“Thousands of foreign students are in U.S. flight schools illegally. Annie Jacobsen exclusively reveals an internal memo on the Transportation Security Administration’s failure to enforce the law.”
From Pajamas Media:
Most remember the shocking revelation.
Six months after Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi piloted hijacked planes into the World Trade Center, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) notified a Venice, Florida flight school that the men had been approved for visas.
The two terrorists were already dead, and so were the nearly 3,000 people they”d killed. The INS was caught with its pants down. There was no way for the unpopular agency to explain itself out of its horrific and embarrassing failure. Yet INS spokesman Russ Bergeron certainly tried when he said, “It does serve to illustrate what we have been saying since 1995 “” that the current system for collecting information and tracking foreign students is antiquated, outdated, inaccurate and untimely.”
The INS unit was disbanded and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) took its place in regard to monitoring foreign nationals for flight school eligibility. In September 2004 the Alien Flight Student Program went into effect, with TSA in charge.
Last week, in one of the most damaging reports on the TSA to date, ABC News revealed that in the program’s first year under TSA control, there were “some 8,000 foreign students in the FAA database who got their pilot licenses without ever being approved by the TSA.”
“Thousands of aliens, some of whom may very well pose a threat to this country, are taking flight lessons, being granted FAA certifications and are flying planes,” wrote TSA official Richard A. Horn in 2005, according to ABC. He was complaining that the students did not have the proper visas.
ABC also cited a former FAA inspector who tried to blow the whistle on the disaster waiting to happen, as documented on its website.
In addition, Pajamas Media has obtained an internal TSA memo “” dated and stamped nine months after the FAA inspectors initially blew the whistle “” which reveals that the current level of ineptitude inside the TSA is hauntingly similar to that of the INS on 9/11. [See the memo at PJM]
TSA officials are wholly aware of major inaccuracies in the foreign flight school program and are promoting a do-nothing policy behind the scenes….
Read it all.