9/11 Commission and New Saudi Angle

townhall.com ^ | 1/26/04 | Joel Mowbray

[kattracks]

The 9/11 Commission on Monday will explore one of the most critical elements of the attack that claimed the lives of 3,000 innocent Americans: how the terrorists got into the United States.

  We have long known that all 19 of the 9/11 terrorists came here on legal visas, but one of the topics the commission will cover is that several other would-be hijackers did not make it because they were stopped by alert officials who sensed that something was amiss.  Though this might appear a vindication for the State Department’s beleaguered visa division, it is actually just the opposite.

  State has long argued that there was no way it could have prevented any of the 9/11 terrorists from entering the U.S. precisely because they didn’t have advance, specific intelligence about the threat posed by any of the individuals.  What State fails to mention, however, is that at least 15 of the 19 did not qualify under the law for visas—yet were given them anyway. 

  The reason: they were Saudis, and all Saudis were considered “clearly approvable,” which is how the number two State Department official in Saudi Arabia described Saudi visa applicants in an e-mail in June, 2001.  It was because of this mentality that the consular officer who approved the visas of 10 of the 9/11 hijackers said that she overlooked glaring red flags in the paperwork, according to government investigators.

  In other countries, thankfully, consular officials did not have the same pressure exerted on them to roll out the red carpet for all visitors. 

  Those who were kept out—whom the commission will examine—were not denied access for terrorism concerns, but because the law was followed.  But that still meant that al Qaeda didn’t get all their operatives in place for the attack.

  News reports in October 2002 discussed how Ramzi bin al Shieb, one of the 9/11 plotters who is now in U.S. custody, went 0-for-4 in his attempts to get a visa to “visit” the United States.  But more than a year later, authorities have revealed that at least three other al Qaeda members were likewise thwarted.

  A member of bin al Shieb’s Hamburg, Germany terror cell, Zakariya Essabar, was also denied a visa.  The commission will look at the reasons for his denial, as well as the cases of two others: one who was turned away by immigration inspector in Orlando, and one who was stopped by a consular officer because “the paperwork didn’t look right,” according to a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

  The moral of the stories of the thwarted terrorists is that they weren’t able to commit mass murder on September 11 because they weren’t Saudis.

  In those cases, the law was followed.  And the law is very simple: any person who applies for a visa is considered ineligible until he proves himself qualified to obtain one.  An applicant must show sufficient ties to his home country and offer a legitimate—and believable—purpose for traveling here.  Though those factors weren’t designed with terrorism in mind, they might as well have been.

  The people least likely to convince the consular officer of their qualifications are young, shiftless men—the people most likely to be terrorists.  Young, single men without permanent employment can’t show strong ties to their home country, and any supposed month-long vacation plans should seem sketchy without a salary to pay for it all.

  But the law was not followed in Saudi Arabia, where even woefully ineligible applicants were approved.  This columnist was the first journalist to obtain the visa applications of 15 of the 9/11 terrorists (those of the other four had been destroyed), and the bias favoring Saudis was clear.

  Consider, for example, the U.S. destinations most of them listed. Only one of the 15 provided an actual address — and that was only because his first application was refused.  The rest listed only general locations, such as "California," "New York," "Hotel D.C.," and "Hotel." One terrorist amazingly listed his U.S. destination as simply "No." Even more amazingly, he got a visa. 

  The inevitable question the 9/11 Commission is likely to pose, then, is: what would have happened had the law also been followed in Saudi Arabia?

©2003 Joel Mowbray

Contact Joel Mowbray | Read Mowbray's biography

[kcvl]

Sept. 27, 2000

Al Gore was the Administration's point man in charge of the plan developed in early 1996 to put a million aliens on the fast track to citizenship even if they didn't qualify and even if they had criminal records. Gore was responsible for keeping the pressure on INS to make sure the aliens were naturalized by September 1, the last day to register for the presidential election.

INS Administrator Doris Meissner was at first reluctant to go along with these shenanigans. But she finally acquiesced in Gore's plan to remove alleged "bureaucratic roadblocks" to speedy naturalization.

The "smoking gun" documentation came to light sort of as an aside in the new book "Sellout" by David P. Schippers, his own story as chief investigative counsel for the House impeachment of Bill Clinton. Before Schippers was ordered to limit his investigations to the Monica case, he had focused on the politicization of the INS.

Schippers uncovered a memo written early in 1996 from Doug Farbrother of the National Performance Review (NPR) to Bill Clinton reminding the President that he had "asked us to expedite the naturalization of nearly a million legal aliens." Farbrother set forth the plan "to force some serious `reinvention' on INS" by "appointing one of our proven NPR reinventors as Deputy INS Commissioner" and moving the existing Deputy elsewhere.

The National Performance Review is now called Vice President Al Gore's National Partnership for Reinventing Government, according to its website www.npr.gov. This confirms Gore's peculiar obsession with reinventing things.

