Ex-GOP Officials Critices U.S. Security (Carlucci)

May 3, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Safeguards enacted after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks may have damaged long-term national security goals by making it harder for foreign visitors to enter the United States, two former high-ranking Reagan administration officials say.

In separate interviews with The Associated Press, the officials -- former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci and former FBI and CIA chief William H. Webster -- agreed Monday that some security measures remain necessary. But they pointed to a drop in visa applications and widespread stories about long immigration delays as risks to future diplomatic, scientific and economic ties with other nations.

"We've erected bureaucratic obstacles, created delays and engendered frustrations -- particularly right after 9/11," said Carlucci, who headed the Pentagon from 1987 to 1989 and is now chairman of the Carlyle Group, an international investment firm. "The message was, 'Don't try to go to the United States. We don't want you.'"

Said Webster, "We have to have some common sense about what will really help us and what will have, in the long run, a more negative approach that leaves people in some parts of the world, who can't get in, more readily hostile to us, and believing all of the bad things that are being said about us in their part of the world.

http://www.newsday.com/news/politics/wire/sns-ap-security-gop-critics,0,5176712.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlines

whenever high rollers start talking about commons sense, they are referring to their own bottom line.

this is deja vu from summer 2001. the bush administration did not resort to tightening the air safety security at domestic airports because they were concerned it would result in financial losses to the airlines.

get anybody they want into or out of the country.

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