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VISA EXPRESS & 9/11 HIJACKERS
Sat Apr 10, 2004 00:17
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Breaking news 12/12/01

The easy path to the United States for three of the 9/11 hijackers
By Edward T. Pound
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/terror/articles/visa011212.htm

Three of the hijackers in the September 11 terrorist attacks obtained visas in Saudi Arabia through a brand-new program designed to make it easier for qualified visa applicants to visit the United States, an American government official said tonight.

The Visa Express program, put in place just four months before the attacks, allowed the three hijackers to arrange their visas through a State Department-designated travel agency, the official says. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers obtained their U.S. travel visas in Saudi Arabia.

None of the three men, the American government official says, was ever questioned by U.S. consular officers in Saudi Arabia. Each took his travel papers and passport to a commercial travel agency, which submitted the applications to the State Department.

Visa Express "is a bad idea," says Jessica Vaughan, a former consular officer. "The issuing officer has no idea whether the person applying for the visa is actually the person (listed) in the documents and application."

The State Department defends the Visa Express program and says security is most important--whether in Saudi Arabia or any other country in which consular officers issue visas. The State Department has tightened visa procedures, though Visa Express and similar programs in other countries remain in place.

Of the 15 hijackers who obtained their non-immigrant visas in Saudi Arabia, the U.S. official says, 11 received them before the Visa Express program was put into place, in June. The three Saudi nationals who obtained visas through the express program were:

Abdulaziz Alomari, about 28 years old. According to the Justice Department, he arrived in the U.S. on a tourist visa in June 2001. The FBI has identified Alomari, a pilot, as one of five hijackers who boarded American Airlines Flight 11 in Boston. The plane crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center at 8:45 a.m. Officials believe that Mohammed Atta, the suspected ringleader, was at the controls.

Khalid al-Midhar, 25, who, the Justice Department says, arrived in the U.S. in July 2001, traveling on a business visa. The FBI believes that al-Midhar was one of five men who hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon.

Salem Alhamzi, 20, who arrived in the U.S. June 2001, traveling on a tourist visa, according to the Justice Department. Alhamzi also was aboard the American Airlines jet that slammed into the Pentagon.

A fourth suspected hijacker, Saeed Al-Ghamdi, received his visa after the Visa Express program was started. The U.S. official says the man was "a walk-in" at a State Department office in Saudi Arabia and was apparently interviewed by a consular officer.

The official says that the names of the four men--and the names of all the hijackers who obtained their U.S. visas in Saudi Arabia--were run through the State Department's CLASS database (for Consular Lookout and Support System). The database contains regularly updated records and intelligence information on foreign nationals. "There was no derogatory information in the files,'' the official said.

The U.S. embassy in the Saudi capital of Riyadh and the consulate in Jeddah issue visas. Government officials declined to say which office issued the three visas in question.

Visa Express was announced with great fanfare last June. When the visa program was unveiled, the American embassy in Riyadh said it was "proud to announce'' the new procedures, which were designed to help "qualified applicants obtain U.S. visas quickly and easily.''

The embassy announcement went on: "Applicants will no longer have to take time off from work, no longer have to wait in long lines under the hot sun and in crowded waiting rooms.'' Instead, "all applicants,'' the announcement said, "will be expected to use the U.S. Visa Express service'' offered by 10 designated travel agencies.

Many Saudis visit the U.S. More than 60,000 Saudi applicants obtained visas for the year ending September 30, either in Saudi Arabia or other countries, according to State Department figures.

Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the State Department has imposed a more rigorous review of Arab and Muslim men, ages 16 to 45, including in Saudi Arabia. Officials acknowledge that the new procedures, described as temporary, have slowed visa applications in Saudi Arabia.

"A substantial fall-off'' is the way one official put it.

In a statement, Christopher Lamora, a State Department spokesman, said that Visa Express was instituted, based on a "traditionally low visa-refusal rate and incidence of fraud among Saudi applicants.'' He said that similar "interviews-by-exception programs' were in place in other countries, including France and the United Kingdom. According to Lamora, consular officers run the names of all visa applicants through the State Department's CLASS database.

"Whether or not an applicant is personally interviewed by a consular officer,'' he says, "will not affect the results of that namecheck process.'' It is "not technologically possible,'' he adds, " to issue visas to people whose names appear in the system and fail to clear the system.''

