Why is the State Department getting an UndyBomber pass?
Photoshop credit: Registered
As I mentioned yesterday, my syndicated column today spotlights the abysmally lax visa issuance policies at Hillary Clinton’s State Department — a problem that festered before 9/11 under GOP and Democrat administrations alike and continues now (hello, James Riady).
Take a look again at what the White House 6-page summary report says about Foggy Bottom’s foul-up:
The focus on visa revocation completely (and deliberately) misses the point about who bears responsibility for approving the visa in the first place. And that responsibility rests entirely with U.S. consular officials gambling on our national security. I asked the State Department for more information about the Crotch Bomber’s visa application and approval. The first thing I got back was chapter and verse citing federal law prohibiting disclosure of info on who, if anyone, interviewed Abdulmutallab; why he was approved for the full, two-year, multiple-entry visa instead of a limited, two-week visa to cover his trip to the shady Al Maghrib Institute in Houston, Texas; and how the State Department bureaucrats ignored the law, the red flags, and common sense to open the front door for Abdulmuttalab.
Why is Hillary’s State Department getting UndyBomber pass?
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010
Forget about no-fly lists, full-body scanners, and air marshals. All the loud recriminations about who should have done what to stop the UndyBomber from boarding a plane to Detroit on Christmas Day miss a more fundamental point: Young, single, rootless foreign Muslim Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab should never, ever have received a temporary visa into our country in the first place. No visa, no plane ticket. No ticket, no passage to airline jihad.
Even absent the intelligence we had on this al Qaeda-trained operative before his fateful trip, Hillary Clinton’s State Department (and Condi Rice’s before her) was required to know better than to issue a coveted entrance pass to a globe-trotting, Nigerian-born nomad. Under federal law (section 214[b] of the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act to be precise), State Department consular officials must determine that foreigners applying for temporary visas (students, tourists, and businessmen) will in fact return to their home countries as required and will not abuse their visa privileges.
This means making sure that the temporary visa applicant has strong ties to his native land. It’s supposed to be a tough burden to overcome. Yet, Abdulmutallab showed no such propensities at the time he applied for his temporary visa at the U.S. Embassy in London in June 2008. He was a twenty-something student who had flitted from Nigeria to Yemen to Togo to England without a family or job. He was, in other words, a textbook itinerant waving more red flags than a bullfighter.
Question: How much due diligence did the State Department consular official on the front line who interviewed Abdulmutallab actually show? Reports say it took just four days for his visa to be approved. Barely two months later, Abdulmutallab turned up in Houston for a two-week seminar at Al Maghrib Institute, a Muslim Brotherhood-tied Islamic education center that has been dubbed “Jihad U” by veteran terrorism analysts.
Now, I’m presuming that a consular official did in fact interview Abdulmutallab before rubber-stamping his visa. Before the September 11 attacks, countless visa applicants – including 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers – skipped personal appearance requirements and bypassed the interview process as a convenience provided by Foggy Bottom panderers. This was supposed to change.
I asked the State Department Thursday for more information about the presumed consular office interview and hasty approval of Abdulmutallab’s visa. Spokeswoman Megan Mattson invoked confidentiality rules protecting his visa form. But there is an overriding public interest in what his application might reveal about our atrociously lax consulate practices. The General Accounting Office obtained and released the 9/11 hijackers’ temporary visa forms, which showed that basic information about where they were headed (two hijackers wrote “Wasantwn”) and what business they claimed to be doing (one wrote “teater” as his occupation) was suspiciously shoddy.
Like Abulmutallab, not a single one of the unmarried, rootless, Muslim male nomads who secured student and business visas to commit mass murder on American soil should have ever obtained a temporary visa in the first place.
