For 2 Hijackers, Rules weren’t Followed, Probe Finds
by Cheryl W. Thompson, Washington Post
The Immigration and Naturalization Service -- which incurred the wrath of President Bush when it sent notices of visa status changes to two dead terrorists in March -- should not have approved the changes at all, the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded yesterday.
In a far-reaching review of the now-infamous foul-up, Inspector General Glenn A. Fine’s office found that “widespread failure by many individuals in the INS” allowed suicide hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi to obtain student visa status. The notices were received by a Venice, Fla., flight school March 11 -- exactly six months after the attacks on New York and Washington.
By that time, Atta and Al-Shehhi had long since completed their flight training and were aboard two separate airliners, presumably as pilots, that slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, killing more than 2,800 people.
Yesterday, Fine’s office said that if the INS had followed its own regulations, Atta and Al-Shehhi’s requests would have been rejected because each had left the country twice while seeking visa status changes. Under long-standing INS policy, an application is considered “abandoned” if an applicant leaves the United States while it is pending.
The INS’s own computer system contained the information that Atta and Al-Shehhi had left the United States twice. But the official who adjudicated their visa changes did not know that because he never checked, the report found.
“The INS’s adjudication of Atta’s and Al-Shehhi’s change-of-status applications and its notification to the flight school were untimely and significantly flawed,” the report said.
Yesterday’s report also reveals that the flight school official responsible for certifying the two men’s paperwork told Justice Department investigators that she had just been assigned to the job, received no training from the INS and was unsure how to fill out the forms.
So she turned to one of the future hijackers, who “directed her on the proper procedures for filling out the forms,” the report found.
Word that the flight school, Huffman Aviation, had received the status change approvals March 11 touched off vehement condemnation of the INS, which has long been criticized as one of the most dysfunctional agencies in government. Bush made no secret of his anger, and Attorney General John D. Ashcroft ordered an investigation.
Bush called the INS’s action an “inexcusable blunder” and said at a March 13 news conference that he was “stunned, and not happy. Let me put it another way: I was plenty hot.”
Last month, the House overwhelmingly approved a bill that would dismantle the INS and replace it with separate enforcement and service agencies that would be part of the Justice Department.
The 188-page report found that the INS waited 10 months to approve requests by Atta and Al-Shehhi for a change to student visa status and allowed a private contractor to wait six more months before sending the approvals to the flight school.
Atta was in the United States on a business visa, and Al-Shehhi was traveling on a tourist visa. At the time, the INS allowed students to take courses while visa status changes were pending, though it has since outlawed the practice.
INS Commissioner James W. Ziglar, who did not return a telephone call seeking comment yesterday, acknowledged to a congressional committee in March that the contractor, ACS Inc. of London, Ky., was not at fault; it was following INS policy.
Victor Cerda, Ziglar’s acting chief of staff, called the report “accurate” and said the agency has changed some rules governing foreign students. “We’ll review the IG’s report and use it as a management tool,” Cerda said.
Cerda declined to say whether disciplinary action will be taken against the adjudicator and others involved.
Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said the INS is “ill-equipped to handle the threat posed by terrorists.
“The . . . report demonstrates that as currently organized, the INS fails to enforce Congressional directives or its own policies,” said Sensenbrenner, who sponsored the House restructuring bill.
The inspector general’s report found that after the Sept. 11 attacks, the INS gathered Atta’s and Al-Shehhi’s files for the FBI but that “no one in the INS located -- or even considered locating -- the notification forms that were being processed by the INS contractor.”
The report also found that the INS’s system for monitoring and tracking foreign students is “antiquated and inadequate” and questioned whether a congressionally mandated Internet-based system to improve student tracking will be fully implemented by the January 2003 deadline -- as Ashcroft has promised.
The Justice Department said this month that the system, known as the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), will be up and running by July 1. The system is designed to provide up-to-date computerized information on 1 million non-immigrant foreign students studying in the United States at any time, including name changes and new dropouts.