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As has been State's modus operandi since its first public response last month to my reporting, Boucher attempted to portray me as a shoddy journalist — but at least he didn't go as far as the Consular Affairs (CA) press guru Ed Vazquez, who said that "every word [he] writes is a lie, including 'the' and 'and.'" (Consular Affairs is the agency within the State Department that oversees consulates and visa issuance.) After I pointed out to Boucher that he was not telling the whole truth about the contents of a classified cable from the ambassador at the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh (more on this later), he retorted, "You've written a lot of things and said a lot of things recently" that were "not true." He proceeded to rattle off four points — each of which I briefly, but immediately, rebutted — and he ended each barb with "and that's not true, is it?" As I reported last week, State Department officials distributed a three-page memo on Capitol Hill and to reporters called "National Review Article on Visa Express: Myths & Facts," in which State deliberately distorted my reporting to set up straw men, and then proceeded to knock them down. Boucher's offensive Friday during the press briefing was merely a restatement of that propaganda. It's time to set the record straight. First, Boucher claimed that I had stated that "visas are decided by travel agents." I never said any such thing. I did, however, repeatedly reference the obvious: Private Saudi travel agents have been deputized to handle the first step in the visa-collection process in Saudi Arabia for all applicants, including non-Saudi citizens. I have been careful to note that consulates and embassies do the rest of the work on visas, as I did in the condensed version of the magazine piece that appeared on NRO: "The consulates review the applications once received from the travel agencies." Still not sure how Boucher could misconstrue that. The biggest problem with Visa Express is that it allows over 70 percent of those issued visas to avoid contact with any U.S. citizen until stepping off the airplane onto American soil — and that's now post-9/11. Truly frightening is that that figure, by State's own admission, is lower now that the number of interviews conducted in Saudi Arabia has increased substantially in the past few months. If consular officers are denied the opportunity to even simply eyeball someone, how in the world are they supposed to know whether or not a visa applicant is on the level and is trustworthy? Quite simply, they can't. But State doesn't seem to care. State's apathy on this count is apparent: Even when people are interviewed, it's a two-to-three-minute chat conducted by a consular officer with less than five hours total interview training — none of which is in law-enforcement tactics. Next, Boucher attacked my work on the grounds that I had reported that Saudi Arabia "is the only country [where consulates] accept documents from third parties." Again, Boucher was way off the mark in describing what I had actually written. To wit: "In some other nations, partial versions of Visa Express are available," which is what I wrote in the aforementioned June 14 NRO story. There's simply no way to make his characterization of my work jibe with my unambiguous statement. Although many countries do have limited third-party screening (corporations or host governments submitting applications for their people to U.S. consulates, for example), only one country has a nationwide system where citizens and non-citizens alike are expected (State's own word) to submit visa applications to travel agents: Saudi Arabia. That fact was made explicitly clear to me Consular Affairs press spokesman Ed Dickens back in May. Boucher then contended that I had "said that performance of Foreign Service officers is measured on courtesy." That statement is, well, true (more or less). As I reported in "Catching the Visa Express" in the July 1 NR, consular officers "are inundated with messages about politeness and courtesy." This wasn't some wild guess on my part, and readers know that. The proof was in the internal CA documents I quoted at length. Additionally, dozens of current and former consular officers, both before and after the story was published, have told me in no uncertain terms that performance evaluations primarily stress customer service, not law enforcement. But I was not the first person to report on CA's obsession with courtesy: the L.A. Times did so last year. Boucher has yet to go after that West Coast paper. In concluding his list of grievances, Boucher asserted that I had said that "applicants are presumed eligible." Boucher clearly had no grounds to make this sweeping generalization, as I explicitly — and thoroughly — discussed CA's tendency to refuse visas to the poor while waving through wealthy applicants. Even Dickens, CA's own press spokesman, admitted the obvious: The poor get routinely refused, while those with lots of dough and no criminal record are presumed eligible for a visa. But readers didn't need to take Dickens's word for it, as I quoted CA's own written policy: "If the travel agency is reasonably satisfied that the traveler has the means to buy a tour 'package,' there will be little further evaluation of the applicant's qualifications." Ten months after 19 well-funded terrorists with legal visas perpetrated the worst terrorist action in our history, CA has yet to explicitly renounce this policy. If Boucher is looking for an actual "myth" to attack, he should focus on his own comment shortly before he launched his litany of complaints. In bringing up the contents of the confidential cable from the U.S. Ambassador in Saudi Arabia, Boucher implied that the memo from Riyadh was merely a plea for more resources to "tighten" visa procedures there. Knowing that the thrust of the letter was the requested demise of Visa Express, I pressed him with the following: "The ambassador asked, in the cable this week, to terminate the program formerly known as 'Visa Express'; …is that correct?" Boucher's response? "Well, no." There is no way to spin Boucher's response to this question as anything but a willful deception — and that's probably a generous assessment. The subject line of the cable says it all: "Request for Guidance on Termination of Visa Express." — Joel Mowbray is an NRO contributor and a Townhall.com columnist. |
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