Visas: Everywhere Terrorists Want to Be
From the March 18, 2002 Dallas Morning News: The student visa snafu underscores issues far beyond the INS.
by Terry Eastland
03/20/2002 12:00:00 AM
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Terry Eastland, publisher
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THE IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION SERVICE once more is the source of bad news. The agency has a problem, all right, but it isn't as huge as some people think. Indeed, the story involving the Huffman Aviation flight school in Venice, Fla., raises issues more profound than any now facing the INS.
It was last week that Rudi Dekkers of Huffman Aviation received notification from the INS that the student visa applications of two of his pupils, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, had been approved. As it happens, Atta and Al-Shehhi were among the al Qaeda terrorists who hijacked the jetliners that decimated the World Trade Center.
An embarrassed INS quickly issued a defensive statement regretting "the late arrival of the notifications." It emphasized that "the decisions regarding the request to change status were made in the summer of 2001."
Which was true: Atta, an Egyptian national, had entered the country on a business visa, and Al-Shehhi, a citizen of the United Arab Emirates, had come in on a tourist visa. To go to flight school and get a commercial license, they needed and duly applied for student visas. The INS had approved the requests in July and August. And because, as the INS noted, "letters to students are automatically generated upon approval," Atta and Al-Shehhi presumably received their notifications last summer. "School notification," the agency added, "occurs after data is manually entered at a contract facility."
The INS statement did little to slow criticism of an agency whose daily press clippings probably are among the
most negative of any government office. And a leading critic was President Bush. Declaring himself "stunned and not happy" about "the embarrassing disclosure," Bush asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to investigate.
So it is that the Justice Department's inspector general now is probing what Aschcroft describes as "the disturbing failures in the INS' record-keeping, document-processing and mailing systems." "Document mismanagement" is the issue, says the attorney general, who warns that "individuals will be held responsible" for any incompetence.
No doubt we all would feel better if someone in the agency had had the wit in the wake of September 11 to say any visa notifications involving the terrorist hijackers should be located and put aside, maybe even locked away in a safety deposit box, and certainly never mailed. Had that happened, there would have been no Huffman notification and, thus, no story about the INS's "disturbing failures."
Perhaps Ashcroft's investigation will turn up some incompetent who merits discharge. But it is hard to see what the INS now should do in processing student-visa requests that it isn't already working on. The agency is developing a computerized system--to be in place in January--whereby the students and their schools will be simultaneously notified once it decides a student-visa request.
The truth is that the Huffman story invites consideration of more important issues. One is an intelligence failure. Why were Atta and Al-Shehhi issued visas to enter the country in the first place? That is a question for the State Department, which granted the original visa requests by which the terrorists came here.
Val:Y
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