But the reckless customer-service mentality prevails under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The department continues to operate the dangerous “Diversity Visa Lottery” program – handing out permanent residency visas (green cards) randomly to some 50,000 foreigners from “underrepresented” regions. The bipartisan visa lottery was championed by the late Democrat Sen. Ted Kennedy and signed into law by Republican President George H. W. Bush in 1990. Although originally intended to give a leg up to Irish immigrants, most of the winners are now from non-Western countries – including several terrorist-sponsoring and terrorist-friendly nations such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Nigeria, and Yemen.
State Department flacks are busy pointing fingers at other homeland security bureaucracies, namely the National Counterrerrorism Center, for failing to revoke the UndyBomber’s visa. Foggy Bottom held a press conference earlier this week to boast that it had finally taken responsibility and stripped Abdulmutallab of his golden entrance ticket. But where does the buck stop for granting the visa in the first place?
Ominously, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley revealed that other suspected jihadi visas have been revoked. “It’s more than one,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s fruitful to get into a scoreboard.” Of course not. Keeping score would mean accountability for negligent consular officials and their bosses. This administration would rather let sleeping bureaucrats lie.
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HI SSNARK #102–That’s how I see it also. We lost more people–innocent civilians–of many races, ethnic backgrounds, nationalities in the 9/11/2001 TERROR ATTACK OF WAR. More died that day than died in the 12/7/1941 Pearl Harbor attack–and Japan tried to hit military facilities and personnel–not civilians.
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The apologists for the U.S.A. should be forced to watch the videos of the attack (not “man caused disaster”) and to again see our people jumping to their deaths rather than burning alive in the towers. Or to watch the Daniel Pearl beheading, Muslim Sharia stonings, floggings, etc. This is a religious war declared against us and our superior civilized way of life–and it has been going on intermittently for 1400 years.
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I thought President Bush 43 made a good start against these barbarians. I think he should have moved against the Iranian terrorist enabling state also. This is war to the death–and the longer we wait before finishing the job the more we will pay in blood when the final battles come.
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Comrade Obama’s (PBUH) Neville Chamberlain appeasement approach is an EPIC FAIL–it didn’t work against Nazi Germany, and resulted in millions more dead when the inevitable war finally came.
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Military tribunals for captured terrorists–and the traditional Texas “long drop with a short rope” if they are found guilty. And GITMO imprisonment forever if necessary–until this evil no longer exists. The U.S.A. can never win if we stay on defense.
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John Bibb
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Obama said he’d “have his eye on the target” unlike his predecessor.
And Homeland Security Czarina JaNo told us last Spring; “the greatest threat to America’s security is retiring cops and returning vets joining militias.”
Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad killed a U.S. soldier at a recruiting station this past May in Arkansas. Hasan killed 13 at Fort Hood. And Abdul the PantyBomber missed by sheer luck killing 277 innocent aboard NWA and who knows how many on the Detroit ground.
But rest easy my fellow Americans; JaNo and Barack kept us all safe and saved so many more American lives from those militias they warned us of.
___‹^›__‹(•¿•)›__‹^›___
KILROYSHERE
There are valid reasons why these regions should remain underrepresented.
Instead, liberal crapweasels, beset with the moral equivalence, “who are we to judge?” mentality will continue to open doors of opportunity to people who are hell-bent on our destruction.
On January 9th, 2010 at 10:26 am, rocketman said:
11 Sep. 2001 should have been our ‘Pearl Harbor’ the nation should have decided then and there that we were fighting for our lives. But, even after a little less than four years of fighting (1942-1945) the US was growing tired of fighting that war. It seems to be one of the problems of a democratic republic that the ability to fight extended wars even ones where most of the civilians and the civilian economy are untouched. Every day I hear complaints about how the billions spent on ‘the war’ could be spent on some kind of government give away or another.
My answer never quite pleases them. The people complaining about the length of the war and the spending either want to end it by ‘negotiating with the jihadis’ or to ‘nuke them all’. Both of which IMNSHO are non-answers. The former ends as Neville Chamberlain’s ‘Peace in our time’ and the latter has grave consequences not just in terms of survivors of an attempted genocide but of the effects of fallout on our own country as the radioactive dust will get into the upper atmosphere and travel thousands of miles.
