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Hijacker visas rile tempers
By MARY JACOBY, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON -- Under pressure from an angry President Bush, Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered an investigation Wednesday into why the Immigration and Naturalization Service sent paperwork to a Florida flight school this week approving student visas for two of the Sept. 11 suicide hijackers. "I was stunned," Bush said at a White House news conference. "And not happy. I was plenty hot. I made that clear to people in my administration." Ashcroft, who oversees the immigration agency, "got the message, and so should the INS," Bush said. Visa approvals for Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi arrived at Huffman Aviation flight school in Venice, 60 miles south of the Tampa Bay area, on Monday, six months after the pair are believed to have flown jetliners into the World Trade Center. All 19 hijackers on four airplanes are believed to have entered the U.S. legally, though the INS does not have complete records of their entries. Ashcroft announced plans to reform the much-maligned INS after the Sept. 11 attacks, separating the agency's law enforcement functions from its work processing immigration applications. The INS, he said, would be on the front lines of the war against terrorism, securing borders and tracking foreign nationals who enter the United States. But, as the visa incident shows, it is not so easy to turn around an agency with 34,000 employees, a backlog of 56,000 immigration cases and enough problems to hand the Oregonian newspaper a Pulitzer Prize last year for chronicling INS incompetence and mistreatment of foreign nationals. INS Commissioner James Ziglar did not make a public statement about the error, which INS officials blamed on an antiquated "paper-based" manual data-entry system for tracking student visas. The agency is developing computer systems to better manage its data. Ziglar, an old friend of Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., and a former Senate sergeant at arms, received Senate confirmation on July 31, 2001. Bush on Wednesday called Ziglar a "good man" who "hadn't been there that long." But the president also hinted at impatience with the pace of reform when he said Ziglar is "held accountable" for INS operations. "He's now got another wakeup call ... with this embarrassing disclosure," Bush said. In a letter to Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine, Ashcroft asked for an investigation into why the letters continued to move through the system after the attacks and why they were delivered seven months after the visa-status change was approved. "Individuals will be held responsible for any professional incompetence that led to this failure, and inferior INS quality-control mechanisms will be reformed," Ashcroft said in a statement. According to the INS, Atta and al-Shehhi filed requests in September 2000 to change their tourist visas to student visas. Atta's application was approved on July 17, 2001 and al-Shehhi's on Aug. 9, 2001. They were students for several months in 2000 at Huffman Aviation, which was allowed to enroll them while their paperwork wended its way through the INS approval process. Because the approvals came before the Sept. 11 attacks, the INS had no information when it okayed the visas that Atta, 33, and al-Shehhi, 23, were connected to terrorism. But after Sept. 11, Atta and al-Shehhi became widely known. And so the blunder revealed Monday conjured the image of a rubber-stamping bureaucrat too indifferent to notice the infamous names. "How this wasn't discovered by even a rank-and-file worker is beyond my comprehension," said Rep. Mark Foley, R-West Palm Beach, whose district borders the flight school. "Anything with Mohamed Atta's name on it should send alarm bells blasting." Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., called the hijacker visas "one of the most embarrassing incidents since 9/11" and called for homeland security director Tom Ridge to testify before Congress. Among the questions Daschle indicated he would like answered is how a $25-million project to build computer systems to monitor foreign students is going. "It's a recognition that we still have a lot of work to do," Daschle said of the visa incidents. And Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., said: "I am extremely disappointed in the Immigration and Naturalization Service, but frankly, not surprised. It is completely unacceptable for an agency to take a year to approve a routine student visa. This is an agency that is out of control, unable to perform its most basic functions and is in need of radical reform." -- Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.
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