Posted on 06/21/2002 7:45:37 AM PDT by browardchad
Since news of my NR story called "Catching the Visa Express" hit the airwaves last Thursday, Consular Affairs — which oversees visa issuance and implemented the open-door policy for Saudi terrorists — has come under fire from both the public and Capitol Hill for the Visa Express program, which is how three of the Sept. 11 hijackers got in this country.
Despite mounting criticism, Consular Affairs (CA) took fully one week to respond to the charges leveled at it about Visa Express. On The Big Story with John Gibson on Fox News yesterday, the new PR flack for CA, Ed Vazquez — in his first week on the job, poor guy — kept trying to make Visa Express sound downright benign, minimizing the impact of deputizing travel agents as visa-collection agents for the U.S. government.
When pinned down by Gibson as to whether or not Visa Express was still in existence, Vazquez conceded, "There is a program called Visa Express, or it used to be called Visa Express."
Wait. Used to be called Visa Express?
Consular Affairs dumped the name "Visa Express" just this week, on the same day that NR hit newsstands.
The U.S. Embassy in Riyadh's website promoting Visa Express, which had not been updated since the launch of the fast-track program last June, was overhauled this Monday. Sadly, the changes were literally limited to the words alone, as not one aspect of the program has been modified.
For an entire year, the website had breathlessly hawked the virtues of Visa Express, with the opening line setting the tone: "The US Embassy in Riyadh is proud to announce the implementation of its new U.S. VISA EXPRESS service for expediting nonimmigrant visa applications throughout Saudi Arabia."
Since last June, the website made clear that all applicants living in Saudi Arabia — including Yemeni, Filipino, and other non-Saudi citizens — were "expected" to take advantage of the "convenience" provided by Visa Express, which was "designed to help qualified applicants obtain U.S. visas quickly and easily."
The new website no longer reads like a full-page advertisement, with marketing hype replaced by the language of bureaucracy. A sample sentence from the new site: "When the applicant has completed and signed the application forms and has compiled the requirement [sic] documentation, these travel agencies bring the application to the Embassy in Riyadh or Consulate General in Jeddah with the required application fee and any applicable visa issuance fee."
The only real change is that the site now has a boring way of saying that private Saudi travel agents have been deputized to handle the first step in the visa-application process.
Visa Express was spawned in an agency with conflicting goals of providing front-line diplomacy and law enforcement for our border security. Over the past decade, CA has excelled at the former with its "courtesy culture," but that came at the expense of the latter. With the new, bureaucratic-speak website, CA has actually managed to fail at both.
Despite the brusque wording and CA's attempts to pawn off the deputization of private Saudi travel agents as mere document collectors, nothing of substance has changed. Saudi nationals and people just living in Saudi Arabia can waltz into a travel agency, submit a short, two-page form and a photo, and go home and wait for the visa to arrive in the mail. Policies dictating issuance of a visa to people whose names aren't on the watch list and with enough money to buy a fancy travel package — something any al Qaeda operative could do — have not changed.
Rather than figuring out how to plug this gaping hole in our border security, CA has spent the past week formulating a way to defend it.
That CA considers dropping the name "Visa Express" and toughening the website's description of the now-nameless program the appropriate response speaks volumes about the frighteningly insular and backward nature of the agency.
The quote from a senior CA official that still haunts me is that CA executives and foreign-service officers in the consulates "act as if the World Trade Center towers were still standing." They don't get it. They don't understand that the world forever changed on Sept. 11.
If it wasn't clear before 9/11, it must be now: Visa screening is the frontline of our border security. And that vital function is still handled, at its first stage, by private Saudi travel agents — and CA executives see nothing wrong with this. CA is a bloated bureaucracy trapped in the death grip of inertia, and it will not change, not even in the wake of the worst terrorist action in our history.
The only solution is stripping visa-issuance powers from CA, and placing that duty in the hands of the new Department of Homeland Defense — a move Bush did not initially propose. But if the officials currently running the show are simply transferred to another bureaucracy in which they can seek solace and resist reform, then the action will be meaningless. The visa house must be cleaned, and every visa applicant must visit a consulate or embassy and be interviewed.
As a direct response to the NR story, Congress will be holding hearings next Wednesday to explore the possibility of shifting control over visa issuance to the new department, but the right outcome is far from certain at this point.
Let's hope Congress realizes what CA does not: Cosmetic changes alone will not protect us from people wishing to do us harm.
— Joel Mowbray is an NRO contributor and a Townhall.com columnist.
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