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 Abdulmutallab, 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 Democratic 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 Counterterrorism 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Ominously, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley revealed that other suspected jihadi visas have been revoked.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.