WASHINGTON, March 19 (UPI) -- Immigration and Naturalization Service chief James Ziglar acknowledged Tuesday that the visa approvals for two hijackers should never have been mailed to a Florida flight school, but he defended the contractor that did it -- saying it was following an archaic agency system.
Ziglar said the main problem was that nobody at INS thought of looking at what pertinent approvals might be flowing through the notoriously slow system after the Sept. 11 attacks. Last week Ziglar froze all visas approvals and ordered them reviewed to see if they have a connection to any known terrorist.
On a day when news stories said that his agency might be eradicated by a new border security plan, Ziglar described for reporters at National Press Club luncheon a long tortured process of visa approvals and record keeping that resulted last week in the disclosure that the Huffman International flying school had received visa approvals for two dead hijackers.
This incident angered President Bush and last week he said his anger had been made clear to the chiefs of the agency, which would presumably include Ziglar. On Friday, Ziglar removed several top agency officials from their jobs and transferred them to lesser responsibilities after an inquiry into the flub.
An administration source told United Press International last week that Bush was livid about the mistake that embarrassed him and called into question the security of the country. Another source told UPI that Bush was unlikely to choose Ziglar to head an expanded new border agency if INS was subsumed.
Ziglar's 35,000-person agency, one of the more troubled in government, has come under enormous criticism for its inadequate and antiquated record-keeping system. Ziglar said the system in part was at fault for mailing the visas. He said the approvals, made last July, were mailed to Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, last summer before they joined a group that hijacked airliners and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
But the approval copies sent to Huffman were like "credit card receipts" mailed out after a sale has been paid for by a credit card. "It was for their files," he said.
The firm that mailed the approvals to Huffman, which he did not name, was simply a contractor that enters the action into an INS database. He said this system was being tightened and improved even as the flub was happening, but that under some contract difficulties last year, the contractor had six months to take action and the visa approvals didn't go out until 2002.
Ziglar said he has stopped all visa approvals in the works and ordered them reviewed to be sure no other suspects in the terrorist attacks are listed. He would not fault the contractor, saying it was carrying out its duties properly.
