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STATE LINE: It's a "myth" that "most Saudi applicants never come into contact with a U.S. citizen until stepping off the airplane onto U.S. soil." State has gone to the greatest lengths to fight the perception — grounded in reality — that Visa Express in Saudi Arabia created a system where the majority of visa applicants never come into contact with a U.S. citizen until stepping onto American soil. Visa Express makes this possible because, by design, all visa applicants in Saudi Arabia, including non-citizens, merely submit a two-page form and a photo to a private Saudi travel agent. The official State line rebutting this charge? "Over the past year, approximately 45 percent of visa applicants in Saudi Arabia have been personally interviewed." Do the math, and that means that 55 percent of visa applicants, or most, are not interviewed. But a quick analysis of the interview figure actually reveals that State's deception goes much deeper. Under the direction of Mary Ryan, the head of Consular Affairs (CA), the agency within the State Department that oversees consulates and visa issuance, the interview requirement has been systematically scrapped in consulate after consulate. Agency-wide, the only time an interview is required is after a visa is refused, meaning that all refusals automatically trigger an interview, where applicants are given a second chance to obtain a visa. In 2001, nearly one-fourth of all visa applicants in Saudi Arabia were refused, which means that visa refusals accounted for more than half of all the interviews conducted in that country. In other words, CA did not interview 45 percent of applicants because it felt compelled to screen out bad guys, but to be "fair" to those refused, giving those people an opportunity to overcome a refusal with a strong showing at an interview. In fact, once people refused a visa are taken out of the equation, only 27 percent of people issued visas in Saudi Arabia were interviewed first. No matter how you slice it, the 73 percent of visa holders skipping an interview are not just "infants" and "elderly people," as State contends. The three 9/11 terrorists who got into this country through Visa Express — without ever being interviewed — were certainly neither "infants" nor "elderly." But focusing on whether or not people get interviewed by consular officers obscures the more important point: Interviews, as they are now conducted, do precious little to screen out terrorists. The typical interview lasts two-to-three minutes, and is primarily designed to keep out people wishing to overstay a temporary visa and become an immigrant. Consular officers are supposed to keep out those seeking to immigrate through visas, but those are pretty much the only visa applicants being screened out by interviews. STATE LINE: "[Mowbray] claims nobody is interviewed. We reserve the right to interview a high percentage of people who come in in Saudi Arabia." This is just a derivative argument of the above attack, but the phrasing of this one merits special attention: "We reserve the right to interview a high percentage of people." People can reserve the right to do any number of things, but it doesn't mean they actually do any of those things. In fact, the law provides that State reserves the right to interview anyone it chooses to — State didn't do anything on its own to reserve any right to interview. STATE LINE: No travel agent is deputized to do a U.S. visa anyplace in the world, least of all in Saudi Arabia. State has always defended the deputization of private Saudi travel agents to handle the first step in the visa-collection process by arguing that the agencies do no more to applications than, say, FedEx would. But a confidential cable written by the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia proves otherwise. "Using the travel agents to assure that documentation is complete and in compliance with guidelines saved the consular officers from spending valuable time pre-interviewing applicants whose paperwork was not in order," the ambassador wrote. That's what State didn't want to get out: Travel agents are being used to "pre-interview" and to ensure "compliance," something FedEx would never do. Travel agents save consulates time and money — that's not my assertion, that's in the ambassador's own words. But if travel agents were merely handing off the applications to consulates in the same way the individuals would do themselves, why in the world would the ambassador need more resources to make up for the loss of travel agencies in the visa process? After all, it should take the exact same effort to receive an application sent in by an individual as one turned in by his travel agent. The obvious answer — obvious to anyone outside State, at least — is that travel agents are not near-bystanders in Visa Express. They do work that otherwise would be handled by consular officers. In other words, private Saudi travel agents are deputized by the State Department under Visa Express. As the ambassador himself wrote in the cable, "Eliminating the role of travel agencies… will certainly require additional resources." STATE LINE: Mowbray reported that Saudi Arabia "is the only country [where consulates] accept documents from third parties." When top State press flack Richard Boucher made this comment last Friday, he 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 my June 14 NRO story. 