Flight training for Syrians should raise red flags

10/19/2001

By RUBEN NAVARRETTE / The Dallas Morning News

Treating people fairly is common decency. Making sure government bureaucracy changes with the times is common sense.

Just because I don't think that law-abiding Arab-Americans should be turned in by neighbors, rounded up by cops, or forced off airplanes doesn't mean that red flags shouldn't go up when, barely a month after terrorists showed how to convert jetliners into weapons of mass destruction, visitors from a country that condones terrorism waltz through a U.S airport on visas to attend flight schools.

Given that an al-Qaeda spokesman has promised another "storm of airplanes," and given that the happenings described above occurred just days before the Federal Aviation Administration lifted its ban on private planes flying near metropolitan areas, the red flags should have been everywhere.

Yet when 14 Syrian men arrived at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport earlier this week, the flags went up, only to be lowered by bureaucrats in Washington.

Immigration and Naturalization Service inspectors at D/FW did detain the Syrians – their country is one of seven on the State Department's "watch list" of nations that sponsor terrorism – and contacted the FBI. As a precaution, the FBI asked the inspectors to photocopy the men's passports.

Since the paperwork was in order, the FBI declined to interview the men, and the INS waved them through. The men, who claimed they were training to be pilots for an airline back home, then headed for Fort Worth Meacham International Airport. They had been accepted to one or more of the independent flight schools operating there.

This may be nothing. Just paranoia and coincidence at a time when tensions are high and the president has told Americans to watch for suspicious activity. Besides, law enforcement agents did their job. As far as they are concerned, the system worked.

But it also failed. It failed because common sense – and brutal, tragic reality – would indicate that we no longer should be granting flight-school visas to students from countries that support terrorism. And even if those visas had been granted before Sept. 11, common sense and brutal, tragic reality would demand that the documents now be rescinded and that the students be barred from entry into the United States.

Neither happened. And the reason is that, according to spokesmen for the two government entities most closely affiliated with student visas – the State Department that grants them and the INS that checks them at point of entry – the rules are exactly as they were before Sept. 11.

The reason, they both say, is that only Congress can change the law. That is reassuring to hear at a moment when the House has shuttered its windows and put up a "closed" sign after several dozen Senate staffers and Capitol police officers tested positive for exposure to anthrax.

Even so, once Congress reconvenes and reforms the visa law – and it likely will – lawmakers probably will limit the tinkering to keeping track of foreign visitors once they are in the United States. What the story of the 14 Syrians who wanted to learn to fly shows is that there need to be changes at the beginning of the pipeline.

Until Congress acts, don't individual agencies have the discretion to adapt their own policies to a changed environment? Common sense would dictate that they should. The State Department should suspend the issuance of visas altogether to those who come from rogue nations or at least put such applicants through extra screening. (Amazingly, even though the State Department identifies seven countries as sponsoring terrorism, nationals from most of those states still can enter the United States on a variety of visas.)

In the case of visas for vocational study, it is the INS that actually gets the ball rolling. It approves certain schools to train foreign students and provides those schools with the form required to apply for a visa in the first place. In light of what happened on Sept. 11, the INS should identify those schools that enroll students from terrorist-sponsoring states and revoke their authority to do so.

Until those changes are made, even with America on high alert, it still is business as usual in some corners of our government. How's that for a Halloween scare?

Ruben Navarrette Jr. is an editorial writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News.

-- Anonymous, October 19, 2001