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| Visas for Terrorists: What Went Wrong? October 31, 2002
Panelists: Michelle Malkin, nationally syndicated columnist and author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores Joel Mowbray, investigative reporter, National Review Nikolai Wenzel, former U.S. Foreign Service Officer, now with the Atlas Foundation STEVEN CAMAROTA: If everyone would be seated, I think we’ll get started now. Everyone. Okay. I am Steven Camarota and I’m director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies here in Washington DC. We are one of the cosponsors of this event. We would also like to thank our other co-sponsor of this event, and that’s National Review Magazine. They are Joel Mowbray to my left, they are his employer, and they are the ones who provided the applications of the hijackers, of the September 11 hijackers, their visa applications that we are giving out today. I should point out that we didn’t ask them how they got them. We actually don’t want to know. Now, in your packet is the actual visa applications of the hijackers. Also in your packet is a newly released GAO report. Or some of you have the executive summary, but for the press we actually gave them the whole report on how the hijackers got their visas and the problems that still exist in our visa issuing system. Also in your packet is an executive summary of a report done by the Center for Immigration Studies. The entire report is available at our website: www.cis.org. The report is entitled The Open Door: How Militant Islamic Terrorists Entered and Remained in the United States ’93 through 2001. Now, this is one of the most important panels I feel that the Center for Immigration Studies has ever put on. To discuss these applications and the problems -- and the fundamental problems that exist at the Department of State, who issues visas, we have a distinguished panel before us. First is Joel Mowbray, to my left. He is a writer for National Review and is also a writer for TownHall.com, and he is the person who uncovered the visa applications we are giving out today. His research is featured in a cover story of National Review that is also part of your packet. And I think we all owe a real debt to Joel for uncovering the kind of lax system that we had that clearly contributed to the attacks of September 11. Now, after Joel speaks, he will be followed by Nikolai Wenzel. Nikolai is to my far right. He is a former U.S. Foreign Service officer. For several years he worked at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and he was in the Non-Immigrant Visa Issuance Unit. He also worked briefly in the Immigrant Visa Unit in Juarez, Mexico. And long before anyone else was talking about the problems at the Department of State, Nikolai was raising red flags about how the State Department is processing visas. He has testified before Congress and he has also wrote a backgrounder about two years ago for the Center for Immigration Studies on the problems of the Department of State and how they’re giving out visas, and that is also in your packet. He is currently employed at the Atlas Foundation here in Washington. Our final speaker will be Michelle Malkin. Michelle is the daughter of Filipino immigrants and was born in my home town of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and like myself was raised in southern New Jersey. So there are two things to recommend her right there. She has served on the editorial staff of the Los Angeles Daily News and the Seattle Times. Her work has been cited in the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today and U.S. News & World Report, and her book is creating a real sensation. This morning it was number nine on the Amazon.com bestseller list, and it is called Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals and Other Foreign Menaces To Our Shores, and it is a must read for anyone who wants to understand how so many terrorists and others who mean us harm are able to get into the country. An excerpt from the book is also in your packet. Michelle is certainly eminently qualified to comment on our panel today. Now, before we get started in discussing the visa applications of the terrorists themselves, I’d like to read to you something. It goes like this: “Oh God, you who open all doors, please open all doors for me. Open all venues for me. Open all avenues for me.” That is from the suicide note of Mohammad Atta, the leader of the September 11 attacks. And it appears that Mr. Atta himself recognized the importance of a lax and open immigration system that we have in his ability to take part in the September 11 attacks. But, as our panelists will make clear, many in the United States government do not seem to realize the fundamental problems in our immigration system. With that, I will turn it over to Joel Mowbray, who will begin discussing the visa applications themselves. JOEL MOWBRAY: You know, in the year after 9/11 most of the hand wringing centered on the FBI and the CIA and their general inability to connect the dots. But that would not have been a fatal blow if the dots hadn’t been here in the first place. And the dots wouldn’t have been here, the terrorists wouldn’t have been here on September 11, if the State Department had simply followed the law and denied the visas. When I was the first journalist to get a hold of the visa application forms from 15 of the 19 9/11 terrorists -- I couldn’t get a hold of the other four because they had been destroyed by the State Department -- I was honestly expecting a few errors here, a few errors there, and maybe a finding that three or four or even five of the visa applications should have been refused. But the reviews I got back from six different current and former consular officers was simply stunning. They all said, to a person, that not one of those visas should have been issued, that they all should have been denied on their face. (Click for Mr. Mowbray's National Review article on the visa applications.) Even to the untrained eye, it really shouldn’t be that hard to figure out why these visas should have been turned down in the first place. Consider, for example, the U.S. destinations most of the terrorists listed on their application forms. They gave such not so specific locations in the U.S. as California, New York, Hotel D.C., and Hotel. One terrorist amazingly listed his U.S. destination as “No.” (Laughter.) Even more amazingly, he got a visa. The terrorists should have been denied visas under a provision of the law known as 214(b). Now, 214(b) is not something that was passed with security provisions in mind, but it certainly serves security purposes today. The point of 214(b) is this. It says that if you are someone who is trying to get a temporary visa to come to the United States, what’s called a non-immigrant visa or an NIV visa, business travel, pleasure, vacation, whatever, come to the United States, you are presumed ineligible until you can prove your own eligibility to get a visa. So basically you’re guilty until proven innocent. It’s not meant to be easy to get a visa to come to the United States, because you’re not entitled to come to this country. Though if you are eligible, we certainly want you here. Well, 214(b) was not at all followed in Saudi Arabia, and that’s actually one of the things that the General Accounting Office found is that the State Department in Saudi Arabia turned this presumption of ineligibility on its head. And in practice what happened was that if you were a Saudi national and you were applying for a visa, you got it unless there was something really glaring. And by really