T5 B43 Jan 26-27 Hearing Notes 1 Of 2 Fdr- Draft Staff Statement 104

Draft Staff Statement Entry of the 9/11 Hijackers Into the United States Members of the Commission, your staff has 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. These findings and judgments may help your conduct of today's public hearing and will inform the development of your recommendations. The findings and judgments I report today are the results of our work so far. We remain ready to revise our understanding of these topics as our work continues. 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. Our staff was fortunate. We could 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 and 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 is used. I.

Travel Intelligence and Terrorism

We do not begin with American law or policy. We begin by analyzing the terrorist enemy. To an international terrorist, few topics are more important than where and how they travel. Anyone immersed in the debriefings of Al Qa'ida terrorists will be struck by how central this is, how vital to their tradecraft. The ability to travel and the character of travel documents is one of the most important factors in operational recruitment, including the recruitment of the 9/11 hijackers. It was a critical, perhaps the most important, reason for reliance on so many Saudi citizens. Think about the problem from their perspective. They live in places where they feel relatively safe or anonymous. When they travel internationally, they must come to the surface. They must pass, again and again, through portals of one kind or another where they are examined by government agents. Only when they reach their destination can they once again disappear into the 'ocean.' Yet, for an international terrorist, travel is essential. Among the 9/11 hijackers it was the pilots who traveled the most. Among the distant coordinators, Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed moved frequently from place to place. So Al Qa'ida devotes enormous effort to travel issues. Before 9/11 a principal unit of the organization worked

on little else. Al Qa'ida terrorists sought to hide their true identities and keep their travel histories off the record. They did not want others to know, for example, that they had visited suspect places like Afghanistan. They carefully planned how to acquire, manipulate, and use travel documents like visas and passports. Ease of entry to a country was, and is, a significant factor in terrorist operational planning. They research entry rules and border processes to select the best documents and entry points. Al Qa'ida terrorists would often travel under an alias, and many possessed m u l t i p l e aliases as well as variations in their names. They would impersonate innocent people whose passports they steal and alter. They would take and use passports of terrorists killed in battle in Afghanistan. They would fabricate entire passports to replicate the data of others. They would use counterfeit travel stamps and visas to create 'false trails' in their passports. They would carry multiple passports with the same serial number and small variations in biographical information, so-called [or that are] "cloned" passports. They \d so they can] use one passport for going to some countries and a [duplicate] similar passport for others. How do Al Qa'ida terrorists get their passports? Some are obtained legitimately. Some are blanks, documents with or without serial numbers [or 'blanks'] that may have already been reported lost or stolen. Al Qa'ida terrorists especially like to get documents from 'visa waiver' countries. These are countries, like those in Western Europe, [that have deals in which their] whose nationals do not need visas to come to the United States. Some other passports are obtained from friendly or corrupt government officials or from terrorists' friends who work inside government agencies. Some are obtained or doctored with the aid of al Qaeda's own or other document traffickers or forgers. For these reasons we must be cautious in reaching conclusions about how much we know about the passports or aliases the 9/11 attackers used. That said, 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. One [was recovered] from a hijacker on American Airlines Flight 11 [It fluttered to the street after the plane hit the World Trade Center] was j A passerby] picked [it] up by a passerby who and] gave it to an 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 onto the connecting flight, which as American Airlines 11. In addition to these four, some copies of passport information were recovered in a post-9/11 raid in Pakistan. We have reviewed findings about all of these documents available from laboratories at CIA. DHS. and F B I . Let's pause for a moment and consider what this means for counterterrorisnl. We believe that the development and analysis of terrorist gww^ travel intelligence of all kinds is of the first importance. [We call it TRAVELINT. In counterterrorisnl work it is just as important as the more famous 'INT's' of the intelligence world, such as HUMINT (or human agents), SIGINT (or signals intelligence).] It is now seen as a niche effort, an

interesting but not central focus that is worked on by [side] specialists here and there. \e\. and very fortunately, the level of systematic intelligence effort on such problems since 9/11 is vastly greater. We think the conceptual breakthrough has not happened yet at the policy level. The information developed by terrorist mobility specialists has not been fully absorbed by the intelligence community as a whole, border inspection authorities, nor incorporated into problem-solving with foreign governments through bilateral, regional and international discussions. We hope this statement and the one later today will demonstrate that not only intelligence, hut policy about international travel rules and supporting documentation I'TRAVELINT] is central to denying access by terrorists to countries that they ha\ targeted. Indeed, disrupting terrorist mobility is at least as important as disrupting terrorist finances, and the opportunities and potential payoffs are probably greater. Its place in the way we think about counterterrorism should be elevated accordingly. II.

