Monday, January 26, 2004
Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC
CHAIRED BY: THOMAS H. KEAN
MARY RYAN, FORMER ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE FOR CONSULAR AFFAIRS, DEPARTMENT OF STATE;
DORIS MEISSNER, FORMER COMMISSIONER, IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION SERVICE, DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE;
JOSE E. MELENDEZ-PEREZ, INSPECTOR, CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY;
MAURA HARTY, ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR CONSULAR AFFAIRS, DEPARTMENT OF STATE;
RUSSELL E. TRAVERS, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, INFORMATION SHARING AND KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT DEPARTMENT, TERRORIST THREAT INTEGRATION CENTER;
DONNA A. BUCELLA, DIRECTOR, TERRORIST SCREENING CENTER, FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION;
JAMES ZIGLAR, FORMER COMMISSIONER, IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION SERVICE, DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE;
ROBERT C. BONNER, COMMISSIONER, CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY;
PETER F. VERGA, PRINCIPAL DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR HOMELAND DEFENSE, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
MR. THOMAS H. KEAN: I'd like to call the hearing to order. As chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, I hereby convene the seventh public hearing. This hearing's going to run over the course of two days, from 9:00 o'clock to 4:30 around today and tomorrow. We have taken it as the topic of today's hearing "Borders, Transportation and Managing Risk." Today we're going to focus primarily on border security.
We intend to be covering a lot of ground today. So we can get right to business at hand, I'm going to keep these opening remarks very brief. I will, however, make just two points before we begin. First, we'd like the American people to know that the Commission is deep into its work. We and our staff continue to work our way through more than two million pages of documents. We have interviewed more than 900 people and will be interviewing several hundred more before we conclude our work.
We have access to some of the most sensitive information in the possession of the United States government. Outstanding requests for additional materials that were the subject of subpoenas the Commission issued have been resolved. We are carrying out our mandate to provide a full and complete account of the events of September 11th, 2001 and to recommend ways to make the people of our country safer and more secure. We intend to write a strong and a creditable report.
Now I want to say just a word about today's hearing. Today and tomorrow staff will present facts uncovered in our investigation thus far into the events that transpired on September 11th, 2001. We believe that what we present today will provide new information about the attacks of September 11th. What we have learned certainly will impact our investigation and impact the final report that we prepare. Today we will hear from four panels of witnesses. Two will be proceeded by statements from the Commission staff, summarizing what we have learned to date about incidents, about which witnesses will testify.
To start, I would now like to recognize Dr. Philip Zelikow, the Commission's executive director, who will begin the first staff statement. He will be followed by Ms. Susan Ginsburg, who directs the part of the investigation that pertains to the subject of today's hearing.
MR. PHILIP D. ZELIKOW: Members of the Commission, working with you we have developed initial findings on how the individuals who carried out the 9/11 attacks entered the United States. We have also developed initial findings on terrorists who failed in their efforts to enter the United States. These findings lead us to some tentative judgments on the way the United States targets the travel of international terrorists. This staff statement represents the collective effort of several members of our staff. Susan Ginsburg, Thomas Eldridge and Janice Kephart-Roberts did most of the investigative work reflected in this statement.
The Commission was able to build upon a large and strong body of work carried out by many talented public servants at the Department of State, the Central Intelligence Agency, the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The American people should be proud of the many extraordinary professionals now serving them. To the extent we have criticisms, they are comments less on the talent available and more on how that talent was used.
As we know from the sizeable illegal traffic across our land borders, a terrorist could attempt to bypass legal procedures and enter the United States surreptitiously. None of the 9/11 attackers entered or tried to enter our country this way. So today we will focus on the hijackers exploitation of legal entry systems. We have handed out a list attached to the statement of the names of 9/11 attackers to help you follow our discussion.
To break down some of al Qaeda's travel problem, view it from their perspective. For most international travel, a terrorist has to have a passport. To visit some countries, terrorists of certain nationalities must obtain a document permitting them to visit, a visa. Finally, the terrorist must actually enter the country and keep from getting detained or deported by immigration or other law enforcement officials. Susan Ginsburg, senior counsel to the Commission will begin by examining how the hijackers navigated these stages.
MS. SUSAN GINSBURG: Beginning with passports. Four of the hijackers passports have survived in whole or in part. Two were recovered from the crash site of United Airlines flight 93 in Pennsylvania. These are the passports of Ziad Jarrah and Saeed al Ghamdi. One belonged to a hijacker on American Airlines flight 11. This is the passport of Satam al Suqami. A passerby picked it up and gave it to a NYPD detective shortly before the World Trade Center towers collapsed. A fourth passport was recovered from luggage that did not make it from a Portland flight to Boston on to the connecting flight which was American Airlines flight 11. This is the passport of Abdul Aziz al Omari.
In addition to these four, some digital copies of the hijackers passports were recovered in post-9/11 operations. Two of the passports that have survived, those of Satam al Suqami and Abdul Aziz al Omari, were clearly doctored. To avoid getting into classified detail, we will just state that these were manipulated in a fraudulent manner in ways that have been associated with al Qaeda.
Since the passports of 15 of the hijackers did not survive, we cannot make firm factual statements about their documents. But from what we know about al Qaeda passport practices and other information, we believe it is possible that six more of the hijackers presented passports that had some of these same clues to their association with al Qaeda. Other kinds of passport markings can be highly suspicious. To avoid getting into the classified details, we will just call these suspicious indicators.
Two of the hijackers, Khalid al Mihdhar and Salem al Hazmi presented passports that had such suspicious indicators. We know now that each of these two hijackers possessed at least two passports. All of their known passports had these suspicious indicators. We have evidence that three other hijackers, Nawaf al Hazmi, Ahmed al Ghamdi and Ahmed al Haznawi may have presented passports containing these suspicious indicators. But their passports did not survive the attacks so we cannot be sure.
Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals. There were significant security weaknesses in the Saudi government's issuance of Saudi passports in the period when the visas to the hijackers were issued. Two of the Saudi 9/11 hijackers may have obtained their passports legitimately or illegitimately with the help of a family member who worked in the passport office.
We do not yet know the answer to the question whether the knowledge of these particular clues existed in the intelligence community before 9/11. From the mid 1970s when terrorists began to launch attacks in the Middle East and Europe, intelligence and border authorities knew that terrorists used forged or altered travel documents. By the 1980s the U.S. government had developed a Red Book used to guide and train consular, immigration and customs officers throughout the world on spotting terrorists. It included photographs of altered or stolen passports and false travel stamps also known as cachets used by terrorists. The importance of training border officials on use of the Red Book is evident from a U.S. government film entitled "The Threat is Real." Here is a brief excerpt.
(Film shown.)
The U.S. government ceased publication of the Red Book by 1992, in part because it had fallen into the hands of terrorist groups. There continued to be a number of government efforts to provide information about generic forgery detection and document inspection techniques. Before 9/11 the FBI and CIA did know of some of the practices employed by al Qaeda. They knew this from training manuals recovered in the mid 1990s and from tracking and interrogations of al Qaeda operatives.
Some of this knowledge was revealed in individual criminal cases prosecuted in the United States in the 1990s. And yet between 1992 and September 11th, 2001 we have not found any signs that intelligence, law enforcement or border inspection services sought to acquire, develop or disseminate systematic information about al Qaeda's or other terrorist groups travel and passport practices. Thus, such information was not available to consular, immigration or customs officials who examined the hijackers passports before 9/11.
Now, turning to visas. The State Department is principally responsible for administering U.S. immigration laws outside of the United States. Consular officers, a branch of our diplomatic corps, issue several kinds of visas for visitors and for permanent immigrants. In 2000, these diplomats processed about 10 million applications for visitorsí visas at over 200 posts overseas. U.S. law allows nationals of certain countries to enter without visas on a reciprocal basis under the Visa Waiver Program. None of the 9/11 hijackers however, were nationals of a visa waiver country.
Before 9/11 visa applicants provided their passport, a photograph and a written application. A State Department employee checked the passport and application for any apparent questionable features. A consular officer could call the applicant in for an interview. The applicant's essential information went into a State Department database. The information was then checked against a large consular lookout database called CLASS which included a substantial watchlist of known and suspected terrorists, called TIPOFF.
Our immigration system before 9/11 focused primarily on keeping individuals intending to immigrate from improperly entering the United States. In the visa process, the most common form of fraud is to get a visa to visit the United States as a tourist and then stay to work and perhaps become a resident. Consular officers concentrated on interviewing visa applicants whom they suspected might leave and not return.
Saudi citizens rarely overstayed their visas or tried to work illegally in the United States. The same was true for citizens of the United Arab Emirates. So while consular officials in both countries always screened applicants in CLASS, including TIPOFF, they would not interview them unless there was something about the application that seemed problematic. Visa applicants from these countries frequently had their applications submitted by third party facilitators, like travel agencies.
In June 2001, the U.S. consular posts in Saudi Arabia instituted a third party processing program called Visa Express. It required applicants to apply through designated travel agencies instead of by mail or in person. The program was established in part to try to keep crowds of people from congregating outside the posts which was a security risk to the posts and to the crowds themselves. We have found no evidence that the Visa Express program had any effect on the interview or approval rate for Saudi applicants or that it reduced the scrutiny given to their applications. It actually lengthened the processing time.
With the exception of our consulates in Mexico, biometric information like a fingerprint was not routinely collected from visa applicants before 9/11. Terrorists therefore could easily exploit opportunities for fraud. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief tactical planner and coordinator of the 9/11 attacks, was indicted in 1996 by federal authorities in the southern district of New York for his role in earlier terrorist plots. Yet KSM, as he is known, obtained a visa to visit the United States on July 23rd, 2001, about six weeks before the 9/11 attacks.
Although he is not a Saudi citizen, and we do believe he was in Saudi Arabia at the time, he applied for a visa using a Saudi passport and an alias, Abdulrahman al Ghamdi. He had someone else submit his application, his Saudi passport and a photo through the Visa Express program. There is no evidence that he ever used this visa to enter the United States. Beginning in 1997, the 19 hijackers submitted 24 applications and received 23 visas. The pilots acquired most of theirs in the year 2000, the other hijackers with two exceptions obtained theirs between the fall of 2000 and June 2001.
Two of the visas were issued in Berlin and two were issued in the United Arab Emirates, the rest were issued in Saudi Arabia. One of the pilots, Hani Hanjour had an application denied in September 2000 for lack of adequate documentation. He then produced more evidence in support of his student visa application and it was approved. Except for Hanjour, all the hijackers sought tourist visas. Of these 24 applications, four were destroyed routinely along with other documents before their significance was known.
To our knowledge, State consular officers followed their standard operating procedures in every case. They performed a name check using their lookout database including the TIPOFF watchlist. At the time these people applied for visas, none of them, or at least none of the identities given in their passports, were in the database. We will say more about this in another staff statement later today.
All 20 of these applications were incomplete in some way, with a data field left blank or not answered fully. Such omissions were common, the consular officials focused on getting the biographical data needed for name checks. They generally did not think the omitted items were material to a decision about whether to issue the visa. Three of the 19 hijackers submitted applications that contained false statements, that could have been proven to be false at the time they applied. The applications of Hani Hanjour, Saeed al Ghamdi and Khalid Al Mihdhar stated that they had not previously applied for a U.S. visa, when in fact they had.
In Hanjour's case, the false statement was made in an earlier application for a visit in 1997, not his final visa application in 2000. Hanjour and Mihdhar also made false statements about whether they had previously traveled to the United States. Information about these prior applications was retrievable at the Jeddah post where each applied. These false statements may have been intentional to cover up the applicant's travel on old passports to suspect locations, like Afghanistan, for terrorist training.
On the other hand these statements may have been inadvertent. During this period, Saudi citizens often had their applications filled out and submitted by third parties. Most importantly, evidence of the prior visas or travel to the United States actually would have reduced concern that the applicants were intending to immigrate, so consular officers had no good reason to deny the visas or travel.
Al Mihdhar's case was uniquely problematical. He had been -- he had not been entered into the TIPOFF watchlist at the time of his second visa application in June 2001. In January 2000, the American consulate in Jeddah had been asked about Mihdhar's visa status in conjunction with an ongoing urgent terrorist intelligence investigation, and confirmed that this al Qaeda operative had a U.S. visa.
When Mihdhar applied again in June 2001, the check against the worldwide TIPOFF watchlist took place, but no system then in place included a notation of the prior visa status check. Neither the investigating agency, nor the post, had made the appropriate lookout entry. Thus, in effect, the post could not remember relevant suspicions a year and a half earlier about this same person who was traveling again with the same biographical information.
At least two of the hijackers were actually interviewed in person in connection with their visa applications. Hanjour was interviewed twice, Satam al Suqami was apparently interviewed in Riyadh. Another hijacker, Ahmed al Nami was apparently interviewed briefly, but just to clarify an entry on his application. The three consular officers involved have some memory of these interviews. All stated that the reasons for their interviews had nothing to do with terrorism. They saw nothing suspicious.
At least four individuals implicated in the 9/11 plot tried to get visas and failed: Ramzi Binalshibh, Zakariya Essabar, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Saeed al Ghamdi. This Saeed al Ghamdi is a different person from the Saeed al Ghamdi who actually became a hijacker. Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni, apparently intended to train as a pilot along with his Hamburg friends, Mohamed Atta, Marwan al Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah.
Binalshibh applied for a visa three times in Berlin and once in Yemen. He first applied in Berlin on the same day as Atta. He was interviewed twice and denied twice. Yemen is a much poorer country than Saudi Arabia, Both times consular officers determined he did not have strong ties to Germany and he might be intending to immigrate unlawfully to the United States. Binalshibh tried again in Berlin, this time for a student visa, to attend aviation school in Florida. He was again denied for lack of adequate documentation and failure to show sufficient ties to Germany.
Essabar, a Moroccan who may also have intended to be a pilot, tried to get a visa in Berlin at least once, and failed because he failed to demonstrate sufficient ties to Germany, such as a job or family there. Third country visa applicants in Berlin were held to significantly higher standards in terms of documentation and showing ties with their country of residence, than were Saudi and Emirate citizens applying from their own countries.
Ali Abdul Aziz Ali is the nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and was heavily involved in financial and logistical aspects of the 9/11 plot. He tried to get a U.S. visa in Dubai about two weeks before the attacks. His visa application states that he intended to enter the United States on September 4th, 2001 for one week. As a Pakistani visa applicant in a third country, he would have received greater scrutiny from U.S. officials from the start. In any event, it was deemed possible that he intended to immigrate, and accordingly he was denied a visa.
Saeed al Ghamdi also known as Jihad al Ghamdi, apparently intended to participate in the 9/11 attacks. He is a Saudi, and applied for a tourist visa in Jeddah on November 12, 2000, the same date as 9/11 hijacker, Ahmed al Haznawi. Haznawi was approved, but al Ghamdi was denied after an interview with the consular officer because the consular officer believed he was intending to immigrate.
We now turn to exit and -- entry and exit from the United States. With a visa, an individual can travel to United States port of entry. Upon arrival, the individual must seek admission into the United States from an inspector of what used to be called the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, an agency whose personnel now form part of the Department of Homeland Security. Property being brought into the United States is checked by inspectors of the U.S. Customs Service, whose personnel are now also part of DHS.
The 19 hijackers entered the United States a total of 33 times. They arrived through 10 different airports, although -- though more than half came in through Miami, JFK or Newark. A visitor with a tourist visa was usually admitted for a stay of six months. All but two of the hijackers were admitted for such stays. Hanjour had a student visa and was admitted for a stay of two years, and Suqami sought and was admitted for a stay of only 20 days.
The four pilots passed through INS and customs inspection a total of 17 times before 9/11. Hanjour came to the United States to attend school in three stints during the 1990s. His final arrival was in December 2000 through the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky Airport. The three other pilots, Atta, al Shehhi and Jarrah initially came in May and June 2000. They arrived for the last time between May and August 2001. All made a number of trips abroad during their extended stays in the United States.
Of the other 15, only Mihdhar entered the United States left and returned. Nawaf al Hazmi arrived in January 2000 with Mihdhar and stayed. Al Mihdhar left in June 2000 and returned to the United States on July 4th, 2001. Ten of the others came in pairs between April and June 2001. Three more arrived through Miami on May 28th. The INS inspector usually had about one to one and a half minutes to assess the traveler and make a decision on admissibility and length of stay. For all the entries, a primary U.S. INS inspector -- a primary INS inspector would work a lane of incoming travelers and check the people and their passports.
The inspector would try to assess each individuals demeanor. No one noted any anomalies in these passports, despite the fact that we now believe that at least two, and as many as eight showed evidence of fraudulent manipulation. The inspector would use the passport data, especially if it was machine readable, and Saudi passports were, to check various INS and customs databases. The databases would show the person's immigration history information as well as terrorist watchlist and criminal history information.
Of the five hijackers who entered the United States more than once, three of them violated immigration law. Ziad Jarrah entered in June 2000 on a tourist visa, and then promptly enrolled in flight school for six months. He never filed an application to change his immigration status from tourist to student. Had the INS known he was out of status, they could have denied him entry on any of the three subsequent occasions he departed and returned while he was a student.
Marwan al Shehhi came in through Newark in late May 2000, followed a week later by Mohamed Atta. Both were admitted as tourist and soon entered flight school in Florida. In September, they did file applications to change their status. Before 9/11, regulations allowed tourists to change their status at any time so they were in compliance, but both overstayed their periods of admission and completed flight school to obtain commercial pilot licenses. Atta and al Shehhi then left within a few days of one another and returned within a few days of one another in June 2001 -- January 2001, while their change in visa status from tourist to student was still pending.
Atta and al Shehhi did get some attention when both said they were coming back to finish flight school. Primary inspectors noticed with each that their story clashed with their attempt to reenter on tourist visas. The rules required them to get proper student visas while they had been overseas, since their earlier pending applications for a change of status were considered abandoned once they left the United States. Atta and Al-Shehhi were each referred by the primary inspectors to secondary inspections.
At secondary, more experienced inspectors could conduct longer interviews, check more databases, take fingerprints, examine personal property and call on other agencies for help. The inspectors involved have stated they do not remember these encounters. The reports indicate that both men repeated their story about still going to flight school and their pending applications for a change of status. The secondary inspectors admitted Atta and al Shehhi as tourists.
Flight 93 hijacker Saeed al Ghamdi was referred to secondary immigration inspection when he arrived in late June 2001. He had no address on his I-94 form. He spoke little English. He had a one-way ticket and about $500. The inspector wondered whether he was possibly intending to immigrate. Al Ghamdi convinced the inspector that he was a tourist and had enough money. Customs officers took a second look at two of the hijackers but then admitted them. On Marwan al Shehhi's first entry into the United States, a Customs officer referred him to secondary inspection, completed the inspection and released him.
In May 2001, Waleed al Shehri and Satam al Suqami departed Florida for the Bahamas, but were refused admission. On their way back to the United States, a Customs officer conducting a pre-clearance in the Bahamas, referred al Shehri to a secondary inspection. Customs then released al Shehri to return to the United States with Suqami. We do know of one success by immigration secondary inspection the affected the 9/11 plot. An al Qaeda operative, Mohamed al Kahtani arrived at Orlando Airport on August 4, 2001. Evidence strongly suggests that Mohamed Atta was waiting there to meet him. Kahtani encountered an experienced and dedicated inspector, Jose Melendez-Perez, we will hear his story later this morning.
During their stays in the United States, at least six of the 9/11 hijackers violated immigration laws. We have noted Jarrah's failure to adjust his status while he was in flight school and the violations by Atta and al Shehhi. Hani Hanjour came in on a student visa in December 2000, but then did not attend the English language school for which his visa was issue. Nawaf al Hazmi overstayed his term of admission by nine months. Suqami overstayed his term of admission by four months. None of these violations were detected or acted upon by INS inspectors or agents.
Two programs might have helped detect such violations. One dealt with violations of student status, the other dealt with overstays. National security concerns about foreign students are not new. By the late 1980s, the INS had established a student school system to track students, but the system did not work. After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing when it was discovered that a participant in the plot had been a student who had overstayed his visa, the Department of Justice asked INS to devise a better way to track students.
INS officials recommended a new student tracking system and a student ID card that used biometric identifiers. In 1996, Congress mandated a new system to be installed by 1998 without appropriating program funds. The INS scraped together $10 million and piloted a successful student tracking program in the Atlanta area in June 1997 which included a flight school. However, advocates of education interests argued that the program would be burdensome and costly.
Upon the order of senior INS management, the project manager was replaced. In 1998, INS indefinitely deferred testing of the biometric student ID card. The program stalled. Senators declared an interest in repealing the 1996 law and sought to obstruct further INS funding for it. Thus when Atta and al Shehhi lied when questioned about their student status on their re-entries in January 2001, and when Hanjour failed to show up for the school for which he was issued a visa in December 2000, a student tracking system was far from available to immigration inspectors or agents.
Congress required the attorney general to develop an entry-exit system in 1996. The system's purpose was to improve INS's ability to address illegal migration and overstays of all types of foreign visitors. By 1998 Congress had appropriated about $40 million to develop the system. Advocates for border communities, however, were concerned that an entry-exit system would slow down trade. INS officials decided to forgo the system at land borders and only to automate the entry process. The automation process was not successful. The result was that when hijackers Suqami and Nawaf al Hazmi overstayed their visas, the system Congress envisaged did not exist.
Moreover, when federal law enforcement authorities realized in late 2001 that Mihdhar had entered with Hazmi in January 2000 at Los Angeles, they could not reliably determine whether or not Hazmi was still in the United States along with Mihdhar.
MR. ZELIKOW: In conclusion, the director of the FBI testified that, quote, "Each of the hijackers came easily and lawfully from abroad." The director of Central Intelligence described 17 of the 19 hijackers as, quote, "Clean," close quote. We believe the information we have provided today gives the Commission the opportunity to reevaluate those statements. Based on our evaluation of the hijackers travel documents, the visa process, the entries into the United States and the compliance with immigration law while the attackers were here, we have a few observations.
Considered collectively, the 9/11 hijackers included among them known al Qaeda operatives who could have been watchlisted, presented passports manipulated in a fraudulent manner, presented passports with suspicious indicators of extremism, made detectable false statements on their visa applications, were pulled out of the travel stream and given greater scrutiny by border officials, made false statements to border officials to gain entry into the United States and violated immigration laws while inside the United States. These circumstances offered opportunities to intelligence and law enforcement officials but our government did not fully exploit al Qaeda's travel vulnerabilities. Why weren't they exploited?
We do not have all the answers. Certainly, neither the State Department's consular officers nor the INS's inspectors and agents were ever considered full partners in a national counterterrorism effort. This is exemplified by the Bureau of Consular Affairs statement that before 9/11 they were not informed by anyone in the State Department or elsewhere that Saudi citizens could pose security risks. Nor were the Consular Affairs Bureau or INS given the resources to perform an expanded mission.
Between 1998 and 2001 visa applications rose by nearly a third, an increase of 2.5 million per year. Trained staff did not keep pace with the volume increase. In Jeddah and Riyadh, for example, each consular officer had responsibility for processing on average about 30,000 applications per year and routinely interviewed about 200 people per day.
The INS before 9/11 had about 2,000 agents for interior enforcement. As long as the top enforcement priorities were removal of criminal aliens and prosecution of employers who hired illegal aliens, a major counterterrorism effort would not have been possible. This is not to pass judgment on immigration policy generally. What we can do is highlight those policy choices affected counterterrorism efforts before 9/11 and potentially affect them today. For our frontline border inspection services to have taken a substantially more proactive role in counterterrorism, their missions would have had to have been considered integral to our national security strategy and given commensurate resources.
Today the level of systematic effort by the intelligence community focused on terrorist travel is much greater. But terrorist travel intelligence is still seen as a niche effort, interesting for specialists but not central to counterterrorism. Nor have policy makers fully absorbed the information developed by terrorists' mobility specialists. Much remains to be done within the United States and internationally on travel and identity document security, penalties and enforcement policy with respect to document fraud and travel documents screening efforts at the borders.
If we have one conclusion from our work so far, it is that disrupting terrorists' mobility globally is at least as important as disrupting terrorist finance as an integral part of counterterrorism.
Thank you.
MR. KEAN: We will now hear from our first panel whose topic will be: "The Border Security System Prior to September 11th." Our first witness will be Ambassador Mary Ryan. Ambassador Ryan had a long and distinguished career in the United States Foreign Service beginning in 1966. Twice the recipient of the Presidential Distinguished Service Award, Ambassador Ryan served as assistant secretary of State for Consular Affairs from May 1993 until July 2002.
Our second witness will be Doris Meissner. Ms. Meissner served the United States government in immigration matters since the 1970s in several capacities in the Department of Justice. In October 1993, President Clinton appointed Ms. Meissner as INS commissioner. She served in that capacity until November 2000. Ms. Meissner is currently the senior associate at the Migration Policy Institute which she helped found.
At the hearing today and at all future public hearings, the Commission plans to put all witnesses under oath as authorized by section 605 of our statute of public laws number 107 through 3006. So, if I could ask the witnesses please to raise your right hand. Do you swear or affirm to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Thank you.
Ambassador Ryan.
MS. MARY A. RYAN: Mr. Chairman, members of the Commission, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to describe the role of the Bureau of Consular Affairs of the Department of the State in our nation's border security program. My remarks will cover the period from May 1993 until July 2002, the years I served as assistant secretary for Consular Affairs. I retired from the Department of State in late 2002 after 36 and-a-half years as a career foreign service officer, during which I served eight presidents: Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43.
In the limited time I have for this oral statement, I have three objectives: to give you an overview of the automated consular system, to correct a couple of misconceptions about how our processes work and I also would like to outline for you the budgetary constraints on the Department of State in the 1990s and how these constraints impacted the Bureau of Consular Affairs. I will describe the improvements made to the lookout systems that developed from microfiche in 1993 to the current global system that we have today.
All these systems are designed to assist officers in visa adjudication process, in evaluating whether or not to issue a visa to a foreign applicant. The systems are the Consular Look-out and Support System, or CLASS, TIPOFF, which is a system developed and managed in my time in CA by the Department of State's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Visas Viper was created in 1993 designed to obtain intelligence from our embassies and consulates abroad as well as other agencies operating abroad and the consolidated consular database which gives consular officers replicated visa records of all visas issued and refused.
These systems contain the names of terrorists, criminal aliens and others who should not be admitted to the United States. They give consular officers real-time, online name checking capability. However, if there is a single point that I want to leave with the Commission today, it is that any lookout system is only as good as the intelligence it contains and the Bureau of Consular Affairs had no intelligence on any of the 19 terrorists.
In the 1990s, consular workload increased dramatically. Non-immigrant visa applications rose from seven million in 1993 to 10 million in 2001. We were also processing over 600,000 immigrant visa applications. U.S. passport demand grew from 3.5 million in 1993 to seven million in the same timeframe. State Department budgets were inadequate for this workload. Because of the lack of funding, the department's senior management determined not to hire to attrition and to reduce promotion significantly into the Senior Foreign Service. These decisions had an immediate and very negative effect on consular operations.
The department had generally maintained an intake of junior Foreign Service officers of about 200 a year. In the mid-1990s, because of the budget shortfalls, junior officer intake numbered one year 130, another year 110 and another year 90. Because most of the entry level jobs in the Foreign Service are consular, consular work was heavily impacted. A huge hole was created at the bottom of the Service. At the same time, senior officers were being forced out of the Service because they failed to be promoted.
Thus simultaneously, there weren't enough junior consular officers and there was also a shortage of top level consular management. Entry level positions were filled through a variety of staffing mechanisms. But many large sections faced a dearth of experienced supervisors to train more junior staff. It was an extremely difficult period and one that lasted well into the 1990s.
I would now like to describe for you the various lookout systems that provide intelligence to consular officers in the field. In Fiscal Year 1994, Congress authorized the Department of State to charge a fee for machine readable visa applications and to keep that money. That was the first time in the department's history that we were allowed to keep a fee that we collected. It was this funding that permitted the Bureau of Consular Affairs to undertake the enhancements to our system.
CLASS is the consular lookout system. In 2001, CLASS contained 5.7 million records on aliens, most of which originated with the visa application process at our consulates and embassies abroad. A variety of federal agencies contribute names to this system. INS contributed over a million records including the names of deported aliens. DEA contribute over 300,000 and Customs some 20,000 from its serious drug violator files. Consular Affairs, in turn, provided other agencies through the Inter-Agency Border Inspection System over 500,000 lookout records.
TIPOFF is a border security and counterterrorism tool developed in 1987 and managed when I was in CA by the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in the Department of State. It utilizes sensitive intelligence and law enforcement information from the CIA, from the FBI and from NSA and overseas posts concerning known or suspected terrorists and criminals. TIPOFF's objective was to detect these individuals either as they apply for visas or as they attempt to pass through U.S., Canadian or Australian border entry posts. Data sharing was implemented with Canada in 1997 and with Australia in 2000.
The Bureau of Consular Affairs provided over $7 million to help TIPOFF between the years 1995 and 2001. The TIPOFF staff reviewed all intelligence reports, overseas post cables and other sources of information for the names and biographic data of known or suspected terrorists that were then entered into CLASS and INS and Customs' IBIS system, the Interagency Border and Inspection System.
In 2001, the CLASS database contained over 48,000 such records. Visas Viper is an integral part of TIPOFF. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies had been reluctant to share terrorist information at posts where it was developed. However, they professed themselves comfortable with providing this information through INR and through TIPOFF. Because the Bureau of Consular Affairs was advised that intelligence was flowing to the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, we believed that we were getting all such intelligence that they had to protect our country. As I noted earlier, even a state of the art system like ours is only as good as the intelligence it has in it, and we had no intelligence on these 19 terrorists.
Finally, the Consolidated Consular Database is a globalized database of visa records. All visa data collected abroad was being replicated to the CCD, and by May of 2001, we were able to make the Consolidated Consular Database available to all visa issuing posts. The photo and details of all visa applicants, once only available locally to the post where the application originated are now available in real time to all visa offices worldwide. Visas can be checked at any point in the process against all issued and refused visas worldwide, and consular management in Washington now has access to up to the minute information about visas around the world. By October 2001, INS was able to accept this information and provided it to all the ports of entry. All of these systems were designed to protect the United States from those who mean us harm.
I'd like to address now some of the distortions that appeared in the media after the attacks on our country about visa operations in Saudi Arabia. In order to meet existing and new demands for visa services, and in the absence of adequate financial and personnel resources, the Bureau of Consular Affairs developed programs aimed at getting the work done as efficiently and effectively as possible. One of these programs was interview by exception, and was designed to concentrate scarce resources on visa applicants that were problematic. We also developed a travel agency referral program whereby carefully vetted travel agents could submit applications for their clients, who generally would not be interviewed. Variations of this program existed before my time in the Bureau.
Validation studies were conducted to ensure that the clients did return from visits to the United States, and agencies that violated any of the rules, or whose clients overstayed in the United States, were dropped from the program. The United States Embassy in Saudi Arabia developed such a program in 2001, one of more than 30 posts with similar programs. It was incorrectly alleged that travel agents were deputize to make visa decisions when they obviously had a financial interest in seeing that the visas were issued to their clients. Nothing could be further from the truth.
We use such programs in countries with low refusal rates or where the applicants had to travel long distances from their homes to our embassies and consulates. In every case, the applications were checked through CLASS, and CLASS is designed so that the visa cannot be printed unless the system is checked, for any indication of a program and the consular office was free to require the applicant to appear for an interview and the policy was never to guarantee issuance.
MR. KEAN: Ambassador, if you could start to wrap up.
MS. RYAN: I'm sorry. We treated Saudis exactly the same as we treat all nationalities who need visas from us. About 40 percent of our international visitors enter the United States through the Visa Waiver Program, and those people are not checked by State Department consular officials. Everyone else is checked and checked carefully through CLASS, through the databases.
To summarize, with all of these systems we need intelligence information from the agencies designed to collect it. We had no such intelligence information on any of the 19 terrorists.
Thank you for your attention.
MR. KEAN: Ms. Meissner.
MS. DORIS MEISSNER: Good morning, Mr. Chairman, members of the Commission. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you. I hope to be able to help in any way that I possibly can with the important work that you're doing. As you noted in your introduction, I had served in the Nixon, Carter, Ford and Reagan administrations, so brought some experience to the position of commissioner when I entered on duty. I came back in the Clinton administration, recognizing some of the challenges that INS faces and committed to wide-ranging agency reform.
INS, as you know, has widely divergent areas of responsibility that had suffered from a history of neglect by administrations and Congresses of both parties. During my time at INS that began to change, as serious attention was devoted to building the capabilities the agency needed to carry out its mission effectively. At the same time, even under the best immigration controls, most of the September 11 terrorists would still be admitted to the United States today. That is because they had no criminal records, no known terrorist connections, and had not been identified by intelligence methods for special scrutiny.
The innovation al Qaeda introduced is clean operatives who can go through immigration controls undetected. Immigration measures are an important tool in the war against terrorism, but they are not effective by themselves in identifying terrorists of this new type. The immigration system can only set up gateways and tracking systems that exclude terrorists about whom the United States has some information. And it can enable authorities to find clean operatives already in the country if new information is provided by intelligence agencies. The immigration and the intelligence systems must work together for either to be effective.
To that end, the lead domestic security responses to terrorism should be strengthened intelligence and analysis, compatible information systems and information sharing, and vigorous law enforcement and investigations. Improved immigration controls and enforcement are needed, and they can support good anti-terrorism enforcement, but they are not enough by themselves.
Let me first give a brief overview of my tenure. With more than 10 million immigrants, the 1990s rank as one of the two decades of highest immigration in American history. These numbers represent millions of transactions daily, and those transactions were made by an agency that suffered from chronic overwork, underfunding and outdated practices. Early in 1993, three high profile immigration crises occurred in close succession. They were the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the multiple drownings when a Chinese smuggling ship washed ashore off Long Island, and shootings outside the CIA headquarters that killed government workers. All three involved people applying for political asylum in the United States.
Beginning with fixing this broken asylum system, border control became the highest priority for the new administration from the outset. During my tenure, the INS budget grew from approximately $1.6 billion to $4 billion. Personnel grew from about 18,000 to 32,000. With growth at that scale came enormous management demands. In addition, Congress enacted a series of sweeping new laws, beginning in 1996, that placed ambitious new mandates on INS. The 1996 act alone required writing more than 70 regulation sand training more than 20,000 staff. All generated unplanned, sizeable new workloads.
Other major efforts that we faced included successive humanitarian emergencies, such as Haitian and Cuban boatlifts, a tripling of detention capacity, dramatic increases in the removal of criminal aliens, and a citizenship backlog reduction program that foundered, requiring top to bottom reforms that demanded attention for several years. Overall, Congress supported the administration in providing increased resources for INS and promoting new strategies and technology. Still the public mood was one of growing anti-immigration sentiment. The administration had basic immigration policy disagreements with Congress, the relationship between INS and its congressional oversight committees was often contentious.
Against that backdrop, let me summarize a few items of most relevance to counterterrorism. First, border control. The broad goal that I set forth for INS was to prevent illegal immigration and facilitate legal immigration. Preventing illegal immigration incorporated all abuses of the immigration system. We began with asylum reform, but we then continued with border control as the agency's highest priority during my entire tenure. Our definition of the nation's borders was comprehensive: land borders with Mexico and Canada, our ports of entry and our consulates abroad. The transformations that were the most visible occurred along the southwest border. But INS's agenda always encompassed a comprehensive view of our borders. That meant that ports of entry, POEs, had to be a key element of border protection.
Among the most meaningful changes that we implemented in our port of entry operations are inspector staffing increases, improvements to the lookout system, data share efforts that Ambassador Ryan has described with Consular Affairs, facilitation programs that created more secure travel such as INSPASS, which was the first use of biometrics, SENTRY, which is electronic dedicated commuter lanes at the border, an advanced passenger information which is the sharing of manifests from airlines. We were able to get 80 percent of airline passengers having been checked before they arrived at our ports of entry in the United States. All of these things are elaborated in more detail in my testimony.
These improvements have been significant. They have strengthened border control and facilitation. But they all address issues of admitting people to the country. There has never been systematic departure controls from the United States. Without them, INS's knowledge of who and how many people have left as required and who did not has been incomplete. To meet this need, Congress called for an entry-exit system in its 1996 legislation. INS designed, tested and implemented the front end of such a system at certain airports but the major stumbling block for entry-exit has been the land borders, a problem that remains unresolved today.
Next to border control, technology was my highest priority. In 1993, less than 20 percent of INS employees had access to any automation. When I left, more than 95 percent had a terminal at their work station and relied on automated information to carry out their tasks. The technology projects beyond those that I have described that have a bearing on counterterrorism include the following.
IDENT, this is the system that was created in 1994 for the southwest border. It is the automated biometrics system that contains a photo and two index finger fingerprints. The technology now meets many immigration needs where identity must be verified for both enforcement and benefit granting purposes.
New green cards and laser visas. In 1998, INS began replacing with a new green card a technology that incorporated state-of-the-art security features, including biometrics. The technology was also used to produce laser visas which Consular Affairs issued to Mexican nationals. The replacement program consolidated a large number of documents that INS had historically issued and its purpose included reducing misuse and counterfeiting of documents.
Foreign student tracking. In response to FBI concerns, INS proposed a new student system in 1995. Congress mandated it in 1996. INS tested a pilot in 1997 and '98 and was on track for implementation in 2003 as the legislation required assuming that funding issues which were unresolved could get resolved. These programs and other technology infusions represented major improvements that INS badly needed to be effective. But by the late 1990s, appropriations did not keep pace. Numerous candidates for new systems development that could yield significant continuing improvement had to be kept on hold.
Nevertheless, it's not databases that catch terrorists. Had student tracking, for instance, been in place before 9/11, it's still highly unlikely that the terrorist with a student visa who did not appear for classes would have been arrested by INS. That's because it would take far greater numbers of officers than INS has ever had to actually locate and take custody of those who have overstayed or who have violated the terms of their visas.
Instead, what good information systems can do is cultivate a culture of compliance with our immigration requirements and they can provide very useful information that law enforcement needs when following investigative leads, including leads in counterterrorism investigations.
I see the yellow light is on, so let me say that there are other actions that are, of course, outlined in my testimony. Among them are serious refocusing of our interior enforcement which included focusing on criminal matters that would have included terrorism and restructuring of the INS which would have been a major effort which we presented to Congress in 1998 and which included upgrading and including and incorporating as law enforcement our activities at the ports of entry. That too is an issue that still remains undone.
Let me conclude by saying that by 2000 INS had become a larger, better, more professional agency especially in the areas of its most critical responsibilities. Many of the changes were transformational. All constituted critical building blocks for properly managing the immigration system in the years ahead. But it is my strong conviction that on the issues of counterterrorism, the agency's focus and record were where they should have been. We understood that our role was to have the systems and structures in place to prevent wrongdoers from getting into the country.
We did that by pressing hard for strong comprehensive border controls, modern information systems and interagency and international coordination. The measures we took and the systems we put into place would have identified the 9/11 terrorists, had INS known who to be looking for. Moreover, the major technology and systemic improvements in immigration control that have been made since 9/11 have been to fund and give higher priority to the initiatives and the technology that we developed.
Thank you very much.
MR. KEAN: Thank you, Ms. Meissner.
Our questioning today will be led by Commissioner Lehman.
MR. JOHN F. LEHMAN: Thank you. I'd like to begin with a question to Ambassador Ryan. Ambassador, as you know, historically, the consulates and the consular corps of the Department of State from the earliest days of the republic have been the outer defenses, the global listening posts and the first line of defense if you will. And the history certainly of the first up to the Second World War was an elite professional consulate professional corps. Yet, ironically, as our global involvement started to expand rapidly after the war, the consular corps and consulates began a long and steady decline, shrinking in numbers steadily, shrinking in prestige, gradually becoming a kind of an orphan within the Department of State.
And while I know during your tenure with things like the MRV program, you did some very significant things to attempt to do more with less or, as you said in one of your interviews, to do more with nothing. But I remember one of the first State Department issues when I began in the government back in the Nixon administration was the closing of a whole range of consulates and consolidating. And then when I was secretary of the Navy, I was deeply involved in a lot of skirmishing throughout my tenure because the Navy is particularly dependent on consulates in ports around the world and they were being closed at an even greater pace during the Reagan years.
So my question to you is, while, I know and your testimony and your statement outlines some important significant tactical efforts that you made to fight what was essentially a rearguard battle against personnel cuts and closings and so forth, could you give us an idea about what you might have done or what should have been done to take a larger view to look at the overall steady decline of which your particular tactical problems were a part. And what was done to try to reverse this and to reinvigorate the consular corps as a line of defense against terrorism and, importantly, to get the resources because next to the Coast Guard and INS, there probably is no other orphans who are underfunded historically as the cone that you headed in State?
Were your obstacles a lack of recognition of the importance? Were they budget cutting within the Department of State? Was it OMB or was it principally the congressional appropriation that kept this inexorable decline going even as the threat increased?
MS. RYAN: Mr. Secretary, we in the Bureau of Consular Affairs take our responsibility -- when I was there, took the responsibility as the outer ring of border security very, very seriously. We were faced with many of the things that you describe. In the mid-90s the budgets were completely inadequate, and this was before the MRV money, machine readable visa money, began to really come in. We just got the authorization in FY '94. We were charging at that time $20 per machine readable visa application, but we did not have that technology worldwide.
So we didn't have a lot of money and so we were devastated by the budget cuts. We were devastated by the lack of junior officer intake. I would say that the people that we used in lieu of junior officers, who were civil servants on excursion tours, they were specialists in other areas of the department, and we also hired Foreign Service spouses to do this work. They did a fantastic job. But the message that was sent by this to the rest of the Department of State was that consular work was really not that important, and it was the only cone -- if we call the specializations cones -- the only cone where this occurred. All other cones were staffed completely by Foreign Service officers.
So we had that problem. I would tell you, sir, that the high point of my career was in the Bureau of Consular Affairs, serving with people in my bureau, which is a primarily civil service bureau, and serving with consular officers worldwide, because I really believe they're the finest public servants in the government. They take their responsibilities very, very seriously. As you heard from the staff, in Jeddah, for example, they were interviewing 200 people a day. I interviewed 200 people a day 30 years ago when I was on Monterrey, Mexico. I can tell you how hard that work is and how difficult it is, and how worn down you are by the end of the day and how you always have people left over that you were not able to reach to interview, even though you were working as hard as you can. It's demoralizing work for consular officers.
But I would tell you, which I believe with all my heart, that they did it to the best of their ability, that they love this country, that they're patriots, that they chose government service not for the money and not for the prestige, because neither exists in the government any more, but they chose it because they love this country and they want to serve our country and the American people. And I -- despite the fact that these 19 people exploited our weaknesses, I believe that the consular officers around the world and the consular officers who issued to these people did their jobs to the best of their ability with the knowledge and the tools that they had at the time.
MR. LEHMAN: But my question really is where was the problem? Why were you the orphan? Was it prejudice within the department or an ignorance within the department. Was it over at OMB that all the cutting went on? Or was it in Congress? And did you -- I mean, the disparity between the needs and the mandates you had and the resources you were given is so gross that I would have expected you to be raising hell at each of these three levels. Did you?
MS. RYAN: I did, sir. We have a program in the Department of State called the Bureau Program Plan, which is a way that we try to match resources and money. We did very good Bureau Program Plans that didn't unfortunately get us the money that we needed. I believe that it was the Congress in the mid-1990s that cut us. If you remember, in the mid-1990s we had the furlough, because I believe that there were people in the Congress who did not know that the U.S. government did anything that the American people needed or wanted or couldn't get when we were closed.
MR. LEHMAN: And was this in foreign relations or in the appropriating process?
MS. RYAN: It's in the appropriations process.
MR. LEHMAN: And did the Intelligence Committees have a say?
MS. RYAN: I don't know, sir, because we didn't ever testify before the Intelligence Committee. I certainly didn't. We testified before the Appropriations Committee. I testified before the Immigrations Subcommittees of the House and Senate. We tried higher up than I in the chain of command in the State Department, tried to get us the money that we needed, tried to get the department the money that we needed. It simply wasn't there. Congress had higher priorities or priorities that they felt were more significant than funding the State Department.
MR. LEHMAN: Ms. Meissner, I'd like to ask you a similar question. You said you got the budget up to $4 billion plus by the time you left, but your successor has made a very good case, with various specifics, just matching minimal funds to the mandates that Congress has provided, and comes up with a figure 10 times that size. As a similar orphan in a larger department, how did you raise hell and at which levels were your biggest obstacle? Again, was it Congress, was it OMB and the White House, or was it within your own cabinet department?
MS. MEISSNER: Well, Mr. Secretary, I think our circumstances during the time that I was there were slightly different from a budget standpoint because we were growing very, very rapidly. The difficulty with INS, of course, was how fast could you grow? I mean, there were years that we were growing 15, 20 percent a year and we didn't have the infrastructure to handle the recruiting and the training and the deployment and the space. So the difficulty that we had with funding was not so much in the early years, support from either the Justice Department or the administration or the Congress.
There was a consensus that the INS needed to grow. The difficulty was that the Congress sometimes wanted the growth in different ways and in different programs than the Administration proposed. And in key areas such as technology, the funding really tapered at the time where we needed it to keep expanding, because our workforce had expanded so quickly that we were eating up the money just with operating the systems that we had, and we were not able to continue the new systems development that we needed in order to support the workforce.
Now, I've seen Commissioner Ziglar's testimony and I wish I had thought of doing an analysis like that. It is entirely possible that INS needs to be a $40 billion agency. I can't say independently anything about that. I think that the most important thing for the growth of an agency like INS is that it be steady and balanced and across the board.
Our problem was that the money and the Congress's desire for the money was focused almost entirely on the southwest border, whereas the case that we made and that the Justice Department and the administration supported us on was for an across the board distribution of resources, the areas that were not getting the money: technology, interior enforcement, and the borders comprehensively, which is not simply the southwest border but also our ports of entry and the kinds of data and technology efforts that needed to take place as between us in Customs and us in Consular Affairs, because this has to be a seamlessness. The duties are divided among agencies but the people and the responsibility for running the immigration system is cross-cutting.
MR. LEHMAN: In addition to being orphans, you both have in common the fact that your agencies have a dual and some would say almost incompatible mission. One is enforcement in each case, which is always unpleasant. People don't smile when you enforce. And service, helping travelers, facilitating air travel and so forth, helping citizens in need abroad. And the criticism of both of the cultures of the agencies you headed, and indeed to a certain extent of each of your tenures, has been that enforcement was seriously neglected or de-emphasized, while service and assistance and facilitation was greatly emphasized and that they money flowed to the soft helping rather than the hard enforcing, and specifically on really putting teeth into the denial of visas and looking at Visa Express, for instance, looking at things like Transit Without Visa that essentially the Consular Corps kind of thought this was not really their business or much of a threat. That has come through from a good deal of the interviewing we've done. Would you care to comment on that, Ambassador?
MS. RYAN: Mr. Secretary, I would agree -- I would disagree with that statement. I think that we did balance law enforcement and travel facilitation. We poured what money we had into improving our lookout systems with CLASS, with TIPOFF, with Visas Viper, all of which were designed to get us the information that we needed to identify people that we should keep out of the country. I don't think travel facilitation and law enforcement are opposites. I think they're all part of the whole scheme of things, as we were trying to do them.
Visa Express, which I agree -- I mean, I certainly wish that it had a different name. It's a very unfortunate name because it makes people think that we just issue visas --
MR. LEHMAN: Well, the problem is not that you issue visas, it's the fact that some terrorists actually used it from third countries to get visas that, had it not been in place, they would not have presumably been able to get.
MS. RYAN: No, I don't think that that's really correct, because prior to the time of Visa Express, most of the people in Saudi Arabia were not interviewed. What happened was that they would come -- this was pre-Visa Express. They would come in the mornings and they would make their application, they would drop off their passports with the application. They would come back in the afternoon to pick up their passports. Thus there was -- the waiting rooms in both Riyadh and Jeddah were insufficient for the numbers of people who were applying for visas. And so there was a great deal of milling around outside of the embassy, both in the morning and the afternoon, which was of great concern to the regional security officers at both posts because, you know, in 2001 we were having intelligence information that there were threats against our interests in Saudi Arabia, and in fact, in July of 2001 we put out a travel warning on the Arabian Peninsula because the threats that we were hearing were so great.
So I don't think that Visa Express changed anything except that a third party now received the passports and submitted them to us, and eliminated the crowds at the embassy and at the consulate. The systems -- the consular systems staff, which developed CLASS when we had the money through MRV fees, developed it so that you could not print a visa without checking the system. There was no override to that at all. You had to check the system so that a consular officer, no matter how busy or overworked or tired or whatever they were, there was no way that they could issue a visa without checking the name -- the lookout system, CLASS.
So I think that knowing certainly what we did in Consular Affairs, prior to September 11th, 2001, we did -- we took every step that we could to enforce the law and to be polite.
MR. LEHMAN: I would respectfully disagree with you. I don't think the record shows that at all. In some of the interviewing of some of your officials that were doing the actual consular functions in Saudi Arabia at the time, they said in so many words, gosh, if we only knew. If someone had told us that Saudi Arabia was a threat. We thought that they were our friends and all we were looking for were people who were trying to immigrate and we weren't looking for terrorists. Well, hello. I mean, did anybody read the newspapers? I mean, there were books.
The literature was rife with, you know, books like "Among the Believers" that catalogued this tremendous proselytizing of hatred and of fundamentalism around the world, sourced in Saudi Arabia, with many Saudi Arabian institutions and clerics the source of it. Yet everybody that we talked to said, "Oh, well, Saudi Arabia," as they issued visas, "Saudi Arabia is our friend so we don't look for terrorists here. Maybe somewhere else like Pakistan," which is the point I was making with one of the terrorists, who applied for a visa through -- thanks to the changes that were made with Visa Express, from a third country that never would have -- he would have gotten much different scrutiny, had he not done it into Saudi Arabia. So that is -- I don't think the record supports your view.
MS. RYAN: Before September 11th, and I think even after September 11th, until now, I think that this government, our government, does regard Saudi Arabia as an ally. In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, the deputy secretary says that we have every confidence in the crown prince of Saudi Arabia to carry out the reforms that he's trying to carry out. I mean, that doesn't sound like we regard Saudi Arabia as a state sponsor of terrorism. It was never so identified before September 11th, it was never so identified after September 11th.
MR. LEHMAN: But did you only have robots that just take what the official State Department characterization is? Don't they read the papers? Don't they know that so much of the funding, so much of the ideological motivation is sourced there? I mean, you know, in fact, after the fact, as you clearly demonstrate and affirm, we were told by consular officers that there was no change. They felt after the attack, oh, gosh, we really screwed up. Fifteen of them were -- we gave visas to 15 of these guys, there are going to be some big reforms coming, and nothing was ever done. Did you ever require -- did you call all hands in for an offsite? Did your require after-action reports? Did you do a lessons learned on how we're going to do things differently?
There was a reason why 15 of them were on Saudi passports, and that's because the way you were doing business in Saudi -- I mean, you can blame it on the official ostrich view of this Department of State perhaps, but these were people that are supposed to have personal judgment, education and ability to ask the right questions on their own, regardless of what the secretary of State happens to be saying.
MS. RYAN: We were dependent on the intelligence of law enforcement agencies to give us information on people that they believed we should keep out of the country. I don't believe that in a visa interview you would ever uncover a terrorist. We are dependent on the people whose job it is to develop that kind of information. We set up all the consular automated systems that we could, designed to get that information. And the system was state of the art, is state of the art. It contains a lot of names. These people were not known to intelligence or to law enforcement. At least 17 of the 19 were not known at all. And even if we interviewed everybody, I do not believe that we would have uncovered the fact that they were terrorists.
MR. LEHMAN: I think our staff disagrees with that.
But, Ms. Meissner, I don't want to let you off the hook here. You, for better or for worse, had a reputation in the -- during your tenure, and we got this from a number of your subordinates, that there was a clear culture of de-emphasizing enforcement. You deferred, you did not spend the money that was appropriated on the student tracking system, the biometrics for student tracking. There were stop work orders on it. It was never fully implemented. You personally -- you told us during your interviews that you personally opposed the entry-exit program that was put in and even supported repeal of it. And so why this bias in both of our frontline outer defenses against enforcement?
MS. MEISSNER: I have to disagree with that characterization. The enforcement responsibilities of the INS have always been its primary responsibilities. And I spent more time and effort on the enforcement portfolio at INS than any other single thing. I did and do believe that in order to enforce the immigration law properly and effectively, it has to be done in a balanced way. In other words, the enforcement of the law simply done along the southwest border by border patrol agents is not sufficient. The entire agency's responsibilities have to be done in an integrated and robust fashion.
The staff statement today is a good example in talking about foreign student visas and applications for visa changes. If INS's backlogs were up to date the way they should be, you wouldn't have to have the kinds of regulations that allow people to come on a visitor visa and then apply for a student visa because the application for student visa would be timely and the information would be available and the regulations that create the workarounds wouldn't be required. That kind of work is considered facilitation work but it has an extremely important impact on our ability to enforce the law properly.
Now, where student tracking is concerned and entry-exit are concerned, my difficulties with those programs were not difficulties of the basic concept. Student tracking in the first place did not have any funding allocated for it. The way that student tracking was to take place was through a fee which was described in the legislation which was to be collected from the foreign student by the schools themselves. There was a great deal of objection to that by the schools and by members of Congress. And ultimately, that legislative formula was changed so that the fee was collected in a different way.
Notwithstanding that there was no budget for foreign student tracking, we took funds, $10 million as the staff statement describes, from other automation projects in order to design a pilot and test a pilot along the timetable that was set out in the legislation. So what we did was work on parallel tracks. We moved ahead with the automation planning just as we were advocating and working with the Congress on a legislative change that would make the funding mechanism be a more sensible one and one that all the stakeholders could live with.
Similarly, on entry-exit. On entry-exit, the timetable that was set up in the legislation was absolutely undoable. They were calling for, in the 1996 law, an entry-exit program to be in place by 1998. That could not happen. As I explained, we have never had departure controls from this country. We went ahead and designed what the front end of a system for entry-exit could be, again working on a parallel track with the Congress to try to change the timetable in the legislation so that there would be the opportunity to design the kind of a system that could actually work.
In fact, on entry-exit, we -- INS itself very early in my tenure made a very big effort to publish research that showed that 40 percent of the people in the United States who were here in an illegal status were here, not because they had come improperly across the southwest border, but because they had overstayed a visa and that the effort to deal with illegal migration to the United States had to be one that dealt with ports of entry and with overstays just as it dealt with southwest border circumstances.
But an entry-exit system is a massive system to put into place and it continues to be a problem even with the high priority that is now being given to it since September 11 because we don't have the highway systems, we don't have the set-ups in our airports to physically handle people checking out when they leave the country. So I think that there -- I don't doubt that people that were in the INS have told you what they did and mistook -- you know, were mistaken or misunderstood what it is that I was trying to do. But what it is that I was trying to do was put a balanced system into place so that the parts actually could work effectively on both the facilitation and the enforcement side because they are mutually supporting. They are not contradictory.
MR. LEHMAN: Thank you. I have one final question and, if you could keep your answers brief, we're running a little over time. There was a famous quote, when the Berlin Wall fell, from an East German worker that said, "You know, our system was based on the state pretending to pay us and we pretended to work." It's my belief that what has been revealed in our investigations is that Congress and a succession of administrations pretended to want enforcement of immigration law and your two agencies pretended to try to enforce it.
The gap between the stated purpose of immigration law and the execution is so vast that it makes a farce of the whole concept of rule of law. And so, for instance, today there's still -- before 9/11 there were only 2,000 interior enforcers in the immigration function. As you rightly complain, how can you go check students overstaying their visas with only 2,000 people. Today, there is still only 2,000 people. So enforcement, not everybody really wants illegals put under a rule of law and that's a huge hypocrisy.
So, with that preamble, could you each of you give us, in 25 words or less, your recommendation on how to fix this lamentable situation?
MS. RYAN: I would say, Mr. Secretary, there was no pretence on the part of consular officers, either in Washington or abroad, on enforcing our immigration laws. It's up to the Administration and to the American people to decide what kind of immigration laws they want. I think that this country cries out for immigration reform but I can assure you that consular officers take their responsibilities to enforce the law very, very seriously. They do the best they can with the tools they have and I think it's an unfair characterization to say that they were pretending to enforce the law.
MS. MEISSNER: I would say that, as a country, we are ambivalent and always have been ambivalent about what we want out of our immigration system and out of our immigration policy. Immigration is an area that has -- the pendulum has swung widely back and forth over history as between tough enforcement, exclusion, discriminatory policies and very permissive, lax approaches when it serves our interest. And that remains unsettled. That's very different, however, from being in the agency and having a set of specific responsibilities and people whose work you direct on a day-to-day basis. And where that is concerned, I certainly must say that during my tenure we made every possible effort to rationalize the system and the political ambivalence that continues today.
MR. LEHMAN: Thank you very much.
MR. KEAN: Senator Gorton.
MR. SLADE GORTON: Ms. Meissner, you have, I think, quite eloquently outlined dramatic changes in INS and, in contrast with Ms. Ryan, at least increasing resources with which to carry out its functions. But, looking at it today, would you tell me your one or perhaps two highest priorities for additional change with an emphasis on what those changes would do to better control or add a greater ability to control terrorism, which is the function of this commission? Let's say, what two changes that are realistically possible would provide the greatest degree of improvement in meeting that mandate?
MS. MEISSNER: Absolutely and thank you. The two changes that I believe are the most critical are, number one, integrated information databases that talk to each other. You now have immigration functions divided up, fragmented within the Department of Homeland Security and you do not have an immigration history for every person that comes to the United States or is in the United States. Those databases do not talk to each other. So not only do you need to continue to invest in the kind of technology that gives you a good foreign student tracking system and exit-entry and so forth, but those that somebody, an immigration officer or a consular officer must be able to click into a computer and on a particular person know everything, be able to get to everything that the U.S. government knows about that individual. That is not the case right now. That should have the absolute highest order of importance. It's the connective tissue that is missing now with the way that the restructuring of the immigration function has taken place.
The second thing is the kind of interagency coordination between the frontline agencies and the intelligence community that was suggested in the staff statement. The frontline agencies are Consular Affairs, the new immigration bureaus, the Customs officers, the Department of Agriculture, those entities that are in what we used to call -- we're in retail -- we've got to open the store every day. And the upstairs agencies, the back room agencies, the FBI, the CIA, the intelligence community, there has to be the trust and the information sharing that allows those frontline officers to do their job in identifying wrongdoers.
MR. GORTON: So, if I can summarize, you're saying we need the technology to do the job and then we need people who will actually do it.
MS. MEISSNER: Well -- and the relationships.
MR. GORTON: Between agencies. Ms. Ryan, you have retired from an agency which was losing resources during much of your time of responsibility. But, nonetheless, within the ambit of what the Department of State does, what would be your two highest priorities?
MS. RYAN: I share Commissioner Meissner's concern about the integration of databases. In, I think it was October of 2001, there was created what was called the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force which was supposed to merge all the databases in the government so that everyone had the same information on everyone who was in the various databases. I detailed an officer from the Visa Office to that task force to ensure that the information that we got was information that we could use. I mean, we can't just use a name. We have to have at least a country of birth and an approximation of date of birth. Nothing ever happened with that and it disappeared. It was disbanded.
Now there's a new terrorist screening center, something like that. I'm not current on all of this because I am no longer in the government. But that is the highest priority. I hope that this commission can break down the stovepipes that exist between agencies of this government, one agency having some information and another agency having some information and perhaps another agency having no information. There has to be integration of these databases so that we all know who the people are that we want to keep out of this country.
The other thing that I think is desperately needed is -- I would argue for increased consular staffing at posts abroad. Interviewing 200 people a day, as we did 30 years ago, we should have advanced beyond that. We should not be asking people to work like that. And then the third thing, even though you didn't ask for a third thing, is that the administration, the Congress, the people of this country have to decide what they want in terms of immigration. Commissioner Meissner put it very correctly. We are very ambivalent, as a nation, about immigration. I don't think we can afford to be ambivalent anymore. I think we have to decide what we want and then give the people who are charged with carrying out that responsibility the tools that they need to do their jobs.
MR. GORTON: I want to thank both of you for those cogent answers and thank you, Mr. Chairman.
MR. KEAN: Commissioner Ben-Veniste.
MR. RICHARD BEN-VENISTE: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My first question is directed to Ms. Ryan. First, I want to express my personal gratitude for your long service to the interests of this country and recognize the difficulties under which you operated during the period most at issue here. However, following up on Secretary Lehman's question and looking at the fact that the terrorists were able to exploit a vulnerability that they perceived in the system particularly with respect to Saudi passports and visas, I see something of a disconnect in the situation as you described it.
Here, in the summer of '01 and somewhat before, you have recognized that a crowd control at the embassy or at the consular office, officers in Saudi Arabia posed a problem because of the potential harm to individuals from those who meant the United States and its interests harm. If we take that just one step further, would you agree that the individuals in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia who might pose such a threat to cause harm to individuals at or about the embassy would be Saudis rather than foreigners? Would you accept that?
MS. RYAN: That the people who mean us harm would be more likely to be Saudis than --
MR. BEN-VENISTE: Yes. The people who you are talking about who posed a threat to the numbers of individuals who were seeking visas in Saudi Arabia must have been largely Saudis.
MS. RYAN: Yes, they were probably largely Saudis although there were a lot of third country nationals in Saudi Arabia who also applied for visas.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: And I guess, on the issue of the disconnect, that Secretary Lehman was talking about, once you acknowledge that there is certainly a number of Saudis who might be in a position to do us harm through violence against individuals at or near our consular offices, it doesn't take a whole lot to go to the next step, even without specific information from our intelligence agencies, that such individuals who mean us harm might in fact wish to come to the United States. So the notion, would you not agree, of Saudis not posing a particular threat being taken out of that threat matrix really doesn't stand up even on the basis of cursory information that you had available.
MS. RYAN: I'm not sure I'm following you, I'm sorry.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: Saudis mean us harm in Saudi Arabia because they might blow up the embassy or harm individuals in the vicinity of the embassy but the Saudis who might seek entrance to the United States were not considered a problem.
MS. RYAN: Of course, they were considered a problem. They required visas. They were checked through our consular lookout systems. You know, in the absence of information that someone is a threat to the nation, we are dependent on the information that we have in our system developed by intelligence and law enforcement agencies about people who mean us harm. I don't imagine that -- I don't know but I can't imagine that you would think that we could on the basis of the fact that some people might mean us harm not issue visas to the entire nationality.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: I'm not suggesting that but that then begs the question of the usefulness of individual face-to-face interviews during periods of increased threat where there is some suggestion of potential wrongdoers. And I think we'll hear next from a witness who makes that point very explicitly. Let me turn to another issue which hasn't, I think, been brought up to this point and that is the issue of the use of interpreters by the consular service in the visa application process.
It has come to our attention from individuals who have had considerable experience that there is a problem, and perhaps a widespread problem, with respect to corrupt interpreters who are brought into the process because consular officers often in certain countries do not have language facility in the native language of that country. And therefore the consular office must rely upon an interpreter to assist in the visa application process and the interview process. Had it come to your attention as of the time that you left the service that this was an issue, and what, if anything, had been done during your tenure to try to correct it?
MS. RYAN: This all goes back to the fact that we don't have enough staff and enough money in the State Department. We recognize that it's a tremendous advantage if officers, consular and otherwise speak the language of the country and don't have to depend on interpreters. But we don't have enough people to be able to put officers into language training, long-term language training, which Arabic would be, or Chinese or Russian or Korean or Japanese, because we've never had a person in motion -- we've never had enough people to do that. And so that's always a concern, that's always a worry that an interpreter might not be interpreting accurately. It's one of the handicaps that the State Department operates under.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: Could I interrupt you for just a moment and ask you whether rather in the theoretical you did not have some practical and substantial information that in various places in the world for a relatively small amount of money an interpreter could be bribed to provide the answers that the consular officer needed to hear in order to approve a visa.
MS. RYAN: I've never heard that about Saudi Arabia.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: I'm not limiting my question to Saudi Arabia. At many places throughout the world you had not heard of such a problem?
MS. RYAN: If I remember correctly, there was a problem once at one post that I knew of at the time where the interpreter was not interpreting accurately, and a Foreign Service national, one of the locally engaged staff, heard that and advised the officer. But that it's a widespread problem, no, I'm not aware of that. I was not aware of that.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: Thank you.
MR. KEAN: Commissioner Gorelick.
MS. JAMIE S. GORELICK: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Ambassador Ryan, after 9/11 did you order an after-action report to determine how and in what circumstances the hijackers got into this country?
MS. RYAN: I sent a retired senior Foreign Service officer to Saudi Arabia to look at the operations of the consular sections in both Riyadh and Jeddah, and he advised me that they had followed all the procedures that we had in place at the time. In other words, no one didn't follow the way visas should be adjudicated, that they adjudicated the visas correctly, that we lacked information.
MS. GORELICK: Did he make a written report to you?
MS. RYAN: Yes, I believe he did. I think he made a written report, which should be available to the Commission.
MS. GORELICK: Thank you. The biggest inconsistency on the face of it between the staff statement and your view of the efficacy of interviews is what I understand you to be saying, is if these names had been in the system, we would have found these people and prevented them from getting visas, because the name would have been in the system. And I take your point. But then the question is would you have found out anything had you interviewed them? Now, I thought you said that you did not think an interview of the sort that is contemplated in the visa process would determine or provoke a question whether someone was a terrorist. Was that your testimony?
MS. RYAN: Yes. In the type of visa interview that we were doing when I was in the Bureau of Consular Affairs, it's not a law enforcement kind of interview, it's just an interview -- what we were basically trying to get at was whether the person was likely to remain in the country, in our country, illegally after his proposed visit to the United States. If you're doing 200 interviews a day, you can't spend a lot of time in an interview. And what you ask is where are they going to go and whom do they know and, you know, why they want to go.
We always interviewed first-time students because we wanted to ensure that their English was sufficient to be able to undertake the course of study that they were planning to take and that their previous study in their own country had been of the type of study that would lead to higher education in the United States. It was a very cursory interview. There's also a body of thinking that the interpersonal interaction that you have with the applicant makes it harder to refuse the applicant because you get to know him or her a little bit by your questioning. So I think it will be very instructive now that so many more people are being interviewed since September 11th, once we have enough information about these interviews to see whether the interview alone will be able to detect a terrorist.
MS. GORELICK: But certainly there is a statutory obligation to assess the visa applicant not just for whether they intend to violate in terms of their visa and stay here illegally or inappropriately but also to keep out terrorists. Now, the staff points out pieces of information which either were omitted from the visa application or which presented inconsistencies with data that were not on the face of the visa application but which were accessible somewhere in the U.S. government. And my question to you is whether, had the interviewers, the consular officers, who had these materials in front of them, had had access to that additional information, whether in that circumstance your view is that the interviews could not have produced a negative response to the visa application? Because you seem to be saying -- and I understand why you might be saying it, but you seem to be saying that really unless the name is in the computer, the interview element of our scrutiny is really not meaningful, and I'm trying to probe that.
MS. RYAN: I think that it's unlikely that we would detect a terrorist in an interview, in a straightforward interview. There is a question on the visa application form which asks the applicant whether he or she belongs to a terrorist organization, and they always say no. You know, if they understand the question they always say no. So, I mean, asking that kind of a question in an interview, I mean, I think you would most likely get the answer, no, I'm not a terrorist. I mean, I don't see how in the interview process, as it was pre-9/11/2001, we would be able to have detected these terrorists. I will never know. None of us will ever know.
MS. GORELICK: Well, let me just ask one follow-up question then. Can you imagine an interview process consistent with the nature of the processing that you've got to do with however many large numbers of people a consular officer has to interview, can you imagine an interview process which would have efficacy in preventing terrorists from entering the country?
MS. RYAN: It would have to be a completely different interview process from the one that was before September 11th. It would have to be a much lengthier interview process. It's conceivable that in a much more law enforcement kind of interview you would detect a terrorist, but that's something that, you know, is for the administration and the Congress and the people to decide, whether that's the kind of interviewing that we want. It's a risk management issue and that's up to people who make our laws to decide that.
MS. GORELICK: Thank you.
MR. KEAN: Commissioner Roemer.
MR. TIMOTHY J. ROEMER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I want to start with just a couple questions to Mary Ryan, and appreciate your attendance here at our hearing this morning. Certainly it seems that there are a couple of consistent themes from the post-9/11 analysis of the attacks on our country on September the 11th, 2001 that both the Joint Inquiry of Congress and the 9/11 Commission today have concluded that the Consular Affairs offices and our INS border were not integral parts of the strategy and included in the key meetings to fight the war on terrorism prior to 9/11. Would you agree with that?
MS. RYAN: No, sir. I think we always regarded ourselves as the outer ring of border security, with all that that means. Our responsibility was to protect the country, as well as to facilitate travel.
MR. ROEMER: Well, that was not the question, Ms. Ryan. The question was, and due to your testimony here and the interviews that you conducted with our staff, you talk about -- in the interview on 9/29/03, you say that you had no direct contact with anyone in the FBI prior to 9/11.
MS. RYAN: That's right.
MR. ROEMER: Now, that seems to me that you were not integrally part of a national security apparatus to catch and detain terrorists that may be coming into our country, especially as our system, as you've noted in your testimony, has resource problems, has problems with contacts with the FBI, has problems communicating or not communicating through stovepipes, yet al Qaeda makes travel one of their highest priorities, maybe even higher than financing. So there doesn't seem to me to be the commensurate allocation of emphasis between our government adjusting to what al Qaeda is just about to do or planning to do throughout the 1990s and our response. Now, you say that we had no knowledge that any of the 19 terrorists were -- we had information on them. How do we expect to have information on them if you have no contact with the FBI?
MS. RYAN: We were dependent on the FBI's providing information to us through TIPOFF and through Visas Viper if they had any information.
MR. ROEMER: And how would you characterize their ability to provide that information to the TIPOFF program prior to 9/11?
MS. RYAN: I thought prior to 9/11 that they had the capability and that they knew about people who were -- who meant us harm. I learned after September 11th that they didn't have information and that they didn't know about people who mean us harm.
MR. ROEMER: Would it surprise you, Ms. Ryan, to learn that there were more people in 2001 recommended for the TIPOFF list from the press and from a foreign government than from the FBI?
MS. RYAN: Yes, it would surprise me.
MR. ROEMER: It would surprise you. Would it surprise you, according to our staff, that the FBI did not have a written policy on the TIPOFF program for recommending people for that list prior to 9/11?
MS. RYAN: When we set up the Visas Viper program in 1993, we wanted the information that was developed at post to be given to us at post for inclusion in our system. And both the intelligence and law enforcement agencies were very reluctant to give us the information at post because consular sections are unclassified environments, and they were concerned about protection of sources and methods. They said that they were comfortable with providing the information through the intelligence and research bureau, which would then put it into TIPOFF. I believed them.
MR. ROEMER: Okay. Well, you believed them, but in an interview with the 9/11 Commission staff, you say that you were outraged when you learned that government agencies knew things, that two hijackers had this information and it was never passed onto the TIPOFF program until they already had their visas. Now, outraged seems to me not gravely disappointed, not very upset, outraged seems to me that you're indicating that mistakes were made, that terrible communication failures were part of this.
MS. RYAN: Yes, sir. That's correct.
MR. ROEMER: And please elaborate. We need to fix this problem as well. And from your further interviews with the 9/11 --
MS. RYAN: I'm not sure how --
MR. ROEMER: Excuse me. With your further interviews with the 9/11 Commission staff, you go on to say that you don't think that this problem has been solved in subsequent meetings post-9/11 with the FBI.
MS. RYAN: Shortly after September 11th, my senior staff and I met with the senior staff and the DCI, Mr. Tenet, and at that meeting we were told that the CIA had passed information on two of the terrorists to the FBI in January of 2000.
MR. ROEMER: Ms. Ryan, is this the meeting with George Tenet, Cofer Black, George Lannon, Ken Duncan, Wayne Griffith and others?
MS. RYAN: Yes, sir.
MR. ROEMER: Okay. Thank you.
MS. RYAN: It was at that meeting that we learned that there was information in the hands of parts of our government on two of the terrorists that was never given to the Bureau of Consular Affairs, never given to INR, to the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, for inclusion into TIPOFF. So, yes, I was outraged. I was furious. I'm still angry about it.
MR. ROEMER: And do you think that this fury and this outrage that you express now -- are we going to feel the same way if something else happens, if this problem hasn't been solved. "After the meeting, however, Ryan said Consular Affairs got more information from the CIA but nothing more from the FBI." That's your interview.
MS. RYAN: We got --
MR. ROEMER: This is post-9/11.
MS. RYAN: We got tremendous increase in information from the CIA. The remedy that we sought to get the information from the FBI was from the Congress. And included in the PATRIOT Act was the requirement that the FBI give us all of their NCIC-3 information. So we got an additional eight million records of criminal aliens, terrorists, that the FBI had that they had refused to give us without the legislation because we were not a law enforcement agency.
MR. ROEMER: So finally, Ms. Ryan, how would you categorize the pre-9/11 relationship and exchange of information that you had with the FBI?
MS. RYAN: It was not sufficient.
MR. ROEMER: Enough to make you furious and outraged after 9/11?
MS. RYAN: Yes, sir.
MR. ROEMER: And how would you categorize the communication that you had with the CIA pre-9/11?
MS. RYAN: I was --
MR. ROEMER: Outrage? Fury?
MS. RYAN: I said at one of the hearings in 2001 that I thought 9/11 was the result of either a colossal intelligence failure or failure to share information. I think now that it was both.
MR. ROEMER: So we don't have a stovepipe problem here, we have a steel wall problem here prior to 9/11?
MS. RYAN: We certainly had problems getting information that we thought we had, that we believed we had, that we needed to protect the country. Now, there were 17 others that didn't come to anybody's attention, but two were known about and those two we also should have known about.
MR. ROEMER: Finally, so my colleagues can ask some questions, you're also quoted in one of your interviews as saying, quote, you "have no recollection of having learned about Tenet's" -- that's the director of the CIA -- "declaration of war in al Qaeda in 1998."
MS. RYAN: No, that's not correct. I knew --
MR. ROEMER: It's not right.
MS. RYAN: -- about the war on al Qaeda. Our embassies were blown up in 1998. I lost colleagues and friends in Nairobi.
MR. ROEMER: That wasn't my question. My question was not the war on al Qaeda, it was the director of the CIA's declaration of war on al Qaeda. Were you aware of his memo that was circulated at the CIA on the war, or did you learn of that --
MS. RYAN: It was in the --
MR. ROEMER: -- through the newspapers and through the --
MS. RYAN: It was in the media that he had declared war on al Qaeda.
MR. ROEMER: So you read about the declaration in the media, not through something that was circulated directly from Langley or from a government document?
MS. RYAN: Not that I remember. Internally government, no. Not that I remember.
MR. ROEMER: Thank you again, Ms. Ryan.
MS. RYAN: Thank you, sir.
MR. KEAN: Commissioner Fielding.
MR. FRED F. FIELDING: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I would like to ask both of you some questions about the student tracking before we get off the subject. But following up on what Commissioner Roemer asked you, Ambassador Ryan, historically, probably from the first days of our republic, the visa process has been part of the Department of State and it's had a long history. And you've had a great deal of experience about it. You know, one of the things that we're chartered to do is try to figure out not only what mistakes were made but how to correct the mistakes of the past. Let me ask you what seems like a pretty basic question. Should the visa processing still remain in the Department of State?
MS. RYAN: Yes, sir. I think so. I'm very biased about the offices in the State Department. I think that the people who work in the State Department are the finest public servants in the U.S. government today, and so I don't think that moving visas to another agency is the answer. I think strengthening the information and the intelligence that visa officers have, giving them more tools, giving them more staff, more money, those are all requirements. But I would hate to see, you know, moving people around just to do something, to make the American people think that they're safer. I don't believe that they would be any safer by moving it to another agency.
MR. FIELDING: Of course, I'm not questioning the individuals themselves at this juncture. I'm just questioning the functionality of this and the duplicative nature of some of the problems that we run into all the time. And so if -- it's not to move it away from State and it's not to move it away from certain people that are doing it. What I was really asking is, is it better served and better integrated into our system by moving it elsewhere?
MS. RYAN: I don't think so, sir, no.
MR. FIELDING: Thank you. Let me go to my original quick line of questioning on student tracking. Ms. Meissner, you testified that, even if the student tracking system had been in place pre-9/11, I understand your testimony is that it's very unlikely that there would be any arrest or that anybody would have picked up someone who had overstayed or had not even attended classes because there is a shortage of staff. Am I correct in understanding?
MS. MEISSNER: That's correct.
MR. FIELDING: If there are not enough agents available, would you have any suggestions to provide to us as to how we could involve the education community into assisting the government in this regard, either by carrot or stick, by sanction if they don't or by incentive to do so? Anything in that regard?
MS. MEISSNER: I think that the education community since September 11th does understand that it's an integral part of this element of immigration control. The problem with people who fall out of status or don't show up for classes, I think, is one where you have to essentially do triage in terms of -- or think of it that way in terms of your actual ability to arrest those people. My own sense is that, if we had a better idea of who, not by names, but of a profile of the types of individuals among the foreign student population that might be of highest concern for national security purposes that you could start there.
MR. FIELDING: If I may interrupt you for a moment, I mean, triage presumes that you can't do everything at once so therefore -- but, of course, we're letting these people in so we control the numbers of this. But I guess what I'm really looking at is you don't need a profile if somebody doesn't show up for class.
MS. MEISSNER: But, let's say, you have about 500,000 foreign students. So class starts presumably some time during the first two weeks in September. Even if you know how many people haven't turned up in those two weeks, even if it's one half of one percent, it's -- let me do the math -- it's thousands of people. So then the question is, even if you had many more thousands of investigators to check that out, where would you go first? That's what I mean by triage.
You, it seems to me, have to do one of two things. You either have to have a very well developed random check kind of a program where whoever doesn't turn up for class, phalanxes of people go out and have the information in the data system of their addresses and find them. If they didn't turn up for class, their address in that data system may very well not be current. So right there, you have another set of things that have to happen.
Or you have a good idea of who the most likely problem students are. They're either people that are studying certain very sensitive subjects. They are people that are in trade schools rather than in graduate schools. They are people who come from a particular country or from a particular set of countries, are studying certain fields and, you know, have prior visa problems. Something that gives you, that narrows the field.
But I would have to tell you that I don't think that the thinking has advanced any further than that on how you would do this even, as I say, if you did have the thousands of investigators because you've got to get to the point where you have some sense of what the threat is. That kind of communication and that kind of analysis has not taken place in the past and my understanding is that it's not taking place today.
MR. FIELDING: Not to beat this into the ground but what role does the university play? What role does the school play? There's a lot of fraud out there and we know it.
MS. MEISSNER: I am assuming that the university is doing its job of reporting the data because the only way that you know who didn't turn up for class is that the university told you who didn't turn up for class through the data system. Now, you know, the suggestion -- the implication of your question is that you also have to have an ongoing monitoring effort of the universities because they are not a one-size-fits-all. Most of them are very conscientious, some of them are not and that monitoring will have be a parallel effort.
MR. FIELDING: That's for sure. That's something we will have to address.
Ambassador Ryan, on the same subject, in your interview, you were aware of this issue and discussed this issue with our staff but you also noted that there had been a lot of opposition from the education community to the imposition of this tracking system in years past. Is that correct?
MS. RYAN: Yes, sir. That was pre-9/11 of course.
MR. FIELDING: I understand that. But could you give us some idea of that history, please?
MS. RYAN: Well, as I remember it, when we were talking, we at the INS, about how to set up what is now called SEVIS, the student tracking system, the universities were -- at least the universities that made their opinions or positions known -- were very opposed to it. They were concerned about issues of academic freedom. They were concerned about the fact that they would be reporting on students to the government. They were also concerned about the fact that there would be a fee involved that the student would have to pay and that we were expecting the universities to collect that fee and they didn't want to do that. Those were what I remember. But again, this was before September 11th.
MR. FIELDING: Is that problem solved now? Either of you, I'd be curious for your answers.
MS. RYAN: I mean, there may still be philosophical objections but it's -- you know, the door is closed.
MR. FIELDING: It's no longer as influential?
MS. RYAN: It's no longer for debate.
MS. MEISSNER: I think one thing that might help you in understanding this is that this -- because I would agree with Ambassador Ryan's characterization of the debate that was taking place during that time. There was a debate not only of concerns expressed by the schools. There was a strong feeling among some in the Congress that was similar and there was a lot of conversation that took place between the government agencies and members of committees and others about how intrusive a system like this would be and whether it was appropriate.
One of the things that happened with this particular issue is that it was put into the legislation in 1996 at the last moment in quite a closed setting and there had been no hearings. There had been no public debate so that it was the kind of a situation where once the legislation passed, you had the debate that typically happens before legislation passes when some of these things start to get sorted out and that was the environment that we were working in.
MR. FIELDING: Okay, thank you. Thank you both. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
MR. KEAN: Thank you. I have one question. We saw in the staff statement -- I actually saw it in the video of something called The Red Book -- and the language sounded very much like something we would want to do today. I mean, people were being alerted very strongly to the threat of terrorism in this country and people were being told, "Watch out for these people." What happened to the Red Book and did anybody ever consider bringing it back?
MS. MEISSNER: I didn't see the video and I don't -- it doesn't ring a bell.
MS. RYAN: I was here for the video. I had not heard of the Red Book before today. The Office of Fraud Prevention programs within the Bureau of Consular Affairs tried to do something similar in terms of training, showing officers examples of fraudulent passports or fraudulent visas or fraudulent stamps in passports, in foreign passports. One of the reasons why we developed the database of lost and stolen passports that we did develop, but I had not heard of the Red Book and I think it would be a very good idea to have something like that where people are trained to identify all the kinds of passports, stamps, visas that might exist and that might be fraudulently used.
MR. KEAN: Thank you.
Commissioner Lehman?
MR. LEHMAN: Yes. There are two huge loopholes in enforcement that I'd like to get both of your views on. One of them has been temporarily suspended, the other is politically correct even to mention. Transit Without Visa is one that has been temporarily suspended, in both of these loopholes we know that terrorists have used them and we must assume they'll continue to use them in the future if they remain.
Transit Without Visa is -- seems to be based on the fact that the airlines say, well we don't have any secure transit lounges and so therefore we need this system which is a form of additional revenue for them. Your former employees in INS say that they have been trying for 10 years to get this stopped but they've been blocked by airline lobbyists at every turn. In fact it was only suspended last August, nearly two years after the fact.
The other huge loophole is the sanctuary system. Deep cynicism has been expressed to us by immigration enforcement officers about the fact that New York City, L.A. and a number of other cities in -- Florida as an example, prohibit their enforcement officials from cooperating with Immigration. So much so that while the Commission was at Kennedy, a group of illegals managed to get past Immigration and Customs and were waiting in the terminal quite visibly, but the INS or the security people said they can't, they're not allowed to go past the Customs Hall and the Port Authority Police are not allowed to enforce federal laws on immigration.
One would seem that both of these sort of cry out for a little bit of attention. Did either of you cry out against either of these huge loopholes that terrorists were using?
MS. MEISSNER: Well, let me begin with the Transit Without Visa. I think the Transit Without Visa, the way that you characterize that is -- I couldn't disagree with that. It is now, you know, as you say suspended, I don't know whether it should stay suspended or what. Obviously the way that it is a loophole needs to be addressed and I don't know whether the best way to do that is by maintaining this suspension of the Transit Without Visa or combining that and/or with a much more careful look as airports are being redesigned to be sure that, indeed there are secure lounges. Which ever way it's done, you know, we want to be certain, you know, that this is not -- this doesn't become a loophole again in the future as attention, you know, wanes.
And that is part of, you know, what I refer to as this pendulum problem that we have. We have a very difficult time just maintaining a steady course on these issues. So that would be one where it would be very important to maintain a steady course which is close the loophole whichever way is the appropriate way to do it.
Now, on state and local law enforcement, state and local law enforcement and its cooperation with federal law enforcement is a long standing issue in immigration and, you know, in other fields of law enforcement as well. But there is a real line between federal authority and federal expertise and responsibility to enforce the immigration law, and the responsibilities of state and local law enforcement. Now, you can resolve and work with that by good liaison and good cooperation, but that doesn't always exist.
So I think, you know, as far as I'm concerned the answer here is that the federal government has to take the lead in being absolutely certain that the working relationships are such that state and local law enforcement understands what's taking place, but the airport authorities according to the kind of a, you know, scenario that you're describing are also involved because people like that shouldn't be able to leave the customs area so that it even becomes a problem for state and local law enforcement. That just sounds to me like a kind of a breakdown that can be solved administratively that does not -- I'm not sure that it requires --
MR. LEHMAN: It's a little hard because the cities that I'm talking about actually have written laws against cooperation.
MS. MEISSNER: And those originated -- I mean some of those have been around for a very long time. It traditionally -- it has not been state and local responsibility, this is federal responsibility and it should be done properly by the federal government.
MR. LEHMAN: How about treason? They shouldn't enforce treason either or selectively choose the ones they feel like enforcing? Is that the rule of law?
MS. MEISSNER: Well, but -- no, state and local governments don't have the responsibility to enforce immigration law. Federal government should do it.
MR. LEHMAN: I mean, that is the most preposterous statement I think I've heard all morning.
MS. MEISSNER: Well then, maybe I'm not understanding --
MR. LEHMAN: That local police don't have to enforce federal laws, and indeed it's quite all right to have them prohibited from enforcing federal laws?
MS. MEISSNER: I'm not sure that they've passed -- my understanding is that what they have said is that they will not -- they will not enforce immigration law and they will not work with federal authorities to do so. I mean, is it your information that that continues to be the case, post September 11th?
MR. LEHMAN: Absolutely. It was just reaffirmed in New York about three months ago. And nothing's been done by the federal government. I mean, they just say, oh well, okay.
MS. MEISSNER: Well --
MR. LEHMAN: I haven't seen any injunctions or court orders or cutting off of funds or whatever.
MS. MEISSNER: Well, what I can tell you is that we made a very aggressive effort during the time that I was at INS to make information available to state and local law enforcement so that they could determine whether they had somebody who was of interest to the federal government. We established a law -- what was called a law enforcement support center, which was an automated information resource so that -- 24/7 so that state and local law enforcement could get help from the federal government and information from the federal government. We felt that that was the proper way for the two sets of authorities to work together, and I think that -- I would still stand by that being a proper way and those relationships need to be --
MR. LEHMAN: Service rather than enforcement?
MS. MEISSNER: That's not a contradiction, that is communication and coordination and each law enforcement authority exercising its authorities in the way that it's been trained to do.
MR. LEHMAN: And Ambassador Ryan, did Consular ever get involved in these issues?
MS. RYAN: Not in the sanctuary issue. Transit Without Visa, I would agree with Commissioner Meissner that it is -- it was a problem. I think that the suspension is a good idea, probably should be made permanent. Before September 11th, one of the reasons why it was one of the rules that allowed people to do this was because airlines, American Airlines profited from people coming to the United States to transit the United States to go somewhere else. And that was always the reason why we were told that, you know, it was something that was just going to have to continue. If one could be sure that the airports had secure transit lounges --
MR. LEHMAN: Like every other country in the world?
MS. RYAN: Like every other country in the world, or most other countries in the world, then I think you could have an effective Transit Without Visa program, but I don't think that all of our airports have such secure transit lounges, and so then it becomes a problem that people could come to the United States and get out of the transit lounge and just disappear into the country.
MR. LEHMAN: Thank you both for your honesty and frankness on those.
MS. RYAN: Thank you, sir.
MR. KEAN: Thank you, this has been a very, very useful discussion.
MR. KERREY: Mr. Chairman, I've got a couple of questions down here.
MR. KEAN: I'm sorry, I didn't know, Senator Kerrey.
MR. KERREY: Well, I just came on board, so. Well, John, I can tell you Doris Meissner and I got to know each other very well when I was representing the state of Nebraska and there were a lot of business interests that did not want to enforce the law when it came to people working in meat packing plants in the States. I know that she was constantly running against people who did in fact put pressure on her not to enforce the law, and I'm encouraged that there has been a lot of training going on with people trying to get them to understand that the law needs to be enforced.
One of the areas of great interest to me is, what I think in a remarkable democratic system such as the United States has, there is a weakness in transition, a transitional weakness. We saw it in 1993 and Ambassador Ryan, you span the full roughly nine year period when there were two transitions. In 1993, I remember it very well, it was Somalia where mission creep got us into a considerable amount of trouble in Mogadishu in October, and in my view there's a similar sort of weakness that could be at play here.
And one of the questions I want to ask you begins with this. Look, this wasn't just terrorism, this is an Islamist form of terrorism. This is a religious based act against the United States of America. And you can't -- and part of the problem it seems to me is when we lump terrorism all together, it seems to me we miss a very important narrative, I think that -- and you could really see it after the World Trade Center I bombing. I mean there was a significant amount of disdain when Nosair tried to get the refund on the Ryder truck and there was a presumption these guys couldn't possibly be sufficiently sophisticated to carry out a really serious attack against the United States, and that was shattered on the 7th of August. And, Ambassador Ryan, I have great sympathy for your loss on that day of 1998.
But talk to me. I mean, during that period of time, you've got World Trade Center I, not -- this is not Tamil Tigers, this is not nationalists who are trying to territory, this was basically the beginning of an Islamist attack on the United States. And then you've got Mir Kansi open fire at CIA headquarters within 30 days of that moment in 1993. And then you've got, the big one for me, you've got three of them actually in a row, '96,'98 and 2000. And I'd like to know, in both of your cases, did you have a sense of increased urgency coming from the top? Either from President Clinton, and Berger and your own bosses in Justice and in State? Or from President Bush, following the declaration that al Qaeda was responsible for the USS Cole on October of 2000?
Because unless there's action from the top which occur obviously after the 11th, nothing's going to happen. I mean just say what among the things that I've acquired thus far in a relatively short time of reading the documents, is a surprising sense of the sophistication of 19 men plus some others who did in fact observe and were able to get visas and passports to come to the United States and in spite of the published story to the contrary, as you heard staff say, they were fraudulently manipulated. They came to the United States and as Secretary Lehman's pointing out, they broke the law.
And then we'll hear later in the panel, the observed U.S. commercial aircraft and saw additional weaknesses and they exploited those weaknesses. So we'll hear this afternoon staff say to us that by the spring 2001 there was a high probability they were going to be successful. And the question I've got over and over here I hear from people asking, well how in the heck did that happen? How -- I mean how could they be so successful against the United States of America? How could they exploit all of these weaknesses?
Every single point along the way we hear, didn't get enough money from the Congress, that was the problem, they didn't deliver the right intelligence, I didn't get this, I didn't get that, everybody's got, you know, a pretty good case of plausible deniability along the line. But did at any point in this point moment, take '93 as an example. You were there in 1993, did President Clinton say in 1993, after World Trade Center, either '93 or '95 after the trial of Ramzi Yousef had made it clear what was going on?
Did at any point in that time did you hear from the President of the United States through the principal, your principal in this case being the secretary of State, that we've got to change the way we're doing it? That we're going after Islamist extremists, that's who we're going after, it's not terrorists, its Islamist extremists and we know where they come from?
MS. RYAN: There were a couple of presidential decision directives on terrorism, on sharing information, I don't remember specifically talk about Islamic terrorists. The intelligence that we had, despite World Trade Center I seem to be always directed overseas, at our interests over seas.
MR. KERREY: Mir Kansi was not directed overseas --
MS. RYAN: Mir Kansi, is that --
MR. KERREY: -- he was at CIA headquarters, for God's sake.
MS. RYAN: That's correct, that's a single individual.
MR. KERREY: And those 19 airmen at Khobar Towers certainly came from the United States of America. They weren't going after Saudi citizens in '92.
MS. RYAN: No, but the attacks were abroad, the attacks on our embassies were abroad, so Consular Affairs put out all kinds of worldwide cautions and public announcements and travel warnings to alert Americans to dangers that we saw abroad.
MR. KERREY: How about after the millennium? How about after the millennium, I mean, my God, we were afraid the country was going to come to an end on New Year's Eve, and we got lucky, again as we'll hear later on in our hearings, we got lucky in Seattle. I mean, after -- are you saying to me that generally speaking that there was no expression from the top either during President Clinton's or President Bush's administration, that an attack on the United States can occur and one of the points of weakness might be the way we're granting visas overseas?
MS. RYAN: Not that I remember, that we were looking internally. We were looking at people who might attack us abroad --
MR. KERREY: Why, why? Didn't it surprise you today, you must -- I mean, it's got to cause you great pain to look at these visas and passports, I mean, these documents that we put up earlier. I mean, doesn't it surprise you that neither President Clinton nor President Bush came and said that Islamist extremism is a serious threat and we've got to tighten up our consular offices or immigration policies in the United States?
MS. RYAN: But we had -- we required visas of Saudis, if that's the issue that you're talking about?
MR. KERREY: Oh no, I'm talking specifically the President of the United States saying not that terrorism or illegal or criminals are a problem, but that Islamist extremism is a problem. That that is a threat to the United States of America on our own soil?
MS. RYAN: Well, we knew that bin Laden is a threat to the United States of America and that he is an Islamic extremist, but I would ask you, sir, how would -- I mean, would you not issue to everyone who's a Muslim? Would y