glaring I mean it had to be really glaring. And let’s not forget somebody who said the destination he was going to in the United States was "hotel." You know, these are things that were not considered glaring errors and did not ruin your chances to get a visa if you were a Saudi National. Let me read you a piece of the law and you can see how clear it is. Quote, “Every alien” -- and now they have a few small, narrow exemptions here -- “shall be presumed to be an immigrant until he establishes to the satisfaction of the consular officer at the time of the application for a visa that he is entitled to a non-immigrant visa." End quote. Now, the deputy press secretary for the State Department, Phil Reeker, commented last month that 214(b) is, quote, “quite a threshold to overcome.” The problem, however, is that it wasn’t much of a threshold at all for any Saudi applicants before 9/11. At a minimum, the forms were plagued with significant amounts of missing information, something that should have been grounds alone to deny the visas. For example, while all but one of the terrorists claimed to be employed or in school, only three forms have the area filled in where it says “Name and address of school or employer.” At the very least, the consular officers should not have ended the interviews until the forms were completed. But as we now know from the GAO report, which you can get here in the packet, it turns out that 13 of the 15 terrorists whose visa applications that I reviewed, and the GAO reviewed the same ones, 13 of those 15 were never interviewed before receiving their visas. Now, we passed out the terrorist visa application forms and as you look through them you’ll see why these visas never should have been issued. In fact, these people never should have gotten cards at Blockbuster to rent movies with forms that look like this, yet they were getting visas to come into the country. I have some overheads here and I think this will make it a little easier for you. (Discussion off mike.) JOEL MOWBRAY: Is this better? Okay. All right, hopefully some of you have it here too. But if you take a look at this, for the name and address of his school, he lists simply “South City.” Now, that doesn’t give you either the name of an employer or the location where it is. Now, he says that he is in “teater”. Now, by that does he mean theater? Does he mean teacher? Or does he mean something else entirely? He says that he is traveling to “Wasantwn”. Now, Wasantwn? I suppose he means Washington. But does he mean the District of Columbia where we are, or does he mean Washington State? Or could it be some place that I don’t know of called Wasantwn? I don’t know, and the consular officer wouldn’t have known either. STEVEN CAMAROTA: Whose application is this, Joel? JOEL MOWBRAY: This is Wail Alshahr. He and his brother traveled on the same day they applied for their visas, on October 24 of 2000. Now, if you take a look here, as well he says he’s going on a four to six month vacation that would be funded by “myself.” And when we take a look at his brother’s application in a moment, you’ll see that you’re talking about someone who is nominally employed. They don’t know whether or not he actually is employed in “teater," whatever that is. That he’s going to be paying for a four to six month vacation for two people in the United States. I mean, even if you assume a no-frills trip, you’re still talking $10,000 to $15,000 at a minimum, yet there’s no proof, as is required under the law, that he can actually afford this trip. Let’s take a look at his brother’s, because I think his brother just -- or actually maybe not. Take a look at Abdulaziz Alomari. Abdulaziz Alomari was one of the three people who came in under Visa Express. Visa Express was the program where you could submit your travel -- you could submit your visa application form to your private Saudi travel agent in your neighborhood, either in Jeddah or in Riyadh or somewhere across the countryside. And this is the program by which three of the terrorists entered the United States, even though the program had only been in place for three months before 9/11. Abdulaziz Alomari was one of the people who got in under this program. He was also the person who was Mohammad Atta’s right-hand man. He came in and he spent the night at the Portland Hotel on September 10 with Mohammad Atta and then got on the plane that eventually crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. If you notice here, for his home address he lists a hotel in Jeddah. Now, you need to have a permanent residence, something you’re like to come back to, under the law because the law, again, says that you’re assumed to be ineligible -- you know, they presume that you are going to be someone who wants to be an immigrant, who wants to overstay his visa in the United States. Well, part of the way you prove that you’re not going to overstay your visa and that you have something to come back to is that you actually have a stable address. The same thing that a credit card company, for example, looks at before they decide to issue you credit. Well, he lists a hotel, which the last time I checked is not exactly a very stable place of residence. He also doesn’t even list his nationality, he doesn’t list his gender, leaves those blank. He says he’s a student, but then doesn’t list a name and address of a school. And as a student also he says that “myself” -- that he himself is going to pay for a trip for two months at the JKK Wyndham Hotel inside the United States. There’s a whole lot of questions. And one more is that he says he’s married, yet he doesn’t list the name of his spouse. At the very least, this is the kind of thing -- and Nikolai can speak to this more than I can -- is that when you have this many red flags, at the very least you have to bring them into an interview and say, “Okay, explain all this.” Now, I have a lot of people who say, “Well, gee, English wasn’t their first language.” But I’ve talked to a number of consular officers who are in countries like Bangladesh and in countries like -- in Brazil and places where there’s deep poverty, people who don’t speak the language. Yet they come in with much better filled out applications than what you found in Saudi Arabia. I think the reason is that they didn’t need to do anything better than this, so they didn’t bother. Hani Hanjour I think is a perfect example. He came through. He had a total of three visa applications that I was able to get a hold of: one from ’97 where he came here to go study English, and then two in the year 2000. Well, if you’ll notice, the first time through he didn’t do a very good job filling out his visa application. And I think it’s worth noting, by the way, we always have this belief that al Qaeda was very cunning and they trained their operatives well, they told them how to gain the system. Well, if they really did such a good job of this, you probably wouldn’t see such terribly filled out visa application forms. I mean, these things are abysmal. Take a look at Hani Hanjour. He was the person who is believed to have piloted the plane that smashed into the Pentagon. This is his first application in the year 2000, September 10. And a surprised consulate employee writes down here in the comment box that Hani Hanjour would like to stay three years or more. Now, there’s a problem with this. This is not an immigrant visa. This is a non-immigrant visa. The maximum length of stay is 24 months. So here you have someone who has already announced his intention to violate the law and overstay the visa. And yet -- you know, that should have been right there the very first thing