Identity and Passports

To break down some of the travel problem, think about three stages. For most international travel, a terrorist has to have a passport. For some countries, like the United States, a terrorist also must obtain a document permitting him to visit. This is called a visa. Finally the terrorist must actually enter the country and keep from getting detained or deported by immigration or internal security officials. Some of these problems can be evaded if a terrorist bypasses legal procedures and enters the country surreptitiously, as do many illegal aliens who enter [America] the United States from Mexico and Canada. None of the 9/11 attackers entered or tried to enter the country this way, though we know terrorists are considering coming through Mexico and some h a \ entered without inspection from Canada, [and perhaps using this option]. But today we will focus on the illegal use of legal entry systems. We will start with passports and identity. We have handed out a list of the names of 9/11 attackers to help you follow [some of the unfamiliar names] our discussion. A word about passports. To a significant degree these vital documents struggle to incorporate the very latest security refinements of the 19th century. It is easier to track the use of a stolen credit card than a stolen passport. We have seen convincing evidence that two of the hijackers, Satam al Suqami and Abdul Aziz al Omari, presented doctored passports. To avoid getting into the classified details, we will just [use the law's language and] state that these were "manipulated in a fraudulent manner." They were manipulated in ways we believe trained U.S. officials would be able to spot today as revealing a direct [likely] link to Al Qa'ida. 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 Qa'ida passport practices and 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 Qa'ida.

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 Mihdar and Salem al Hazmi, presented passports that had such suspicious indicators. Again, we believe that today trained U.S. officials would be able to spot these indicators and take appropriate action. Each of these two hijackers are known to have possessed at least two passports. All of their known passports had these suspicious indicators. We have seen evidence that three other hijackers, Nawaf al Hazmi, Ahmed al Nami, and Ahmad al Haznawi may have presented passports containing these suspicious indicators. But their passports did not survive the attacks, so we cannot be sure. Two of the Saudi 9/11 hijackers may have obtained their passports through patronage connections with Saudi officials. We now know that 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. Through patronage connections or bribes, terrorists had access to large numbers of blank Saudi passports. Many contained no issuing serial numbers, a weakness that terrorists can manipulate. Saudi passports were therefore often the passport of choice for Al Qa'ida terrorists, even those - like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - who were not Saudi citizens. The obvious question is whether all of these characteristic manipulations and indicators were known to the U.S. government before 9/11. We are sure that word of any such clues had not been circulated to [the officials in the field] the border inspection service officials who saw these passports. As to whether the knowledge of these particular clues existed in the intelligence community before 9/11, we do not yet know the answer to that question. [One reason we are unsure, though, is because before 9/11 neither intelligence nor border authorities regularly analyzed travel documents to see whether they bore such telltale clues.] 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. Before 9/11 the FBI and CIA knew Al Qa'ida engaged in such practices. They knew this from training manuals recovered in the mid-1990s. They knew this from tracking and interrogating captured Al Qa'ida operatives. Some of this knowledge was used in individual criminal cases prosecuted in the l : .S. By [In] the 1980s the CIA had developed a "Red Book" to guide and train consular, immigration and customs officers [document examiners at other agencies, like the State Department or INS], in spotting terrorists. To the best of our knowledge, the 'Red Book' was last published in 1992. [So the quality of the guidance and training before 9/11 was lower than it had been ten years earlier.] Before 9/11 we cannot find evidence of any centrally coordinated and systematic effort to exploit such "TRAVELINT" to create and distribute a set of telltale clues that consular officers or immigration inspectors could use in order to spot Al Qa'ida operatives or otherwise exploit Al Qa'ida's travel vulnerability. If this information had been developed, [both] the State Department, and the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the Customs Sen-ice, whose personnel

