and that s what our bill fixes on tuesday. 5,000 of these foreign fighters that have gone to syria and iraq have western passports. and therefore do not have to obtain a visa before they come into the united states. now chris, this is a huge security gap. it needs to be addressed and fixed and the congress understands that as does the white house, and we intend to do that. but if you think again about the majority of the paris attackers having french or european passports, they wouldn t have had to go get a visa before coming to the united states. that s a threat to the homeland, it s a threat to europe, obviously, but the bigger threat to the homeland is the ease of travel visa waiver to get into the united states. another area you were one of the majority in congress who voted to end the nsa s bulk collection of phone data, the fact that my phone number called your phone number and spoke for x number of minutes. and that program ran out last sunday, a week ago.
radar. as you look at this, several days into this incident, any sign of an intelligence failure, an intelligence gap that was exploited? or is this just something that we couldn t find? that s something we ll be looking at on the committee, the oversight, to see what could have been missed. could we have done a better national security check over in saudi arabia on the female suspect to find out what her background really was before we let her in on a fiancee visa? these are a lot of things in congress i came up with to strengthen foreign travel. but to deal with combatting violent extremism, islamic extremism in the united states. we have a little priority or focus on these programs. and i think we need to do a much better job trying to identify the early warning signs of radicalization inside the united states. but i guess at some point you just can t do it, and that s the question i m asking as someone
him to show people visually he understands that this is something that people are taking very seriously. to the degree that he was behind the curve of a lot of americans this week where he was talking about workplace violence and gun control and seen a lot slower than the average american to come to the conclusion this was an act of terror, is this a a belated effort to get ahead of the curve? he thinks that s the right approach but over the course of a couple days or week the president will typically end up where americans are and where a lot of his critics frankly have wanted him to be from the start. we asked you for questions for the panel and we got this on facebook from renee trotter, she writes, we know there was a suspicious neighbor who was afraid to call authorities due to fear of being labeled a racist. similar occurrences happen with hassan before he shot numerous people at ft. hood.
arsenal of weapons and ammunition and material for bombs. you re right. we are looking at the forensics in this case. i believe on his salary he could not buy this on his own. we know one of the suspects was providing the semiautomatic weapons to him as well. so that s all part of the bigger investigation in terms of who was providing, not only the finance but also the expertise. it s been reported they had a bomb-making factory, if you will, inside their home. they had already built 12 pipe bombs ready to use. and who knows what the next target could have been. as the head of the house homeland security, one of the questions you have to be asking is why didn t we find this out? we re talking about an american citizen. it seems to have come under the
k-1 so-called fiance visa. do we need to end those? well, i think more scrutiny needs to be placed on the national security investigation to get that visa. as you know on the floor on tuesday, we ll be voting on a visa waiver program bill to tighten up the restrictions so that people who have basically have those visa waiver countries, for instance, the french attackers have a french passport wouldn t have to get a visa to come into the united states. that s vitally important. and the majority of the attackers let me ask you about that because i think a lot of you may not know, we ll talk about the refugees and fiance visa, 38 countries, a lot of them in europe, there s a visa waiver. they can come into this country, a lot of them come, hundreds of thousands of them come without any screening at all. does that have to stop? well, it does.