they should have honed in on. Take a look at this: “At what address will you stay in the USA?” “Arizona, rent home.” Now, you need a specific address. There’s a couple of reasons for this, the first being theoretically they’re going to be able to track you once you come to the United States so you don’t just slip into the woodwork of society. But the other, and a more practical one, is that you want to be able to verify whether or not this person has a legitimate purpose for coming to the United States. So if someone just says, “Oh, I’m going to stay at a hotel” or “I’m going to rent a home somewhere in the state of Arizona,” this should not give you terribly good comfort that this is a legitimate purpose of travel to the United States. Now, he says that he wants to, again, visit for three years and just go on a vacation. Now, this, as you can see, is not a very good application. He gets rejected with this. So some consulate employee was actually on the ball and refused this application. However, he walks in two weeks later. Now look at this. Instead of three years, he lists a much more appropriate one year as the amount of time he’d like to stay in the United States. And instead of saying “Arizona, rent home” he’s decided to move a few states over and go to California at a specific address. And now he’s decided he wants to be a student and not just travel to the United States. And even though before in the other one he talked to the consulate employee about wanting to go to flight school, well now he has no intention here about flight school at all and simply wants to study English. Things that -- when you see something that’s this cleaned up, the consular officer should be asking, you know, “Something’s up here” because you don’t go from something so bad to so good without having a few people there helping you, you know, coming in with all the right answers. So I think -- and we have all 15 applications? STEVEN CAMAROTA: Yes, all 15 are here. The names of the applicants are put here on the side so that you can look through them as well. QUESTION: Excuse me. Do you think that the other four were destroyed? JOEL MOWBRAY: The GAO actually found that. The State Department has document destruction procedures, and that’s what they did in this case, is they destroyed these visa application forms, even though less than a year had really passed between the time. If you take a look at the GAO report, in the appendices they have a timeline of when each person got his visa. But I don’t know if they actually include the visas that were obtained by Mohammad Atta and Alshehri. But, you know, I think that the worst part here is that there are many people inside the State Department with whom I’ve spoken who said they were not surprised that the terrorists exploited our visa vulnerability. State pressures its consular officers in the field to not only be extremely polite and courteous to all visa applicants, but to also issue as many visas as quickly as possible. It was these policies that allowed all 19 of the September 11 hijackers to enter this country on legal visas. State is now moving to interview more applicants worldwide, which is a welcome first step. But even when someone is interviewed by a consular officer, it isn’t likely going to do any good. You know, if you’re trying to decide in a time of war whether or not you want to let somebody come into the country, think for a moment how long would you want to interview them? El Al Airlines, Israel’s airlines for example, interviews people for 20 to 30 minutes just to take a flight. A U.S. consular officer, even in this day and age, spends two to three minutes interviewing someone. That’s less time than it takes to drink a can of Diet Coke, and we’re making decisions about letting them into the country. But even if the consular officers were given the time to conduct a thorough interview, the problem is they have no law enforcement background and haven’t been equipped with the skills necessary to conduct a quality interrogation. Well, I think that, you know, to answer the question of how all this happened, the quote for me that sticks out from a senior State Department official, I think that provides the best insight into the minds of the bureaucrats at the State Department is that “The executives at State act as if the World Trade Center towers were still standing.” QUESTION: Are we open for questions? STEVEN CAMAROTA: They will speak and then we’ll open it up for questions. Next will be Nikolai Wenzel. NIKOLAI WENZEL: Thank you, Steve. Thank you, Joel, also for exposing this situation. You’ve done us all a great service. But, unfortunately, I’m going to step back now and talk about the bureaucratic nature of the State Department and the systemic problems, and unfortunately leave my comments on the pessimistic note that this type of problem issuance of bad visas could happen again -- in all likelihood has happened again and probably will happen again. I’m afraid I can’t deliver much better news than that, based on an analysis of the situation. Joel has already done a complete job talking about 214(b), the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act under which these visas should have been refused. Now, as Joel pointed out, section 214(b) places the burden of proof on the applicant to prove that the applicant overcomes the presumption of ineligibility by showing strong ties to his country of origin. Now, there are many, many other laws that bar entry to the United States for criminals, for potential terrorists, et cetera, but that’s not even the issue here. All of these visas should have been refused under section 214(b) of the INA because, frankly, after looking at these applications, the applicants did not overcome the presumption of ineligibility. Now, if there is a burden of proof placed on the applicant to show that the applicant overcomes the presumption of ineligibility, there is also an implicit burden of proof on the interviewing consular officer, and therefore on the State Department, to make sure that the applicant actually does overcome the ineligibility. Now, looking again at these forms, they are incomplete, they are sloppy, they’re not properly filled out, they’re full of red flags. Think about the last time you took a six-month vacation. Sounds good to me, but doesn’t sound terribly realistic. Now, as Joel pointed, if a consular officer in good conscious were to see these application forms, that consular officer should call in the applicant for an interview. Now, frankly, a lot of these forms I would not even have called in the applicant for an interview, because I would have referred it directly to the Anti-Fraud Unit at the embassy because an interviewing consular officer doesn’t have time to look at the really bad situations with many, many red flags. Now, if there’s any doubt in your mind as to how these applications were filled out, I suggest -- actually, I don’t suggest. But try this little exercise come April 15. Fill out your IRS tax forms and omit, say, income or your address or your Social Security number and see what happens there. Yet all of these visas were issued. Now, taking other examples. Joel mentioned the possibility of applying for a credit card or applying for a loan. Now, if you go in and apply for your credit card and apply for your loan and leave out some information, well, typically the loan officer is going to ask you some questions and see if you overcome those problems. Now, aside from the big red flags that are raised in these application forms, a few of these visas admittedly could have been issued because they were missing only a little bit of