arc now part of DHS,] could have [an] established the capacity for training and alerting their officers in the field. Before 9/11 these agencies" efforts focused mainly on iruduiona! immigration enforcement and organized visa fraud rings [and traditional immigration enforcement]. Since 9/11 this picture has improved. We have not completed our factual evaluations of these improvements. The CIA is [system has been energized to] looking harder at intelligence related to terrorist mobility. The Department of State is incorporating new information into their processes, as is the Department of Homeland Security. [The DHS has taken the lead in spurring a whole new kind of international cooperation to modernize and integrate travel documents and travel information.] As we finish our evaluation of these efforts the Commission should consider possible policy recommendations in this area. Visas Before 9/11, and today, the State Department is principally responsible for administering U.S. immigration laws outside of the United States. A branch of our diplomatic corps, consular officers, issue several kinds of visas for visitors and for permanent immigrants. In 2000 these diplomats processed about 10 million applications for visitors' visas [to] at about 230 posts overseas. The U.S. has agreements with a number of countries in which their citizens and ours do not need to obtain visas for a visit. None of the 9/11 hijackers had passports from such countries. [Al Qa'ida certainly takes notice if the organization encounters a recruit who has a passport from such a 'visa waiver' country. ] A visa applicant provides their passport and a photograph. [The passport is checked] A State Department employee checks the passport for any apparent questionable features. [If the applicant applies in person, a State Department employee can see and interview them.] A Consular Officer could call the applicant in for an interview. The applicant's essential information goes into a State database. The information is then checked against a large "consular lookout" database, which includes a substantial watchlist of known and suspected terrorists called TIPOFF. Before 9/11, the main focus of the whole immigration system, including the visa process, was to keep intending immigrants from improperly entering the United States. In the visa process, the most common form of fraud is to get a visa to visit the U.S. as a tourist and then stay to work and perhaps become a resident. So consular officers concentrate on interviewing visa applicants whom they suspect might leave and not come back home. In Saudi Arabia, before 9-11. Saudi citizens were (are] not seen as "bad risks" for becoming unlawful immigrants. They rarely overstayed their visas or tried to work illegally in the U.S. The same was true for citizens of the United Arab Emirates. So, with some minor variations, diplomats in both countries tended to screen applicants against TIPOFF, but they would not interview them unless there was something about the applications that seemed [worrisome] problematic. Visa applicants from these countries frequently had their applications submitted by third parties, like travel agencies, and often

would not fill out their applications completely, beyond the biographical information needed for name checks. The U.S. posts in Saudi Arabia instituted the [a] Visa Express program in June 2001. It had little effect on visa [policy] outcomes. It required applicants to apply through travel agencies instead of by mail or in person. One reason the program was established was to keep crowds of people from congregating outside the posts, which was a security risk to [them and to the posts] 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 rates for Saudi applicants, or that it reduced the scrutiny given to their applications. It actually lengthened the processing time. W i t h the exception of Mexico, though, before 9/11, [though,] biometric information like a fingerprint - was [almost never] not routinely collected from a visa applicant. [And, since Saudi applicants did not apply in person,] Terrorists therefore easily could exploit opportunities for fraud. We offer one example. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the chief tactical planner and coordinator of the 9/11 attacks. He has a long history of terrorist activity. Before his capture in Pakistan in March of 2003, he had long been sought by U.S. authorities and was indicted for terrorist activity by federal authorities in the Southern District of New York in 1996. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed obtained a visa to visit the United States on July 23, 2001, about six weeks before the 9/11 attacks. He did so using an alias, Abdulrahman al Ghamdi. He did so with a Saudi passport, although he is not a Saudi citizen and we do not believe he was even in Saudi Arabia at the time. He had someone else submit his application and a photo (taken of him in disguise) through the Visa Express program. However, there is no evidence that he ever used this visa to enter the United States. The hijackers obtained their visas over a ten year period. The terrorist pilots acquired their visas in the year 2000. The others, with two exceptions, obtained their visas between the fall of 2000 and June 2001. All told, beginning in 1997. and including multiple visas, the 19 hijackers submitted 24 applications and received 23 visas. Two of these were issued in Berlin. Two were issued in the United Arab Emirates. The rest were issued in Saudi Arabia. One of the pilot's applications, that of Hani Hanjour in September 2000, was denied temporarily until he produced more evidence in support of his student visa application. It was then approved. To the best of our knowledge, State consular officers followed their standard operating procedures in every case. They checked their lookout database, including the TIPOFF watchlist. At the time they applied for visas, none of these people - 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.

