9/11 staff report focuses on immigration(terrorists passports that were less than three weeks old

9/11 staff report focuses on immigration Hijackers' visa applications were incomplete

- A new report from the now-defunct Sept. 11 commission details the lax controls on immigration and customs that the hijackers exploited to carry out their plot.

The report, compiled by the commission’s staff, says 13 of the 19 hijackers applying for visas presented passports that were less than three weeks old, yet their visa applications were met with no increased scrutiny.

Two of the hijackers, the report said, lied on their applications “in detectable ways” but were not questioned about those lies.

And all 19 of the hijackers’ applications had data fields left blank, or were incomplete in some other way. Three of the hijackers were carrying Saudi passports “containing a possible extremist indicator” present in the passports of many al-Qaida members, the report said.

While it’s not clear what that indicator was, the report added that it had not been analyzed by the CIA, FBI or border authorities for its significance.

The report is one of two staff addenda to the commission’s final report, which was released last month. The other report released Saturday analyzed the hijackers’ financing.

It concluded: There is no evidence that anyone in the United States, or any other country, provided substantial funding to the hijackers.

Most of the money came from al-Qaida. Gaps remain in the intelligence community’s understanding of how the terrorist network moves its money.

“Because of the complexity and variety of ways to collect and move small amounts of money in a vast worldwide financial system, gathering intelligence on al Qaeda financial flows will remain a hard target for the foreseeable future,” the report said.

FBI Fumbled on Terror Financing, 9/11 Panel Says

By Kevin Drawbaugh

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The FBI (news - web sites) knew about specific suspected al Qaeda fundraisers before the Sept. 11 attacks but failed to tackle the problem, the Sept. 11 Commission said in a staff report released on Saturday.

In a broad critique of the government's surveillance of terrorist financing, the report said "gaps appear to remain in the intelligence community's understanding of the issue."

The report said the government should resist creating "a terrorist financing czar" or some other specialized entity to focus on the problem. Instead, it backed an existing interagency committee led by the National Security Council.

"The total elimination of money flowing to al Qaeda ... is virtually impossible," the report said.

But it added that efforts to detect and disrupt terrorist money flows are important to limiting "al Qaeda's ability to plan and mount significant mass casualty attacks."

The commission -- created to investigate the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- last month issued a final report that found widespread failings in intelligence. Two staff reports released on Saturday delve into narrower issues, such as financing.

The 9/11 plot cost al Qaeda $400,000 to $500,000, of which about $300,000 was deposited into U.S. bank accounts controlled by the 19 hijackers, the report said.

Al Qaeda funded the hijackers using cash, travelers checks, wire transfers and credit cards in transactions so unremarkable that they largely went unnoticed, it said.

Perceptions that Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) personally bankrolled the attacks are incorrect, it said, concluding he had no access to significant personal wealth just before the attacks.

"Rather, al Qaeda relied on diversions from Islamic charities and on well-placed financial facilitators who gathered money from both witting and unwitting donors, primarily in the Gulf region," the report said.

FBI street agents had intelligence about specific suspected fund-raisers before the attacks, but the agency "did not systematically gather and analyze the information its agents developed," the report said.

"The FBI as an organization failed to understand the nature and extent of the problem or to develop a coherent strategy for confronting it. As a result the FBI could not fulfill its role to provide intelligence on domestic terrorist financing to government policymakers and did not contribute to national policy coordination," the report found.

Moreover, it said, the Department of Justice (news - web sites) had little success before the attacks developing criminal cases against suspected terrorist fund-raisers, despite a 1996 law that dramatically expanded its power to do so.

Since the attacks, the FBI, the CIA (news - web sites) and other intelligence and law enforcement agencies have improved coordination and moved effectively to limit the funds available to al Qaeda and use financial information as an investigative tool, it said.

The other staff report issued on Saturday detailed how the hijackers obtained U.S. visas and official documents, such as driver's licenses, some of which they used as identification when they boarded the aircraft on Sept. 11.

The report said some of the hijackers lied on their visa applications, overstayed U.S. visas or falsified their passports.

It said the suspected leader of the hijackers, Mohammed Atta, entered the United States for the last time on July 19, 2001, at Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta.

"Because Atta had only been out of the United States for three weeks during the previous 13 months, he should have been flagged as an intending immigrant and was a candidate for secondary inspection. There was no secondary inspection, however, and Atta was now legally in the United States until the day of the planned attack."

Referring it what it called "the myth that the hijackers' entry into the United States was 'clean and legal,"' the report said: "It was not

Control the borders.

You'd probably be interested to know about the working paper making the rounds in some of the policy foundations. Best way to control the borders is to close them, in effect.

It studies various ways to use entry fees and immigration tax to good effect. It's past time to keep allowing in anybody who has the price of a plane ticket. If they want the benefits of staying here, they can pony up, big time. If they're nickel-and-dime dregs, they're likely to be troublemakers anyway, and we don't have to invite them in.