information, but only if the consular officer had asked the questions to complete the application. Incomplete applications can be overcome. It is possible that in certain circumstances, after asking the right questions, a person can indeed take a three to six-month vacation. Or maybe the person was somewhat worried because it is, indeed, a difficult process psychologically to apply for a visa and maybe some of these applicants might have forgotten to write in certain details. But, again, those are the incomplete things that should have been asked about in the application process. Now, to the State Department’s credit, most specifically to the individual issuing consular officer’s credit, section 214(b) is difficult. It’s subjective. You have two or three minutes, based on a cursory interview, based on a review of documents, to determine if somebody has strong ties and is likely to overstay illegally in the United States or come back to his home country. That’s a tough decision to make. And, admittedly, the way the law is written, there are going to be some bad decisions made. Consular officers are not omniscient. Consular officers cannot read the minds of the applicants. But they have to rely on interviews, they have to rely on questions, they have to rely on information, which is not what happened in this situation. The problem is here there’s a pattern. We’re not looking at one or two applications that weren’t properly filled out and, oops, the consular officer made a mistake because the law is written in a relatively subjective manner that the applicant has to satisfy the consular officer. No. These are not isolated individual circumstances, and that’s why I do not point the blame at the individual issuing consular but at the system. At the State Department’s priorities, at the post priorities of issuing visas. This is a pattern of negligence. I call it criminal negligence because it is systemic, because it is universal as far as I have seen, and because it is not an isolated circumstance. The problem is here the writing has been on the wall for several years before 9/11. One of the many reasons I left the State Department back in 1999 was over disagreement with the State Department’s interpretation of the law, or shall we say application of the law. And now as an economics student rediscovering the joys of mathematics, I like to call it the one over 214(b) argument, that as far as the State Department is concerned, an applicant is eligible for a visa until that applicant proves to the State Department and issuing consular officer that he is not eligible for a visa. Now, admittedly, the State Department is in a somewhat difficult situation because it is saddled with the dual burdens or the dual missions of diplomacy on the one hand, and law enforcement in the visa field on the other hand. The two are conflicting, the two are difficult. It’s tough to be nice and polite and “Oh no, you can’t come visit the United States.” And it’s always tough for the U.S. ambassador to look the president of the country in the eye and say, “Yes, we are partners of the international scene. Oh, by the way, 80 percent of your country nationals can’t come into the United States. Sorry.” And partially because it has been saddled with this dual mission, but also because of the choices and the bureaucratic nature of -- and the bureaucratic priorities of the State Department, the State Department has chosen public diplomacy to the detriment of law enforcement. Looking at a simple statistic, 50 percent -- one-half -- of all the illegal aliens in the United States entered the country on non-immigrant visas issued by the State Department. This is not 5 percent, this is not 10 percent, it’s not the odd mistake, it’s not a problem with the law being difficult to apply. One-half represents a systematic and systemic pattern of priorities. And I will leave you here with two quick quotes. One was from my boss in Mexico City, who incidentally, and perhaps not coincidentally, was later the Consul General in Saudi Arabia when these visas were issued to the terrorists. His name is Tom Furie (ph), and one of his favorite sayings was “People gotta have their visas.” Another very telling saying is from Mary Ryan, the Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs who, for lack of better wording, was retired when the Visa Express story broke, who told us in training not to worry too much, because consular officers are not the frontline of national defense. Yet, right around the same time, in writing that very same Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs who was responsible for all of these issuances wrote that, “Consular officers are the frontline of diplomacy. They are the public face of the U.S.” In conclusion, this is particularly troubling because it could and likely will happen again. It’s a pattern, as I pointed out. It’s a set of priorities. As far as I have seen and as far as the GAO has reported, there has not been a self-assessment within the State Department as to what went wrong and how they can fix it. Instead, State is denying the problem. They are blaming the messenger, as you can ask my colleague Joel Mowbray who was detained at the State Department, ostensibly for asking embarrassing questions. The State Department will fault intelligence, will fault lack of resources. But you can have all the intelligence information in the world, you can have all the resources in the world, you can have all the money in the world. If the will is not there to apply the law, problems will continue. This has been exemplified most recently after Mary Ryan’s ouster in August. The State Department, the best -- (break in audio) -- up with as a replacement for Mary Ryan was for protegee Moira Hardy (ph), who had served as her deputy for many years and was, I understand, instrumental in setting up the Visa Express. And this is the person the State Department is putting forth to head consular affairs in the wake of 9/11. The only conclusion I see here is that the State Department is not fit to handle the visa function, because it has conflicting priorities and it should focus on its function of diplomacy and leave the visa issuance function to a new entity -- or perhaps an existing entity, I leave that to the lawmakers on Capitol Hill. But an entity that will place law enforcement over national security. A visa officer should be first and foremost a national security law enforcement officer, with important but secondary public diplomacy and courtesy considerations, rather than the current situation where consular officers are fundamentally public affairs officers with those pesky, inconvenient law enforcement responsibilities. Thank you. STEVEN CAMAROTA: Thank you, Nikolai. Now we’re going to hear from Michelle Malkin. MICHELLE MALKIN: Thanks, Steve, and thanks to the Center for Immigration Studies and National Review for sponsoring this forum. Joel Mowbray’s relentless watershed reporting on these visa applications really lays bare a fact that our government still has not reckoned with yet, and that is that the State Department’s small acts of presumably benign neglect, when compounded exponentially can open the door to terrorist acts of mass murder on American soil, and that’s exactly what happened in this case. It’s stunning the sloppiness and the incompetence that are compiled in these applications. But, unfortunately, it didn’t stop at this front door. And in the same manner that the State Department and its consular officers ignored all of these omissions and non sequiturs and misspellings and lack of clarity and completion, the INS did the same thing at their ports of