Of these 24 visa applications, 4 were destroyed routinely along with other old documents before their significance was known. We have reviewed the remaining 20. All the hijackers sought tourist visas except for Hanjour, who obtained a student visa. All 20 of these applications were incomplete in some way, in that a data field was left blank or not answered fully. This did not affect the visa adjudication process because the data left out was the kind of data often left out by applicants, [or left blank by the travel agencies filling out the forms for them]. The State officials generally did not think these items were material to making a decision about whether to issue the visa. Officials were most concerned about getting the key biographical data they needed for their name checks. 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 Mihdar 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 conjunction with an earlier visit, in 1997, not his final visa application in 2000. Hanjour and Mihdar also made a false statement about whether they had previously traveled to the United States. We do not know whether these false statements were made in furtherance of the terrorist plot. They might have been trying to hide the fact they had previously traveled using different passports. But the false statements might have been the result of language problems or incorrect filling out of the form by a third party facilitator [travel agent], a common practice for Saudi citizens. Had these false statements been discovered and questioned, the three individuals might have reassured U.S. officials if they had admitted their prior visas and travel, and claimed the statements were inadvertent or made by a travel agent. Why would this be reassuring? Because it would have shown they had gone to the U.S. and returned, reducing any concern that they might be intending immigrants. But the discovery of the false statements could well have led at least to an interview on this topic. And such an interview carries with it some small chance that one of the men might have slipped or revealed some other worrying clue. Mihdar's case is still more problematical. While it is true he had not been entered into the TIPOFF watchlist at the time of his second visa application in June 2001, the post had other sources of derogatory information about him. In January 2000 the American consulate in Jeddah had been asked about Mihdar's visa status in conjunction with a then urgent terrorist intelligence investigation. U.S. officials at that consulate and at the Embassy, in Riyadh, responded helpfully. So when Mihdar applied again, the routine check against the worldwide TIPOFF watch list took place. [But the standard operating procedure could not or did not include the issuing post's check of its own databases about him, including data held by other agencies at the post.] But no system them in place included a notation of the prior check. Thus, in effect, the post - as an institution — could

not 'remember' relevant jits own] suspicions a year and a half earlier about this same person, who was traveling again with the same biographical information. At most, 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 reason for the interview had nothing to do with terrorism. None thought that, if they had spent more time on the interview, they would have come to any different conclusion about the application. They saw nothing suspicious. [On the plus side,] It is worth noting that several participants in the 9/11 plot tried to get visas, and failed. This has not been publicized before. One story, which is that some of the terrorists or would-be hijackers were on a terrorist watchlist, is untrue. None of these people were denied visas on grounds related to terrorism or because their names were on a watchlist. The participants in the plot who failed to get visas were Ramzi Binalshibh, Saeed al Gamdi, Zakariya Essabar, and Abdul Aziz Ali. This Saeed al Gamdi has a name similar to the Saeed al Ghamdi who became a hijacker. They are different people. We start with Ramzi Binalshibh. Binalshibh was an important participant. He apparently intended to train as a pilot along with his Hamburg friends, Mohammed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi. Binalshibh is from Yemen. He 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, both times because it was believed he did not have strong ties to Germany and he might be intending to immigrate unlawfully to the U.S. Yemen is a much poorer country than Saudi Arabia. Binalshibh tried again in Berlin, this time for a student visa. He was denied again for lack of adequate documentation. Essabar, a Moroccan, also tried in Berlin and failed because he lacked adequate documentation. In general, third country \a applicants in Berlin were held to significantly higher standards in terms of documentation and a required showing of ties than were Saudi and Emirati citizens applying from their own countries. Abdul Aziz Ali is believed to be related to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and was heavily involved in the financial side of the 9/11 plot. Using his Pakistani passport, he tried to get a U.S. visa in Dubai about two weeks before the attacks. As a Pakistani in a third country, U.S. officials would have been dubious from the start, and he was denied as a possible intending immigrant. Saeed al Gamdi, also known as "Jihad" al Gamdi, apparently intended to participate in the 9/11 attacks. He is a Saudi and applied for a tourist visa in Jeddah on November 8, 2000, the same date as 9/11 hijacker Ahmad al Haznawi. Haznawi was approved, but al Gamdi was denied, apparently after an interview with a consular officer, the only wouldbe Saudi hijacker who failed to get a visa.

