INS Error Cited on Atta’s Visa

U.S. authorities now believe the Immigration and Naturalization Service may have improperly allowed terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta to reenter the United States eight months before the Sept. 11 hijackings despite questions about his visa status, officials said Monday.

That suspicion, contained in a new Justice Department investigative report, offers the first indication that any of the 19 hijackers may have come into the country improperly, and it raises new questions about the INS’ ability to secure the borders from terrorists.

Previously, all of the Sept. 11 hijackers were thought to have entered the country through proper channels, using tourist, business and student visas to adeptly navigate the labyrinthine U.S. immigration system.

But the new report questions whether Atta, who piloted American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center’s north tower, should have been turned back at the U.S. entry point in Miami in January 2001 because his application for a student visa had not yet been approved.

The Justice Department Inspector General’s office, which issued the report, was unable to reach definitive conclusions, and it found that INS policies generally were followed in Atta’s case. But the report said the issue was symptomatic of widespread flaws in the INS’ poor handling of the hundreds of thousands of foreigners who study in the United States.

“There was a laxity in the system,” Inspector General Glenn Fine said in an interview. “This shows [that the INS] did not scrutinize students closely at the time and did not consider them to be a big risk.”

The findings are sure to intensify efforts to impose major structural changes upon the INS. A firestorm engulfed the agency in March when it notified a Florida flight school that it had approved student visas for Atta and fellow hijacker Marwan Al-Shehhi. The notification came six months after they had become infamous for their roles in the Sept. 11 attacks--and eight months after the INS actually had approved their visas. Al-Shehhi is believed to have piloted United Flight 175 into the south tower.

In addition to questions about whether Atta should have been allowed to return to the United States, investigators found other potential trouble spots in the INS’ handling of his case and that of Al-Shehhi. The problems often involved poor coordination and incomplete information to field employees:

* INS employees who were considering applications from Atta and Al-Shehhi for student visas did not realize that the two men had already completed their flight training in Florida while their applications were pending. “If the adjudicator had full information, he should have denied their applications,” investigators found.

* Although a warrant for Atta’s arrest was issued on June 4 in Florida because of his failure to appear in court for a traffic ticket, INS inspectors allowed him to reenter the country six weeks later because that information was not available on their computer system.

* At one point during Atta’s stay in the United States, he was given a visa for eight months instead of the standard six months. An eight-month visa would have allowed him to remain through Sept. 8, 2001. Not until Atta went to an immigration office in Miami in May of that year to try to get an eight-month stay for an unidentified companion did officials realize the apparent error and reduce the length of his visa to six months.

But in July his application for a student visa was approved, allowing him to stay in the country through October.

Although Atta and Al-Shehhi were in the United States legally on Sept. 11 as a result of their active visas, three of the other 17 hijackers had overstayed their visas, immigration officials say.

INS officials said they were gratified that the inspector general had not identified any clear violations of department policy in the handling of Atta and Al-Shehhi, and they said they are already moving to correct problems identified in the report.

But congressional critics--and even the INS’ bosses at the Justice Department--were less forgiving.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he found the inspector general’s findings “deeply disturbing.”

Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said the report reflects a “dramatic failure” of INS management “to provide clear guidance, policies and procedures to its front-line employees.”

And Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, who oversees the INS, said the report “reinforces the need” for fundamental changes in the way the agency regulates the visas of foreign students. He said the Justice Department will “redouble our efforts to move the INS’ reporting systems into the 21st century” by vastly expanding data that U.S. schools are required to send the INS about their foreign students.

But the inspector general’s office concluded that the INS is unlikely to be able to meet the ambitious Jan. 30 deadline set for that overhaul.

Fine noted that the INS would have to recertify 72,000 U.S. universities, colleges and vocational schools in a matter of months for that plan to become fully operational. “That’s a monumental task.... We think it’s unlikely to happen,” he said.

The report offers perhaps the most detailed reconstruction to date of the global travels of Atta and Al-Shehhi in the months leading up to the hijackings, as each entered the country three separate times in apparent preparation for the Sept. 11 attacks.

Atta, in his first trip out of the country, left Miami for Spain on Jan. 4, 2001, and returned to Miami six days later. He had already applied to change his visa from tourist to student status so he could attend flight school in Florida. When Atta returned to Miami International Airport, an INS inspector raised questions about his status.

By leaving the country while his student visa application was pending, Atta had effectively abandoned his application under INS policy. The inspector in Miami concluded that he would need a student visa to reenter and sent his case to another inspector at the airport for more extensive questioning, according to the inspector general’s report.

The second inspector apparently believed--erroneously--that Atta’s change to a student visa had already been approved. “We do not know how the secondary inspector could have come to that conclusion because the request had not been approved at that time and INS databases would not have reflected the approval until many months later,” the report said.

Still unclear is exactly what Atta told the second inspector. If he told him he was studying at flight school only part time, he would have been allowed into the country under then-INS policy, officials said. But if he said he was studying full time, that should have barred his reentry unless he received a waiver for an “unforeseen emergency,” investigators found.

“Should he have gotten in? That’s the hard question,” Fine said. “If he said [to the inspector] that he’s attending school full time, then he needed a student visa, which he didn’t have. But we don’t know what he said, and neither does the inspector.”

Bill Strassberger, a spokesman for the INS, said Atta’s January 2001 reentry to the country “could be problematic, but it was not improper. A decision was made based on the information the inspector had available to him, which is something that happens many times a day around the country, and it was enough to allow [Atta] in,” he said. “There was no information at the time that [Atta or Al-Shehhi] were terrorists or intended to do harm.”