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 by Consular Affairs press spokesman Ed Dickens back in May. STATE LINE: Mowbray said that "applicants are presumed eligible." Boucher clearly had no grounds to make this sweeping generalization, as I explicitly — and thoroughly — discussed the tendency of Consular Affairs (CA), the agency within State that oversees consulates and visa issuance, 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. STATE LINE: It's a "myth" that if a Saudi travel agent 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. This myth, as previously noted, is written State policy, though I have been careful to point out that visa applicants must also have a clean criminal history. But that's it. In a world where al Qaeda sleeper-cell agents come from well-off backgrounds and have clean records, this screening is woefully insufficient to safeguard our shores. STATE LINE: "An applicant's economic status has nothing whatsoever to do with assessing his security risk to the United States. Applicants are presumed by the law to be 'intending immigrants' until they establish to the satisfaction of the consular officer that they are not." First, notice the following language: "An applicant's economic status has nothing whatsoever to do with assessing his security risk to the United States." I've never said that one's economic status had anything to do with a security assessment. The problem is that the only security check done is running someone's name through a database. The cursory, two-to-three-minute interviews simply do nothing to screen out bad guys who appear fine on paper. It's ironic that State resorts to the "law" to defend itself, when in fact, I've stated clearly that the "law" is that the burden of proof is on visa applicants to prove eligibility. The problem is State's execution of the law. Current and former consular officers state unequivocally that the reality in the field is far different, that there is enormous pressure from Washington and their superiors to grant as many visas as quickly as possible. STATE LINE: Mowbray "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. STATE LINE: "Junior Foreign Officers are among the U.S. government's most talented and best-prepared employees." Consular Officers are not the problem. As State correctly notes, consular officers are often highly educated, bright individuals. But the structure of CA and the lack of training virtually guarantee that they are thrown into the field ill equipped and ill prepared to protect us from terrorists. Since the NR story came out, former and current consular officers have come out of the woodwork to praise the piece, universally agreeing that Mary Ryan's "courtesy culture" at CA has sacrificed border security at the altar of convenience — for foreigners. STATE LINE: It's a "myth" that "Junior Foreign Officers are typically young, often unmotivated and almost always under-trained and under-prepared." The problem is how State treats consular officers, starting in training. In the ten months since 9/11, State has not even begun to seriously design a protocol for ferreting out terrorists during the interview process. Consular officers still, post-9/11, receive less than five hours total training on conducting an interview. After reading a scant three pages in the training book and handling five-to-ten supervised mock interviews (at two-to-three minutes each), consular officers are tossed out into the field, charged with the responsibility of serving as our front line of border security, expected to keep out people wishing to do us harm. Once in the field, consular officers are put under enormous pressure to subvert the law by issuing visas to people who should not be granted access to the United States. Compounding this undue pressure, consular officers are derisively referred to within the foreign-service corps as "visa stampers." STATE LINE: It's a "myth" that Consular Affairs is violating its own internal protocol by granting a third party document program to a country where one-fourth of the applicants are refused. As I have noted, it is an unwritten, but largely followed, practice that countries with refusal rates of 6 percent or higher should not have a widespread system of third-party screening. Just because State apparently no longer adheres to this standard in the past year or two does not justify establishing Visa Express in Saudi Arabia, where the overall refusal rate for citizens and non-citizens is 23 percent. STATE LINE: "CLASS (Consular Lookout and Support System) name-checking system is designed to make it tough for an applicant to disguise relevant information in our system or for a consular officer to overlook it." The State Department maintains to this day that its computerized lookout system is state-of-the-art. Yet there are many examples of people who have skirted the system by tweaking names or dates of birth, including a suspected Colombian drug dealer earlier this year. But State's almost sole reliance on the watch lists is downright foolish, if not dangerous, considering that al Qaeda sleeper cells are populated with people with no criminal records. Would interviews screen out all sleeper agents? No, but it would be better than simply waving them through, as we do now. STATE LINE: "Keeping [out] people who…would do us harm is not exclusive or incompatible with providing good service to people who are perfectly qualified to enter the U.S." The "courtesy culture" implemented by State is what has caused the current state of disrepair of the whole visa system. State has placed diplomacy above security, and continues to do so to this day. With its track record, State should not — and cannot — be trusted with the power to issue visas in this time of war when our enemies want nothing more than to gain entry into the United States. The one fact we must remember above all else is that all 19 of the 9/11 terrorists came here on legal visas. There's no way State can spin that. — Joel Mowbray is an NRO contributor and a Townhall.com columnist. |
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the past month, the State Department has responded to NR's reporting
on Visa Express and the problems of the entrenched "courtesy culture"
with an attempt to smear and spin. Unfortunately for State, the written
record is clear. The following is a compilation of State's intentional
deceptions, and the truth behind each issue. 