As the terrorist attacks demonstrated, the information contained in CLASS was far from adequate. In the past, some law enforcement and intelligence agencies weren't anxious to share information with the State Department. In congressional testimony last October, Mary Ryan, a senior State Department official, put it bluntly: "We have had a struggle with the law enforcement and intelligence communities in getting information.''
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Open Door for Saudi Terrorists--Startling New Revelation
Joel Mowbray (archive)
September 30, 2003
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/joelmowbray/jm20030930.shtml

VISA EXPRESS

State has by no means been acting as a rogue department in dealing with Saudi Arabia, somehow coddling a nation that various White Houses considered hostile. But the lengths to which State goes to pamper the Saudis is something largely carried out of its own volition. There is no better example of this than Visa Express, the program that required all Saudis (including non-citizens) to turn in their visa applications at private Saudi travel agencies, which then sent them in bundles to the embassy in Riyadh or the consulate in Jeddah. Visa Express was entirely of State’s own making; it was conceived of and planned for while Clinton was president, and was officially launched when Bush was in the White House. And in the three months it was operational before September 11, Visa Express let in three of the September 11 terrorists. But State did not shut it down. It took ten months—and tremendous public pressure—before that happened.

From the moment in early 1993 that Mary Ryan became head of Consular Affairs (CA), the division that oversees visa issuance, consulates, and embassies, traditional requirements for visa applicants started getting pared down (discussed in detail in Chapter 8). Partial versions of Visa Express—though not by that name—were implemented in various countries in the mid- to late-1990s. But nowhere in the world had State launched a program whereby all residents, citizens and non-citizens alike, would be expected to submit visa applications to local, private travel agencies. It was a bold—and untested—plan. Yet State chose to try out this ambitious project in a nation that was a known hotbed of al Qaeda extremists. To be fair, most Americans were not thinking about national security in late 2000 and early 2001, but State should have been. That’s its job. Khobar Towers, the U.S. military dormitory, had been attacked by Hezbollah terrorists in 1996, killing nineteen U.S. soldiers, and wounding 372. And State had ample information that al Qaeda was fully operational inside Saudi Arabia. Yet State went ahead in that environment with plans to launch its first nationwide Visa Express program.

Although State vociferously defended Visa Express when it came under intense scrutiny—claiming that it was almost irrelevant that travel agencies had been deputized to collect visa applications (and more, as it turned out)—the truth is that Visa Express was an incredible threat to U.S. border security. State’s official line was that travel agencies did no more than, say, FedEx would in collecting and passing on applications. This was simply not true. According to internal State documents, travel agencies were expected to conduct pre-interviews and ensure compliance. In other words, people with financial incentive to obtain visas for others were helping them fill out the forms. At first blush, this might not sound significant. But the average visa application is approved or refused in two to three minutes, meaning that there are key indicators a consular officer looks for in making his decisions. With a two-page form—one page of which has questions like “Are you a member of a terrorist organization? (Answering ‘yes’ will not necessarily trigger a refusal)”—a travel agent who handles dozens or hundreds of applications daily could easily figure out the red flags that are to be avoided. Armed with that information, it would be relatively easy to help an applicant beat the system. Visa Express also arranged it so that the overwhelming majority of Saudi applicants never came into contact with a U.S. citizen until stepping off the airplane onto American soil.

Apparently oblivious to the glaring security loopholes created by Visa Express, State proudly implemented the program in June 2001. In an e-mail that, in hindsight, is shocking for its gleeful tone, the deputy chief of mission in Riyadh, Thomas P. Furey, wrote to Mary Ryan about Visa Express being a “win-win-win-win”—with nary a mention of security concerns. In the e-mail, Furey notes that the program started with Saudi nationals—whom he amazingly refers to as “clearly approvable”—and then says that Visa Express had been expanded to include non-Saudi citizens one day earlier, on June 25, 2001. Visa Express also resulted in the overwhelming majority of Saudi applicants never coming into contact with visa applicants. “The number of people on the street and coming through the gates should only be fifteen percent of what it was last summer,” Furey wrote.

The four wins Furey boasts about? From his e-mail:

“The RSO [regional security officer, an American responsible for coordinating embassy security with local police] is happy, the guard force [Saudi residents who provide embassy and consulate security] is happy, the public loves the service (no more long lines and they can go to the travel agencies in the evening and not take time off from work), we love it (no more crowd control stress and reduced work for the FSNs [Foreign Service Nationals, Saudi residents]) and now this afternoon Chuck Brayshaw and I were at the Foreign Ministry and discovered the most amazing thing—the Saudi Government loves it!”