entry, which is really the last line of defense before these foreign terrorist infiltrators come into our country. The I-94 form, which is INS’s tracking record issued to all foreign visitors, requires applicants to provide complete, truthful and legible information about where they will stay in the U.S. during their visit and what they’re going to do here. And like State, the INS overlooked this incomplete paperwork. If you’ll compare Khalid al-Midhar’s visa application that Joel was able to obtain -- remember, he pointed out that for the address he will stay in the USA at, he had put “hotel.” Well, it didn’t get much more -- well, it got a little bit more explicit when it came to his I-94 form. He put “Marriott in New York City” on that I-94 form. No street address, no hotel room and no phone number, and no indication about which of the 10 Marriotts in the Big Apple he meant. Now, this required information might have come in handy when federal authorities realized that they had let in a suspected terrorist with links to both the Cole bombing and the East African Embassy bombing. But swamped immigration inspectors, like swamped consular officers, let it go. And soon after al-Midhar’s admission into this country, FBI agents waged a quite futile search for al-Midhar and they found him two months too late when he wrapped up his business trip on his business visa by piloting American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. Again, this kind of sloppiness that Joel has exposed at the State Department extended to the INS with regard to Lafi Khalil. This was the Palestinian who was later arrested with Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer in Brooklyn, New York, for planning to bomb the New York City subway system. And in November ’96 a State Department consular officer had issued Khalil a C-1 transit visa in Israel, and he was supposed to transit from Israel through the United States and then ultimately land in Ecuador. Well, after he had been issued this transit visa he arrived at JFK Airport and presented his passport with the visa to an INS immigration inspector, who didn’t have the time to check out what the exact category was and stamped a B-2 tourist visa on the I-94 form, and that allowed him to stay in the country for six months, rather than the 29 days that the C-1 transit visa offered him. When the Inspector General interviewed the INS inspector who issued that, the inspector candidly admitted that even if he had seen the C-1 visa designation he would not have followed the INS field guide and asked Khalil to show an airline ticket to his final destination, because it would have taken too much time. Joel’s reporting on so many issues with regard to the State Department, and Nikolai’s firsthand experience and testimony in this, and the research in my book all come to a very similar conclusion and that is our immigration system and our entrance system is incapable of doing its job. Whether you’re talking about those negligent consular officers overseas, to our porous air, land and sea ports of entry, to our ineffective detention and deportation policies, our federal immigration authorities have failed at every level to provide for the common defense. And it is not too simplistic to say that to concentrate on these small little acts of benign neglect is exactly where we need to start in winning the war on terror. It’s very much similar to a broken windows theory of crime control, because when you focus on the little things -- and this is what they’ve found in New York City -- fixing the windows, cleaning up the graffiti, paying attention to the fare jumpers in the subway, you can turn around a ship that is sinking. And I think it’s the same way with immigration policy. In effect, fixing and repairing our broken fences, whether you’re talking about guarding the front door and the holes in the screen doors at our consular offices overseas, to locking the back door with regard to illegal immigration, and the side door that allows so many not only known and possibly suspected terrorists to cycle through our system, but also other foreign menaces and criminals. That will help us get control of what is essentially a state of immigration anarchy. The State Department and the INS are our first and last lines of defense in protecting Americans from those who would come to our shores to do us harm, and it’s about time that they did their jobs and provide for the common defense. And, very simply, they should start by enforcing the laws that are already on the books. STEVEN CAMAROTA: Well, thank you very much, Michelle. And thank you to all of our panelists. I would like to open things up for questions. But let me just exercise the chair’s prerogative here and ask the first question, and this is really for all of you. You’ve all thought about these questions. Isn’t one of the problems that we really have is just simply the level of immigration? The number of people who are eligible, Joel, eligible for Green Cards, for temporary visitor visas, for guest worker programs, cultural exchange, inter‑company transfer. We issue now over a million long-term temporary visitor visas a year. We give out another million Green Cards, that’s permanent residency. And then we also have all the tens of millions of shorter term visitors. Wouldn’t it make sense, until at least we get our house in order at the Department of State and at the INS, to cut those numbers back to something more manageable? JOEL MOWBRAY: Steve, why do you have to do this? You throw this wonderful panel for us and then you give me a question you know I’m going to disagree with you on. I don’t think so. I think one of the things that’s actually very interesting is that if State and the INS had simply enforced the law in a number of these cases, we wouldn’t have the thugs here to begin with. I mean, I think Michelle broke an important story recently about the DC sniper. John Lee Malvo, the 17-year-old, he was in custody of the INS in December of last year. And then in January, even though the law says that he had to be deported -- there was no discretion, no wiggle room. It wasn’t like he could be deported. You know, if you really feel he was a menace then you might deport him. No. The law is unequivocal you must deport him. And the INS in January of this year had him sign a sheet of paper, released him on his own recognizance and off he went. Now, if the law had simply been enforced, he wouldn’t have been in the country for the shooting spree. And I think if you take a look through these terrorist visa applications -- you know, the problem wasn’t just that they were overworked when it came to visa load. They actually made a conscious decision to issue visas to as many people as humanly possible. If they had just followed the law and said, you know, there is a presumption of ineligibility and we have to have some compelling reason to let them into the country, or at least they have to prove why they’re eligible for a visa, then we wouldn’t have had this problem in the first place. You know, Consular Affairs actually sets its own budget because it has what’s called MRV fees, machine readable visa fees, that they charge to every applicant. And they recently raised it from $65 to $100. Now, $100 times eight million visa applicants, which is what they had in the year after 9/11 with a depressed number of visa applications, that’s still $800 million for Consular Affairs. And if you want to talk about resources -- you know, State complains about having staffing shortages at consulates, which again makes no sense since they set their own budget. They have plenary authority. Congress