Posted on 07/24/2002 11:20:45 PM PDT by kattracks
AT LAST, a head has rolled since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Mary Ryan, assistant secretary for Consular Affairs, has “retired” from the State Department. She was pressured out on July 9 after suffering severe criticism for a program she pioneered called Visa Express. Unique to Saudi Arabia, it fast-tracked visa applications for Saudi citizens and alien residents hoping to come to America. Rather than visit U.S. diplomatic posts, visa applicants were expected to hand their papers to Saudi travel agents who would deliver them to American consular personnel. So long as they could afford passage and did not have criminal records or appear on watch lists, these applicants were greenlighted to enter America, usually with neither interviews nor any other contacts with U.S. officials until they actually landed here.
This program was particularly convenient for Salem Alhamzi, Khalid Almihdar and Abdulaziz Alomari. These Saudi citizens were among the 19 hijackers who killed 3,056 innocents on Sept. 11. Without even being interviewed, these three mass murderers reached U.S. shores through Mary Ryan’s brilliant initiative.
Visa Express is gone. So is Ryan and her “I’m OK, You’re OK” approach to visa applicants from a hostile, anti-western, anti-American, anti-Semitic country that she embraced like a sandier, flatter Switzerland.
Ryan’s departure should force State to practice vigilance rather than hospitality when it screens people eager to come to America — not to see the sights, but to detonate them. State now says it will interview Saudi visa applicants. While it is hard to believe this was not always the case, it is unforgivable that this did not become policy on Sept. 12, 2001 rather than July 10, 2002.
Better yet, visa approval — at least for applicants from pro-terrorist nations like Saudi Arabia — should be shifted to the new Homeland Security Department. Congress is weighing this radical, but prudent, reform of U.S consular operations.
If Mary Ryan is this tale’s vanquished villain, its hero is Joel Mowbray, my colleague at National Review Online. He deserves enormous credit and the nation’s gratitude for discovering the Visa Express story and sinking his teeth into it as if he were a pit bull that caught up with a jogger. His initial piece, “Catch the Visa Express,” was published in National Review’s July 1 issue, which appeared on June 17. The State Department that day changed the program’s name and its description on the department’s Web page. Ignoring such cosmetics, Mowbray followed up his scoop with additional NRO and newspaper dispatches, media appearances and testimony before a House panel eager to learn more about the idiocies he unearthed.
The fruits of Mowbray’s intrepid journalism are stunning: America’s longest-serving career diplomat is out on her duff. A foolish and deadly federal program has been spiked. And Congress may yank one of State’s core functions from its clutches.
This may explain why a State Department official and four armed guards detained Mowbray for 30 minutes after he challenged spokesman Richard Boucher at a July 12 briefing. Mowbray cited a classified diplomatic cable regarding Visa Express that was discussed on NRO and in the Washington Post. State’s goons pressed Mowbray to name his source, even though the document he was furnished merely embarrasses State without jeopardizing national security.
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Fla., greeted this outrage with a July 16 letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell. They complained that “the actions of State Department security officials effectively chilled the work of the media and the whistleblowers who are so vital to exposing problems in our government.”
The eye of this hurricane is no veteran reporter, but a 26-year-old who just two years ago worked on Capitol Hill for former Rep. Mark Sanford, R-S.C. Mowbray began writing articles only last November.
NRO first posted his work in April. Since then, he has rocked a key bureaucracy and, in Ryan, nailed quite a fancy scalp to his wall.
Amid this summer’s chaos and crashing disappointments — from pedophile priests to WorldCom to the Dow — Joel Mowbray reminds Americans that one man truly can make a difference.
Now, if he simply would aim his magic keyboard at the FBI and the CIA.
New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Fairfax, Va.
I believe I saw him on TV the other day, but failing to remember with any precision which of the Foxnews shows it was.
He seemed rather nonchalant about it!
Looks like an up and coming reporter to me!
I just wished that I could have held them hostage for their arrogant incompetence, in countries spread throughout the world, from the mid-east, to Europe, to the Far East.
It sounds like the 5 state department individuals who are worth the powder to blow them up is an over estimate to me.
One down...8,934 to go.
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