Dr. Elaine Kamarck in Gore's office responded to Farbrother on March 21, 1996 in a solid-cap memo: "THE PRESIDENT IS SICK OF THIS AND WANTS ACTION. IF NOTHING MOVES TODAY WE'LL HAVE TO TAKE SOME PRETTY DRASTIC MEASURES."

A March 22 memo to Al Gore from Doug Farbrother then reported that he told INS "to waive stupid rules, move money from one account to another as needed, and recruit and hire people locally instead of through the slow centralized process." Farbrother added that each city manager in the major cities was to be given "a project budget to spend as needed."

Farbrother's memo spelled out other details of the plan to circumvent customary procedure: "delegate hiring authority, waive extensive background investigations on new employees, allow the cities `overhire authority.'" This carried out the suggestion originally made in a February 15 memo from HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros to Clinton and Gore suggesting the use of "volunteers" from Hispanic action groups to "process" naturalization applications.

In a subsequent fax, Farbrother wrote that he had instructed INS Commissioner Doris Meissner to "get the results the Vice President wants."

In a memo addressed to Al Gore on March 28, Farbrother restated the goal to "produce a million new citizens before election day." The game plan was to "blast INS headquarters loose from their grip on the frontline managers" and to "make Doris Meissner delegate broad authority to her field managers" in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Miami.

A March 29 memo from Farbrother to Elaine Kamarck revealed his concern lest this plan be exposed as "a citizenship/Clinton voter mill."

This ingenious 1996 "voter mill" paid off big time. An audit by the accounting firm of KPMG Peat Marwick uncovered some of the results.

The newly naturalized citizens who were qualified to vote by this Gore project included more than 75,000 who had arrest records when they applied, an additional 115,000 citizens whose fingerprints were unclassifiable for various technical reasons and were never rechecked, and another 61,000 people who were given citizenship without submitting any fingerprints at all.





http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:maQ6YOqyupMJ:www.eagleforum.org/column/2000/sept00/00-09-27.shtml+al+gore,+INS&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

[CyberAnt]

"she overlooked glaring red flags in the paperwork"

Well .. who told her to overlook such glaring red flags ..?? If no one told her to overlook these people, then she was not doing her job.

[kcvl]

March 17, 1997


U.S. News & World Report : How Al Gore's efforts to fix the INS may have backfired and made matters worse :

Joshua Wolf Shenk

"One of these days," an Immigration and Naturalization Service staffer wrote in a July 1996 internal memo, "probably in the near future ... the I&NS is going to naturalize an ax murderer, child rapist , or a person with an outstanding federal warrant , etc." That may have happened. At the very least , the Justice Department said last week , 168 newly naturalized citizens have serious criminal histories , and an additional 180 , 000 never had their backgrounds checked. Republicans in Congress--relishing the prospect of another scandal- -charged the White House with relaxing safeguards to naturalize a million new (mostly Democratic) voters in time for the 1996 election. The principal cause of the mess , though , wasn't political machinations but the ineptitude of a government agency combined with a botched effort to improve it by Vice President Al Gore's staff. Help wanted. The INS , never particularly quick or efficient , faced a gargantuan challenge in 1995.

[kcvl]

Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2000

The phenomenon is a repeat of what happened during the 1996 election year when the INS, spurred on by Vice President Al Gore, put out a dragnet for new citizen voters and added thousands of probable Democrat voters.

Even more frightening are press reports that the White House has sent out letters over Bill Clinton’s signature to noncitizens that urge ineligible noncitizens to vote for Democrat candidates and attached voter ID cards making it possible for them to go to the polls.

In 1996, the INS broke all records for swearing in new citizens. According to congressional investigators Gore's office pressured the INS to naturalize 1 million new voters by Election Day.

In memos to Gore and to President Clinton, their staffers cited the need to naturalize a million new voters for the 1996 election. In one of them, Gore was urged to put pressure on the INS to ''waive any INS rules, provided they stay within the law.'' Gore replied by e-mail: ''We'll explore it. Thanks.''


http://216.239.37.104/search?q=cache:hbB1Qa-MUaAJ:www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2000/11/6/205824.shtml+al+gore,+INS&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

See this:

Illegal criminal aliens abound in U.S.

[MEG33]

I feel sick.

[My Dog Likes Me]

Let's keep the central focus of the thread on crazed Saudi nationals entering our country at will to cause us harm due to incompetence by our government.

Al Gore's smuggling of Hispanic voters into the US might be somewhere in the same food group, but let's "stay on subject."

[MEG33]

I wonder when we will learn.

[Valin]

HIGHLY RECOMEND Mr Mowbray's book "Dangerous Diplomacy".
IMO A must read! If this book doesn't get your dander up nothing will.

[Gritty]

All roads to 9-11 also seem to lead to Bill Clinton and his mal-Administration.

[mewzilla]

Which is why this investigation won't go anywhere. Just look at who sits on the panel...

Commission Members: Thomas H. Kean, Chair; Lee H. Hamilton, Vice Chair; Richard Ben-Veniste; Fred F. Fielding; Jamie S. Gorelick; Slade Gorton; Bob Kerrey; John F. Lehman; Timothy J. Roemer; James R. Thompson.