has actually given them the authority to set their own fees, something that’s pretty unprecedented within the government. And they actually just spent $3 million giving bonuses to over 200 foreign service officers, including Mary Ryan and Mora Hardy and the other people responsible for the policies that gave us the terrorists in this country on legal visas. So not only did no heads roll, but they actually rewarded people like Tom Furie, the person who was Consul General at Riyadh when 14 of the terrorists received their visas, and Mary Ryan and others, and they gave them bonuses of $10,000 to $15,000 each, for a total cost of $3 million. So here’s an idea: if there are staffing shortages, well then take money that you’re giving instead the top officials for outstanding performance when they let in 19 terrorists on legal visas, take that money and actually put it into consular offices and doing a better job of screening out terrorists. MICHELLE MALKIN: I just want to add one point, which is Joel mentioned the Malvo case and there’s an irony here in that INS is now nitpicking the Border Patrol agent who was responsible for arresting him back in December 2001. Is nitpicking all the particulars of his form and saying it was incomplete and there was inaccuracies. And it just goes to show you that both State and INS have this annoying habit of erring on the side of letting people in, rather than erring on the side of keeping people out. And, well, we saw what the bloody consequences of that were on September 11, 2001, and we also saw it just a few weeks ago when this sniper’s shooting spree finally ended. You’ve got INS agents that are claiming that, you know, classifications were made wrong and there were misspellings of Lee Malvo’s mother’s name. And yet all of these misspellings and omissions didn’t matter. JOEL MOWBRAY: And the law is actually pretty clear on this. You’re supposed to err on the side of people being deported, people not coming into the country in the first place. You’re not supposed to err on the side of having people come into the country or stay in the country. And, Michelle, you can speak to this figure better than I can. But what’s the number of people who the INS has at one time or another had in their custody but then let go, who are now still roaming about free? MICHELLE MALKIN: Well, the INS had initially reported after September 11 that it was at least 314,000. But according to many former INS officials who were in charge of trying to track down these absconders, they think that’s a lowball figure. And Richard Inzunza (ph), who was a former Bush INS official, claims that it’s actually in the millions. JOEL MOWBRAY: And that’s of people who have been in the INS system? MICHELLE MALKIN: Right, and who had already been ordered -- JOEL MOWBRAY: And who were like -- MICHELLE MALKIN: -- deported by Immigration judges. JOEL MOWBRAY: So, in other words, if the law is just followed and these people once in custody go out of the country, you would have a lot fewer people here. NIKOLAI WENZEL: I’ll just add a quick comment in answer to your question, Steve. I tend to agree with Joel. Napoleon once wrote that in war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one. And this is what we have here is a war on terrorism. The State Department has been clamoring for as far back as I remember for more resources, more money. Now, since 9/11 there have been more resources. There are new security forms that certain target groups need to fill out. There is much more information on the CLASS, which is the terrorist background lookout. But the will has not changed. The Visa Express program continued for almost one year after 9/11 and was only terminated because it caused morale problems at the embassy because it looked bad. Not because it had let terrorists in and not because it was rolling out the red carpet for potential terrorists. In a recent letter from the State Department to the Justice Department, on which Joel reported, the State Department essentially said that simply the presumption that an applicant might potentially have terrorist ties was not sufficient reason to deny a visa, and the State Department needed hard proof. We can pump in more money. We can cut down the numbers, even though I don’t think that’s the problem. As long as the fundamental will to follow the law does not change, we’re not going to see any significant change. STEVEN CAMAROTA: Let me open it up to questions. You had your hand up there. QUESTION: Yes. Mr. Wenzel, in Joel Mowbray’s article you are quoted as saying the issuance of those visas to those terrorists amounted to criminal negligence. Now, the term negligence, even with the term criminal attached to it, implies laziness, stupidity, incompetence, or perhaps a combination of all three. Criminal puts -- gets it into legal territory. I’m not a lawyer and I suspect you’re not either. But it was the late Defense Secretary Jim Forestal who once said if our government officials only made mistakes -- jail time, if that’s what it comes to. NIKOLAI WENZEL: I’m not an attorney, so I can’t comment on the details of that. But I would like to see that. I don’t think anything is going to change until a clear signal is sent. And with all due respect to Joel and the National Review and all the superb work they’re doing, just exposing these problems is not going to be sufficient. If there are no consequences, if the incentive structure is not changed, if there is not punishment for bad actions that help facilitate the deaths of thousands of our compatriots, nothing is going to change. So I would applaud some movement, some action to punish those responsible, not as vindication, not as vengeance, but to make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again. And the only way it’s not going to happen again is if the incentive structure is changed and the bureaucratic patterns are changed. JOEL MOWBRAY: Yeah, in terms of incentives again, they’ve rewarded these officials, they didn’t punish them. I think the only thing that’s going to happen is from outside action. I think either Congress -- which is already looking into this. Senator Jon Kyl from Arizona has already promised more hearings on this and he’s already questioned some State and INS officials about the terror visas. And one other thing. I think that, you know, the victims of 9/11 -- I think if they’re looking to sue anybody, I think they should look to sue the State Department because if the State Department did not live up to the law, did not live up to its own regulations then I think there should be some culpability there and they should have to pay the price for paving the way for the death of 3,000 innocent Americans. QUESTION: Yeah but that’s civil action, I mean, is there room for criminal action? JOEL MOWBRAY: I don’t think so. I don’t think so. But something else -- NIKOLAI WENZEL: Just a quick follow up to that question. In the private sector if you lose a million dollar sale and you make a bad mistake, you lose the contract, you lose your job, you lose the bonus. In the State Department if you make a bad mistake and you issued bad visas systematically, you get a $15,000 bonus. What’s wrong with that situation? STEVEN CAMAROTA: Okay, other questions? Here. QUESTION: Why have Saudi Arabians received preferential treatment on visas? It seems obvious most Americans love their oil, and the military obviously loves the geographic strategic location. And the arena in both countries -- obviously we love to do business together. But is there anything else we’re missing? Just as far as Islam, which Saudi Arabia seems to strictly adhere to more so than