President Bush did make a good start. He was unfortunately a man who trusted his cabinet and was served poorly by Donald Rumsfeld (the second coming of McNamara). We needed to recruit and train another five divisions plus strategic airlift capacity back in 2003 forward and should have kept the leash close on Al Malaki while continuing to build Iraq as a democratic republic (need another 5+ years at least) then waited for the current government crisis in Iran to invade. In Afghanistan we should have pulled support from Karzai, he’s proven he’s neither strong enough nor honest enough, then perhaps looked at ‘rehabilitating’ Dostum (not honest either but can rule) then bought the entire opium crop to keep it out of Taliban hands. It’d be interesting to see how long they could fight without money.
Ah, the pipe dreams of an old Soldier.
“Donald Rumsfeld (the second coming of McNamara)”
Having lived through the Vietnam War, hospital corpsman 1972-1976, LBJ, McNamara, Nixon, etc., I am not able to equate Rumsfield with McNamara. Sorry but there is no comparison.
On January 9th, 2010 at 3:17 pm, jsmiddleton4 said:
What’s not to compare. Rumsfeld wanted to re-make the military on a civilian business model to include such things as out-sourcing, down-sizing/right-sizing and all the other ‘whiz kid’ MBA school dreck that went with it. McNamara wanted to build the military on the Ford Motor Company with all of his ‘whiz kid’ dreck.
What’s not to compare? Pretty much what McNamara did in the 1960s was emulated by what Rumsfeld did in the 2000s. The only major difference was the business models of the 1960s were not those of the 2000s. We added things like ‘going green’ and ‘outsourcing’ to the lexicon of the military. The Senior leadership that I served under said much the same thing as I’m echoing and they’d been around much longer than either of us.
“What’s not to compare? Pretty much what McNamara did in the 1960s was emulated by what Rumsfeld did in the 2000s. The only major difference was the business models of the 1960s were not those of the 2000s.”
Sorry but that is flat out wrong.
Sec. Rumsfeld will never write a book basically apologizing to a generation of young Americans for wasting their lives in a winnable war as McNamara did and probably had to do for his own personal reasons.
McNamara was the Vietnam fiasco. Please point me to anything similar in Sec. Rumsfeld’s career?
On January 9th, 2010 at 3:48 pm, jsmiddleton4 said:
The current military situation in Iraq and Afghanistan are the products of Rumsfeld. Even that idiot Shinseki could see by 2004 that we were trying to fight a 15 division war with a 10 division Army. The fact that Rumsfeld didn’t try to replace combat losses in equipment and killed off several projects to update equipment like replacing the outdated M-109 Paladin or advocating a larger force. The only difference will be that I doubt if Mr. Rumsfeld will ever feel remorse before he dies or that his policies helped create a situation where troops were not getting rations or ammo because contract truck drivers, unlike military ones were refusing to make runs in unarmed civilian semi-trucks to resupply troops in Iraq. Or that gave rise to the 2004-2006 Shi’a vs. Sunni violence that nearly cost us the war or his opposition to the Counterinsurgency proposed by Gen. Petraeus. No, unlike McNamara, Rumsfeld has too much hubris. But, in say twenty years as it took for people to realize what damage Rumsfeld has done to the US military. From his fascination with hi-tech ‘toys’ to his failure to force the Air Force to look at and augment its aged and rapidly diminshing strategic airlift capacity. The costs of ten years of using contractors versus the ten year cost of Soldiers. Soldiers who can be their own force protection rather than needing large garrisons at every LSA to protect civilian contractors doing jobs previously done by less expensive Soldiers. There’s no difference between the one and the other both were trying to impose a cost-effective business model on warfare. An approach that is silly from its initial premise. In business, I deal in money. In war I deal in lives.
As I’ve said, I’m just echoing people who were in under both and that’s how they see it too.
Talk to me about it in twenty years.