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September
12, 2002, 9:15 a.m. By Michelle Malkin |
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lying this week or weekend? Here's something to make your airport experience
even more nerve-racking than it already promises to be.
While Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta's minions bully grandmothers, harass Medal of Honor winners, confiscate toy guns, grope toddlers' shoes, and ransack bottled breast milk to protect America from another terrorism attack, millions of foreigners waltz into our airport terminals without even having to bother to get visas. Countless numbers of these foreign tourists then walk out of the airports and disappear.
Such is the bizarre state of homeland defense one year after the September 11 attacks.
It was bad enough that the State Department took nine months to eliminate the so-called Visa Express program in Saudi Arabia, which three of the September 11 hijackers used to secure expedited visas through travel agencies without undergoing the normal consular interview process.
But even worse is the continued existence of the Transit Without a Visa program, available to travelers around the world, which completely eliminates the need for potential terrorists to gain a visa to enter the U.S. Who needs Visa Express when you can go visa-less?
The visa is supposed to be our government's best method for keeping out foreign menaces. Law-enforcement agents consider it the most important screening mechanism for national security. Yet, airline and tourism lobbyists have poked perilous holes in the system and helped facilitate hassle-free travel for outside visitors who fuel the $590 billion travel industry.
WORLD
WAR II RELIC
The Transit Without a Visa program was created in 1952 to help with the
resettlement of World War II refugees, most of whom had no identity or
travel documents to obtain visas. But half a century after its inception,
this obsolete humanitarian program has morphed into a lucrative marketing
gimmick for airlines. The program waives visa requirements for passengers
who are ostensibly passing briefly through the U.S. on their way to final
destinations abroad.
During the past three years, more than five million airline passengers — accounting for roughly five percent of all foreign nationals entering the country by plane — were routed to American airport hubs under the Transit Without a Visa program. Citizens from some Middle East state sponsors of terror, including Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Sudan, are not eligible. However, foreign nationals from several terrorist-exporting countries, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, and Jordan, can participate.
Airlines are responsible for guarding and escorting passengers in transit, and are supposedly liable for damages when they cannot confirm that program participants have actually departed the country. But the fines are negligible. Moreover, since the Immigration and Naturalization Service does not maintain arrival and departure records on a majority of these transiting passengers — and since the agency's interior-enforcement staff is overwhelmed and understaffed — the airlines are essentially off the hook for passengers who leave the airports and never come back.
The result? A terrorist network's dream: Travelers avoid pesky State Department background checks. Swamped airlines lose track of unknown numbers of passengers in transit. And private security guards assigned to escort program participants are easy marks for bribery and conspiracy.
OPERATION
LAX LOUNGE
In June 2002, a federal immigration inspector and two private airport
security guards were arrested for allegedly taking part in an alien-smuggling
conspiracy that allowed travelers transiting from the Philippines to slip
out of Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) without visas. The indicted
ringleader was a retired U.S. Marine and naturalized citizen from the
Philippines who had worked for the INS for 19 years. The operators charged
$10,000 per person smuggled.
Authorities found no terrorism links in the Filipino scam. But in July 2002, according to an internal "law enforcement sensitive" memo I obtained, the INS office of field operations informed its regional directors that federal antiterrorism investigators had launched "Operation LAX Lounge" based on information that "four individuals were involved in smuggling illegal aliens, many of whom are Middle Eastern males, into the United States" through the Transit Without a Visa program at LAX (now an unwittingly fitting abbreviation).
Two of the four involved in the alleged smuggling operation are Jordanian nationals who worked as LAX contract security guards. Another is a Social Security Administration official married to one of the guards. Investigators have charged them with collaborating to smuggle transiting passengers out of the airport and helping approximately 1,000 individuals — mostly of Middle Eastern descent — obtain fraudulent Social Security cards between 1998-2000. Some of the Transit Without a Visa passengers allegedly let free by the Jordanians at LAX are on the INS and State Department watch list of terrorist suspects. A few of these fugitive passengers were traced to New York City and arrested in July, but most remain at large.
A little-noticed report by the Justice Department Inspector General issued after the September 11 attacks warned of continuing lapses in the Transit Without a Visa program and concluded that the agency "must take immediate action ... to enhance national security."
However, no action, immediate or otherwise, has been taken to restrict or shut down the Transit Without a Visa program. Representatives of the transportation industry protested to federal investigators that terminating this fast-lane foreign-tourist program would be "inconvenient to the traveler."
Inconvenient? Tell that to our war veterans and nursing moms, waiting patiently in line to get roughhoused, while foreign travelers and suspected terrorists whiz by unmolested.
— Michelle Malkin is author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores.