No Straight Answer From the Feds on Armenian Furor

Just when it looked like the federal government might have to put a barbed wire fence around the city of Glendale for reasons of national security, good news arrived Monday from the crime busters at the U.S. Justice Department.

Armenian nationals do not -- repeat, DO NOT -- have to report to the Immigration and Naturalization Service for fingerprinting and registration.

It was all a mistake, and Armenians can now return to their normal activities.

Or maybe it wasn’t a mistake.

I can’t tell, and the really frightening thing is that the Justice Department can’t seem to tell either. After rescinding the order calling for Armenians to fall in line and be accounted for, a Justice Department spokesman was asked by The Times about the goof, and here’s what we got out of him:

“I can’t say it was a mistake.”

Well then what was it? And if they couldn’t get this right, and couldn’t at least come up with a credible lie, why should we assume the feds are capable of getting anything else right when it comes to homeland security?

This all began late last week when Armenia, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were added to a list of 18 mostly Muslim nations whose nationals are required to register if they’re male, 16 or older, and here as students or visitors.

This requirement sent the nation’s 1.5 million Armenian Americans into a frenzy, and California, home to half of them, led the outrage campaign.

Californians sent more than half the 10,000 letters of protests filed with the White House over the weekend.

“Not only is Armenia a staunch supporter of the United States, but Armenian people have had a long history of being integrated into the fabric of this great nation,” said Ardy Kassakhian of the Armenian National Committee of America’s Western regional office in Glendale, which has roughly 70,000 Armenians.

“Armenia is also a Christian nation surrounded by Muslim neighbors, and hostile ones at that,” he said. “Does anyone even read history or the newspaper or anything?”

That could be it. This might be a simple case of someone in the Bush administration having flunked geography, and thinking Armenia was a suburb of Tehran.

If someone had made a movie called “My Big Fat Armenian Wedding,” this probably wouldn’t have happened.

Other possible explanations? This was a wink and a nod to Turkey, a strategic ally that has a long history of conflict with Armenia.

Or some mid-level weasel decided it would look bad to have only one other non-Muslim nation -- besides North Korea -- on the list.

“It’s not geography or history or anything like that,” insisted Harut Sassounian, publisher of the California Courier, a weekly newspaper based in Glendale and serving a national Armenian audience.

“I happen to know through sources in Washington that it was initiated by someone in homeland security,” said Sassounian, who insists there was an overreaction to a report that Armenia’s borders are not “watertight.”

Whose are?

Adding Armenia to the list was all the more absurd, Sassounian said, when you consider that some of its border countries aren’t on the list even though they’ve been suspected of having terrorists in their midst.

“The U.S. government has troops in Georgia right now to hunt down Al Qaeda members, and Georgia is not on the list,” Sassounian said. “It’s all games, politics and self-serving positions.”

If it weren’t, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan would have been the first countries on the list, not the last.

Saudi Arabia harbored or produced many of the Sept. 11 terrorists, and Pakistan is home to schools that are grooming the next generation of anti-American terrorists.

Look, we wouldn’t even need the fingerprinting and registration if the feds hadn’t been asleep at the wheel for decades, and actually kept track of foreigners who were here temporarily.

Now the Bush administration is playing catch-up, still rudderless, but trying to look like it’s doing something useful by rounding up anybody who doesn’t go to the same church as John Ashcroft or Tom Ridge.

Does anybody think there’s a terrorist dumb enough to go down to the local INS office and introduce himself?

In the new world, I don’t know too many people who would object to the government finally reforming immigration controls.

But is it too much to ask for some consistency and logic, or for someone to articulate a coherent policy that doesn’t remind us of internment camps?

Why not put Spain and Germany on the list because of the Al Qaeda operatives in those countries?

Why not all of Indonesia, which has the world’s largest population of Muslims?

Is it religion, geography or trade status that gets you on the list, or is someone in the White House throwing darts at a map?

And can we really trust Canada?

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com.