Okay, that doesn't help much with directly-funded terrorists, but it helps overall. They recruit among the disgruntled foreigners over here. If they can't pay up, send 'em back.

THEN we would not have to have the TIA anal probe inserted into every law-abiding citizen.

LOL!

You don't have something to hide, do you? ;-)

Okay, the TIA was a clumsy move, and probably an infection of big-governmentitis. Our President sometimes forgets who he's working for. Much better ways to achieve the same ends by privatizing and just tracking the likely bad guys.

Immigration policy blunders should have been at the top of the 9/11 staff's discoveries, along with our Balkan policies and relations with specific Middle Eastern countries (i.e., that we consider Turkey a friend, Syria and Serbia malevolent, etc.).

Intelligence failures are the result of human error. It is impossible to eliminate them completely. If we focus merely on looking for cosmetic problems with our intelligence system--instead of considering a completely different approach to whom we let into this country and whom we support across the globe--it will only be a matter of time until the terrorists strike again.

I know I sure feel a lot safer with airport security feeling up that nice little old Danish lady ahead of me in the line. Those Lutherans can be a scary bunch, y'know.

9/11 would NOT have happened had we enforced existing immigration rules.

Didn't most of the hijackers enter LEGALLY? Yes, many of them overstayed their visas. But there's no practical way to keep track of each and every one of the million immigrants we allow into this country annually. We need not only to enforce our immigration rules, but to tighten them.

From http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic04/NewsST040804.html:

In reality the existence of the multi-million-strong Muslim diaspora in the U.S. and elsewhere in the Western world—from Madrid to Montreal, from Buffalo to Berlin—provides the terrorists with the recruits, the infrastructure, and the relative invisibility without which they would not be able to operate. This is the only immigrant group that harbors a substantial segment of individuals who share the key objectives with the terrorists, even if they do not all approve of their methods. A sizeable minority of them wishes to transform the United States of America into a Caliphate and to replace the Constitution with the Sharia by whatever means. A coherent long-term counter-terrorist strategy, therefore, must entail denying Islam the foothold inside the West. But the notion of cultural and religious criteria in determining the eligibility of prospective immigrants is ideologically unacceptable to the ruling American establishment—to the Commission’s panelists and witnesses alike.

Say what you will about Chronicles magazine or Srdja Trifkovic's animosity toward George W. Bush, but personally, I have never seen anyone successfully refute anything Trifkovic has written. He definitely takes the #1 spot on my list of favorite columnists.

Didn't most of the hijackers enter LEGALLY? Yes, many of them overstayed their visas.

Yes, they did, but it looks like they never should've been allowed to enter in the first place.

From the article:

Two of the hijackers, the report said, lied on their applications "in detectable ways" but were not questioned about those lies.
And all 19 of the hijackers' applications had data fields left blank, or were incomplete in some other way.
Three of the hijackers were carrying Saudi passports "containing a possible extremist indicator" present in the passports of many al-Qaida members, the report said.

But there's no practical way to keep track of each and every one of the million immigrants we allow into this country annually.

Did you mean to say that we can't keep track of visitors, etc, or did you mean only immigrants?

We need not only to enforce our immigration rules, but to tighten them.

You can say that again.

Al-Qaida runs own
travel agency
9-11 panel report says Latin American service helps terrorists get to U.S.

While there likely aren't any posters depicting exotic destinations on the wall, an al-Qaida travel agency operates in Latin America to help terrorists enter the U.S., the 9-11 commission reports.

The revelation was part of the panel's final report issued Saturday as the commission formally disbanded.

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The global terror network operates a travel service that uses human smugglers as tools, reported Agence France-Presse.

"There are uncorroborated law-enforcement reports suggesting that associates of al-Qaida used smugglers in Latin America to travel through the region in 2002, before traveling onward to the United States," the panel said, without offering specifics.

Though the reference is to 2002, recent news reports indicate a growing concern that Arab terrorists are using the porous southern border to enter the United States.

Though the problem is getting more attention now, WorldNetDaily reported in 2001 that the number of Middle Eastern illegals crossing the southern border was on the rise.

Federal agents said OTMs – border lingo for "other than Mexicans" – were an increasing problem.

The commission report also stresses the premium al-Qaida puts on creating false border documents, including passports. According to the panel, Osama bin Laden associate Abu Zubaydah was the network's expert in travel fraud.

"He told them what kinds of clothes to wear, what kinds of airline tickets to purchase, how to alter their appearances and what to carry in order to avoid attracting suspicion from border authorities," the report said.

Another part of the report stressed the many violations of immigration law committed by the 9-11 hijackers, pointing out if federal officials had detected any of the fraud, the September 11 attack may have been thwarted.

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