any other Islamic country -- I mean, our government seems to give lip service to, but I’m not sure they really are sincere about that. STEVEN CAMAROTA: Well, does anyone want to venture -- I mean, the general thought is that it’s just political pressure. Part of the reason they’re not -- those applications weren’t looked at was because there was a desire very much not to offend the Saudis. And it was this theory that because of the wealth in Saudi Arabia, very few people on temporary visas would overstay. That is, most would go home. Even though INS estimates do suggest that there are a significant number of illegal aliens in the United States from Saudi Arabia, nonetheless that seems to be sort of the underlying reason why visas seem to be passed through that system so quickly. Another question? QUESTION: Mrs. Malkin. First I want to congratulate you on your silent takeover of the Fox News Network. (Laughter.) STEVEN CAMAROTA: Silent? Have you been listening? QUESTION: “All Malkin, All The Time” I think is there new motto. I hope you can answer this question with something more specific than “beats the hell out of me.” But shortly after your book came out, which was I think about eight weeks ago now, it hit number one on Amazon.com. Last night I was watching and it went all the way up to number two on Amazon.com, eight weeks after it was first released. I’ve seen it I think number 21 on the New York Times list. Yet, over the last week I have gone to several mega bookstores and I have yet to find a single copy. I’ve looked for displays since it first came out. I’ve seen two displays, again, going from here all the way to California, the Santa Monica promenade, I looked. Two displays. But wait, there’s more. In those eight weeks I have yet to see any mainstream publications review your book, any at all. And in fact darned few non-mainstream publications. STEVEN CAMAROTA: Well, Michelle, if you’d like to answer that. MICHELLE MALKIN: My cash payment to (laughs) Santa Monica is in my bag. You know, I actually am heartened because I think that with relentless reporting like Joel Mowbray’s and with brave people like Nikolai Wenzel, and many other whistleblowers in both the State Department and the INS who are getting the word out there, I think the book has only added to many voices, including the Center for Immigration Studies which have long been Cassandras on this issue. There really has been a sea change in how people view immigration policies and our entrance policies. The theme of the book is that immigration has to be treated first and foremost as a national security issue, and I think that especially after September 11 it was clear from most polls that, you know, there wasn’t a sane person in the United States who didn’t believe in that principle. And yet we still have a government that doesn’t understand that, that seems unable to make the connection between getting control of this state of immigration anarchy and seems also unable to grasp the principle that you cannot have de facto open borders, which is what we have, and win a war on terror at the same time. But, again, I think I’m really heartened because all these different forces pounding their drums and basically forcing the mainstream media and Washington to pay attention is hopefully going to effect some change. JOEL MOWBRAY: Well, Michelle is far too modest. And I could make a hard pitch for the book because it’s easy, but I won’t. I will simply say that this book is selling as it is only because of grassroots and only because of word of mouth and talk radio. It’s a stunner. Reading the book -- and I’m someone who is generally sincere to pro‑immigrant, you know. At least, that’s politically the way I’ve aligned myself in the past. And I think Michelle actually, you know, is there as well. I think Michelle and I agree a lot on the immigration question. But the thing that’s so important here is that in the mainstream media, I don’t know why -- either -- I think it could be one of two things. Either, one, they just want to ignore it. They want to let it go away. The other is maybe this is an issue that doesn’t do it for them. It doesn’t, you know, float their boat, so to speak. You know, if she had been writing about the tragedy of homelessness among Middle Eastern migrant workers who were homosexual with Oedipus complexes, maybe she might have tuned up the interest of some folks on the left. But, honestly, I don’t know and it’s one of the things that is very saddening to me, because it’s such an important book because it talks about just time and again people who come in and who commit actions, either terrorist actions or who rape and murder people, and these are people -- there is one person who had a murder warrant out for his arrest and the INS let him go, saying “Oh, we didn’t realize there was the murder warrant there.” Well, John Lee Malvo is not the first time they’ve let someone go who’s gone on to kill people, and this has happened time and again. And the only way you’re going to know this is by reading Invasion. And I wish I could find it at more bookstores, and I think that there is a systemic problem that they’re overlooking and they don’t want to pay any attention to the book, and that’s the reason you won’t see a review in The New York Times, in the Wall Street Journal, or elsewhere. MICHELLE MALKIN: I just want to add one last thing, which is that one of the things that I’ve found in talking about the book is that -- the almost -- the huge sentiment now that there is a huge problem at INS that needs to be fixed, is also seeping into popular sentiment with regard to the State Department. And that book is definitely waiting to be written. STEVEN CAMAROTA: Other questions? Go ahead. QUESTION: I’d like to ask if there’s any country in the world, maybe Japan, maybe North Korea, that has the kind of program that really screens immigrants very carefully, that keeps the bad guys out, that keeps the people that might do them harm from coming into that particular country. JOEL MOWBRAY: I think another great story out there that has only been partially told is that of bin Alshibh. Bin Alshibh was one of the many so-called 20th hijackers. But the interesting thing about him is that he was actually going to lead a fifth hijacking. This is something that we know from recent news reports, New York Times and elsewhere. But he wasn’t here in the country to lead a fifth hijacking because he couldn’t get a visa. He tried twice in Germany and he tried twice in his home country of Yemen, and he was a Yemeni national, and yet he couldn’t get a visa. I wonder why it is the State Department hasn’t taken the consular officers who refused those visa applications and hoisted a monument to their honor out front of Foggy Bottom -- in their building at Foggy Bottom? And that’s what they need to do because instead of giving bonuses to people like Mary Ryan, they should be having dedications to the consular officers who were brave enough to follow the law and refuse the visas. But the point is that they were so confident that they could get people in here, they waited until June, less than three months before 9/11, to get five of the 19 terrorists into this country. I mean, they didn’t think that they were going to have any problems and in fact, aside from bin Alshibh, they didn’t. And if only the law had been followed, we could have had even one or two less hijackings because one person being denied a visa, bin Alshibh, caused a lot of problems for them and put a big crimp in their plans and they had to scale back. QUESTION: This is for anyone. Do you really think locking the back door is the answer? And