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July 9, 2002, 9:15 a.m. State Defense The government is still defending Visa Express.

ith Congress nearing final action on the new Department of Homeland Security, the State Department has kicked its efforts into overdrive to hold onto visa-issuance powers, which many in Congress want to transfer to the new department as a necessary measure to safeguard our border security. Since all 19 of the 9/11 hijackers came here on legal visas, logic alone would dictate that visa issuance is a vital issue of homeland security.

Just before the holiday last week, in an act of desperation, Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs Paul Kelly, sent Congress a three-page memo called "National Review Article on Visa Express: Myths & Facts."

Given that it took over two weeks for anyone at State to offer up any kind of a written response to the NR story on the program in Saudi Arabia that let in three of the Sept. 11 hijackers in the three months it was in operation before 9/11, one might anticipate a detailed, factual rebuttal. Anyone expecting that, however, would be sadly disappointed.

Continuing a trend that began with the department's first response — on Fox News fully one week after news of the story had hit the airwaves — State's missive cleverly implied (through the "Myth" labels) that "Catching the Visa Express" from the July 1 issue of NR was filled with lies. Curiously, though, "Myths & Facts" — like prior State responses — lacked any actual evidence or facts to support its case.

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 off the airplane 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? The first "Fact" listed on the memo states, "Over the past year, approximately 45% 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-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.

In the nearly ten months since 9/11, CA 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-ten supervised mock interviews (at two-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.

Consular Officers, though, are not the problem. As "Myths & Facts" 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.

As a way of defending Visa Express and the scuttling of the interview requirement, CA and State are proud to note that 12 of the Saudi 9/11 terrorists were interviewed. But this frightening fact doesn't show that interviews don't work, but that interviews designed by Consular Affairs don't work. Mary Ryan's "courtesy culture," which demands polite treatment of all visa applicants, is inimical to the very idea of law-enforcement-based interviews designed to ferret out bad guys.

Applicants are ushered in and out of the interview room in less time than it takes to drink a can of Diet Coke, because to do otherwise would be "inconvenient" for the person wishing to come to America. A woman at a bar needs to be sweet-talked by a guy for at least 10-15 minutes just to agree to speak with him over the phone sometime, yet in far less time than that, someone is able to obtain a visa to get into this country. No wonder 12 of the Saudi 9/11 terrorists sailed though cursory interviews.

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.

Despite the blood-tarnished history of Visa Express, which is still in operation in Saudi Arabia, CA secretly wants to make Visa Express the norm in countries around the world. Mary Ryan herself has called eliminating the interview requirement a "very worthy goal," and that has apparently not changed, even in the wake of the worst terrorist attack in our nation's history. A senior CA official says, "Mary Ryan still wants to move to entirely rely on the lookout system, with very few interviews for non-refusals, if any at all."

The problems that plague the visa-issuance process cannot be fixed by the State Department, which simply does not have the institutional know-how to run a law-enforcement function. By refusing to close Visa Express, an unmitigated failure by any objective standards, State has shown itself to be incapable of, if not unwilling to, protect us from very real terrorist threats.

But even if State could clean house and close the gaping loopholes in our border security, there are few tasks that would be more central to the new Department of Homeland Security than keeping terrorists from reaching our shores in the first place.

— Joel Mowbray is an NRO contributor and a Townhall.com columnist.