It would be easier to defend State’s creation of Visa Express if it had abandoned it on September 12, 2001—or at least had done so after it realized that fifteen of the hijackers were Saudis, including three who got in through the program. But in the month after September 11, out of 102 applicants whose forms were processed at the Jeddah consulate, only two were interviewed, and none was refused. When word leaked to the Washington Post that fifteen of the nineteen terrorists were Saudis, the embassy in Riyadh assured the Saudis that the U.S. had “not changed its procedures or policies in determining visa eligibility as a result of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.” And after my investigative story on Visa Express came out in mid-June, State’s initial change was cosmetic—literally. It dropped the name “Visa Express,” but changed nothing about the program itself. Only after a month of a full-court press defending the suddenly nameless program did State shutter it. And even then, it was not because it had realized the error of its ways, but because it needed to offer some proof to Congress—set to vote near the end of July to strip State of the visa authority altogether—that it was indeed fit to handle such a vital function of U.S. border security. (The gambit worked—Congress sided with State.)

After the program was sacked, officials at State “openly worried that Saudi relations would worsen with the stricter requirements,” according to an official there.22 If only they had expressed such “worry” about the wisdom of fast-tracking visas in a nation teeming with Islamic extremists.

Saudi Arabia, after all, is the home of Wahhabi Islam, and Wahhabi true believers’ favorite catch phrase is “Death to America”—well, maybe the second favorite, after “Death to Israel.” But look again at Furey’s e-mail. He was clearly—frighteningly—blind to this reality. He referred to Saudi nationals as “clearly approvable.” What he saw was a nation filled with people he believed belonged in the United States. Furey, in his e-mail, summed up his idealized vision of Saudi Arabia quite succinctly: “This place really is a wonderland.”


EXPRESS NEGLIGENCE

State’s obliviousness to reality—and security—had an even more incredible result: one of the ten travel agency companies contracted as a Visa Express vendor is a subsidiary of a suspected financier of terrorism. Fursan Travel & Tourism is owned by the Al-Rajhi Banking & Investment Corporation (RBIC), which is one of the alleged financiers of al Qaeda listed in the “Golden Chain” documents seized in Bosnia in March 2002 (detailing the early supporters of al Qaeda back in the late 1980s, after the Soviets left Afghanistan). RBIC was also the primary bank for a number of charities raided in the United States after September 11 for suspected ties to terrorist organizations.

RBIC maintained accounts for the International Islamic Relief Organization, the Saudi Red Crescent Society, the Muslim World League, and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth. RBIC also was used to wire money to the Global Relief Foundation in Belgium, which the United States has designated as a terrorist organization.

Records recovered by Spanish authorities show that several members of an al Qaeda affiliate there held accounts at RBIC, and the terror cell’s chief financier told a business partner to use RBIC for their transactions in a fax recovered by Spanish police.23 And they were not the only al Qaeda terrorists who did business there. Abdulaziz Alomari, who helped Mohammed Atta crash American Airlines Flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Center and was one of the three terrorists who received a visa through Visa Express, held an account at RBIC as well.

Because his visa application form—which was obtained by this author—does not indicate which travel agency he used, it is not known whether Alomari submitted his application to the agency owned by RBIC.

The founder and namesake of RBIC, Suleiman Abdul Aziz al-Rajhi, also started the SAAR Foundation, whose clone successor, Safa Trust (SAAR liquidated, but most of the same people and operations carried over to Safa25) was at the center of the FBI’s investigation into the extensive financial network of mostly Saudi-financed terrorist activities in the United States. Operation Greenquest, as it was called, resulted in the raiding of twenty-three different Muslim organizations’ offices, including Safa Trust and several charities that had bank accounts with RBIC. Although the raids occurred after September 11, the FBI had been investigating the elaborate financial arrangements—which regularly included SAAR—for years before the September 11 attacks.

Yet the State Department was so careless in choosing its Visa Express vendors that one owned by a suspected financier of terrorism became deputized to handle the collection and initial processing of U.S. visas.

©2003 Joel Mowbray

• 7/21/2002: visa express still running! — MEDIA CONTACTS, Fri Apr 9 00:27