Real facts on REAL ID

THE WASHINGTON TIMES EDITORIAL

To listen to the paranoid debate now taking place over the REAL ID Act in Congress, some state legislatures and the blogosphere, one might think that this legislation was some Bush administration plot to create a national identity card and spy on innocent Americans. The reality is much more serious and mundane. In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombings and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, there is a need to set some kind of minimum standards to ensure that driver’s licenses and other forms of government-issued identification cannot be tampered with and used by terrorists.

Timothy McVeigh used a fraudulent South Dakota driver’s license to rent the Ryder truck in Oklahoma that was used to bomb the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 persons. The Sept. 11 hijackers fraudulently acquired 17 driver’s licenses from Florida, California and Arizona, including four duplicates. They also obtained 13 state-issued IDs from Maryland, Virginia and Florida. The IDs were used to open bank accounts, find housing, rent cars and board aircraft on Sept. 11. Ziad Jarrah, the hijacker who piloted the plane that crashed in Shanksville, Pa., and Hani Hanjour, who crashed his plane into the Pentagon, had both obtained Virginia IDs by fraud. Three Salvadoran immigrants living in Virginia (one a legal permanent resident of the United States and the other two illegal aliens) helped four of the Sept. 11 hijackers use fraudulent identification in order to obtain Virginia-issued identification cards.

The Sept. 11 commission recommended that the federal government “set standards for the issuance of birth certifications and sources of identification, such as driver’s licenses.â€