in regards to resources, in a pluralistic society if we put all the resources in defending the borders, someone is going to slip through anyway. Does anybody think about the risk associated with being a liberal democracy, in that you’re going to take a risk if you have porous borders, and we have economic prosperity because of those porous borders. So, I mean, has anybody really taken account of the risk analysis associated and do you really think the resources should be best put on the frontlines on the immigration, on the consulate and the Border Patrol. Maybe that’s not the best answer. STEVEN CAMAROTA: Well, let me address a couple of quick questions. As an economist who spends most of his time looking at the economic impact of immigration, I and I think most of the leading economists who look at the issue think that, on balance, immigration is a net drain for the United States. So less immigration would probably make for some modest increases in prosperity, but it’s not a make or break issue either way. On the other question of are some people going to slip in? Well, sure, some people might. But consider this case of Ahmed Ressam, who was caught at the Canadian border and we averted the Millennium Plot. You don’t always have to catch everyone. If you can just catch a few of the people in a large plot, often the entire conspiracy can be unraveled. Now, clearly, our war on terrorism is going to have to involve lots of things: military action, diplomatic efforts, a lot more intelligence gathering, cutting off their money. But, clearly, since the primary goal of our enemy is to enter America and kill us, then our system for regulating how people enter America is a critically important front in our war on terrorism, and that will remain the case for the indefinite future. And so I think that’s the way to think about it. And if you’re going to increase defense spending $20 or $25 billion after 9/11, why not increase spending on your immigration system by a few billion dollars too? Yes, it means more Border Patrol; yes, it means more INS agents; yes, it means more resources at State. Now, we’ve talked a lot here about the cultural problems at State. But I think resources are a huge problem and the numbers are a huge problem. I don’t think we can get the kind of enforcement that some people think and keep numbers at this level. We’ll see. QUESTION: Yes, my name is Joel Wishincran (ph). I’m with World Media Reports. In covering the State Department, there seems to be an attitude there -- I brought up a first question concerning Afghanistan not September 12, but September 7, and it was with the asylum seekers that were at the time on a Norwegian freighter off of Christmas Island near Indonesia. And one of the things that in asking the question pertained also to Australia, where they were all headed, and it’s that we have NATO for Europe, we had at one time SEATO for Southeast Asia. It’s like they’re disconnects, they’re talking much about that today. Disconnects between the State Department, the INS, the Border Patrols. Do you think, all of you, we think Congress that they have to change the focus of how these institutions are working? Now, with respect to 9/11 there’s a lot of religious madras schooling and I’ve noticed that when you attempt to ask a question concerning, well what’s the effect of religious entities, they won’t answer or they’ll slough it off. And yesterday I brought up -- STEVEN CAMAROTA: Well, why don’t we go with your first question about coordination between the various agencies. I mean, very quickly, one of the hopes is with Homeland Security. We put Customs, we put INS and so forth all in the same agency. And I think one of the things we’re going to need to do is completely take visa issuance away from the State Department. They simply have demonstrated that they are not qualified, they’re not up to the task. It’s a cultural problem there, and maybe place it with the Department of Homeland. JOEL MOWBRAY: Yeah, and I think that really gets to the root of the problem. But one other thing, though, and I just can’t stress this enough. Yes, we need coordination, yes we need more information in the databases. That was one of the things that Mary Ryan made a big stink about after 9/11, saying “Well, gee, we didn’t have the information in the databases to refuse the visas to the terrorists.” Well, yes, it’s important. But even without any coordination at all, the INS should have been deporting people like John Lee Malvo, like the other terrorists who came in their midst and they let them go, and the State Department should have denied the visas without any coordination whatsoever. They didn’t need to know anything else. They knew that they were young, single, unemployed men in their twenties, which by the way is the group most likely to be screened out by 214(b), for pretty much the same reasons you’d want to keep people out for potential terrorist threats because they are young, they are shiftless, they can pack up and move to another country at a moment’s notice and, sadly, they can also commit terrorist actions and take their own lives in the process because they don’t have much to lose. They don’t have families that they’re leaving behind, and so that’s -- I mean, just following the law without any coordination at all gets you a long way in the process. STEVEN CAMAROTA: Why don’t we take one more question, if anyone has one. Go ahead. QUESTION: Clearly there’s a big problem going on, but I’m getting a different view -- I’m not sure -- I’m getting the impression that you’re leaning towards strengthening the laws to prevent crime, and I’m getting -- JOEL MOWBRAY: Just enforcing the law is good enough for me for now. QUESTION: I want to know is the issue enforcing the law, or actually reducing immigration? Because I’m getting the impression from -- STEVEN CAMAROTA: We have a different point of view. I think the only way to enforce the law is to cut the numbers. Joel has a much more optimistic view of government, I think. He thinks we can have mass immigration, but finely tuned in a way that I don’t think is possible. NIKOLAI WENZEL: I’ll add -- QUESTION: -- in reduction of immigration? STEVEN CAMAROTA: I do. But Joel -- NIKOLAI WENZEL: I’m here to talk about terrorism. That’s the problem here. Before 9/11, we had a problem of rule of law, that the State Department was not following the law, that the State Department was essentially rewriting the law. Take a quick look at the U.S. Constitution, Article 2. I did this again recently. I looked and looked and looked, and I could not see anywhere in there that the office of Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs has the authority to rewrite the law. Only Congress can do that. So it’s a problem of rule of law, it’s got consequences. But before 9/11 what we had is hundreds of thousands of people coming to the U.S. to better their lives and for the most part were peaceful. Fine, that’s one issue. I’m not here to talk about that. I’m talking about problems of rule of law that allow people to come in here and kill our compatriots and kill thousands of people. So the emphasis here is particularly on terrorism, particularly on how we can solve -- look at existing laws and enforce them. We don’t need to add millions of new laws. We need to start by enforcing the existing laws towards the goal of, you know, staying alive. STEVEN
CAMAROTA: Okay. Well, I think on that note we will end. I
want to thank you all for coming. By the way, Joel’s business card is
available at the front if anyone wants. Again, this was put on by the
Center for Immigration Studies. Our website is cis.org. |