The State Department was and is deeply committed to keeping terrorists from getting visas. The Department, and in particular Consular Affairs working with a little known official named John Arriza in its Bureau of Intelligence and Research, has accomplished groundbreaking [solid, innovative] work in building and sustaining the TIPOFF watchlist the o n l y true terrorist watchlist in the U.S. government before 9 1 1. We are troubled, however, that the Department and its Consular Affairs bureau states that before 9/11 they did not believe that Saudi citizens were security risks. In this matter they were essentially passive. Our research does not show that anyone formally told the bureau that Saudi citizens were potential terrorists. So officials did not treat them that way. If the Consular Affairs bureau had tried to take more precautions, it would have encountered some insurmountable |uncomfortable] budget realities. Visa applications rose by nearly a third, another 2.5 million a year, just between 1998 and 2001. Trained staff did not rise with it. The Congress had cut funding for Foreign Service officers during the 1990s, especially the early 1990s. 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 a day. When asking [To ask] the Department of Slate and Consular Affairs to take a more proactive role as part of a national security team, this [is the] context must be considered. Entry into and Exit from the United States With a visa, a traveler can travel to a port of entry into the United States. There, however, the traveler must seek admission into the U.S. from an inspector of what used to be called the INS, an agency whose personnel now form [that now is] part of DHS. We will refer to INS in describing events before 9/11. The property being brought into the U.S. is checked by inspectors of the U.S. Customs Service. This agency's personnel are ! is also] now also part of DHS. The 19 hijackers entered the U.S. a total of 33 times. They arrived through ten different airports, though more than half came in through Miami, JFK, or Newark. A visitor with the usual tourist visa was usually admitted for a stay of six months. All the hijackers were admitted for such stays, except one had a student visa and was admitted for a stay of two years. Another only sought and was admitted for a stay of twenty days. When flights foreigners] from abroad arrive at aport of entry in the U.S., the INS guidelines called for a total processing time of about 20 minutes from point of debarkation. In this time, the inspector usually had about one to one and a half minutes to size up the person and make a decision on admissibility and length of stay. The four pilots passed through INS and Customs inspections a total of 17 times before 9/11. Hanjour attended school in the U.S. in three stints during the 1990s. His final arrival was in December 2000, through the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport, from

which he made his way to San Diego. The other three pilots, Atta, al Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah, initially came in May-June 2000 and arrived for the last time between May and August 2001. All made a number of trips abroad during their extended stays in the U.S. Al Shehhi and Atta usually traveled together. The other hijackers were less active travelers. Of the other 15, only Mihdar came, left, and came again. Nawaf al Hazmi [and Mihdar] came in January 2000 with Mihdhar and stayed. Mihdar left in June 2000. Ten of the others came in pairs between April and June 2001. Three more arrived through Miami on May 28. Mihdar returned to the U.S. on July 4, 2001. For all these entries a primary INS inspector would work a lane of incoming travelers and check the people and their passports. They would try to assess the person's demeanor. No one noted any anomalies in these passports. The inspector would use the passport data, especially if it was machine readable (and Saudi passports were) to check various INS and Customs databases. Those databases would show if the person was linked to any prior violations of immigration law. As mentioned above, 5 of the 19 hijackers entered the U.S. more than once. Some of them had violated immigration law, but the INS did not know it. Ziad Jarrah, who later piloted United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania, entered in June 2000 on a tourist visa and then promptly enrolled in flight school. In 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 Mohammed Atta. Both came on tourist visas 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 legal. But they both slightly overstayed their authori/ed periods of" admission [visas] by at least a month. Atta and al Shehhi then left and returned in January 2001, still on their tourist visas, because their applications to change their status were still backlogged for action. But the INS did not know when they had left the U.S. and therefore did not know about the overstays, so that subject did not come up when they sought readmission. Atta and al Shehhi did get some attention, though, because they said they were coming back to finish flight school. This was untrue, since they had finished their prior Flight training and received their commercial pilot licenses the previous month [program]. But 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. Their earlier pending application for a change of status was considered abandoned once they left the U.S. Atta and al Shehhi were referred by the primary inspectors to secondary inspection.

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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 state they do not remember these encounters. The reports indicate that both men told their story about going to flight school and their pending applications for a change of status. In this case the secondary inspectors admitted Atta and al Shehhi as tourists. A hijacker entering the U.S. for the first time, Saeed al Ghamdi, also was referred to secondary inspection when he arrived in late June 2001. He had no address on his 1-94 form. He spoke little English. He had a one-way ticket and about $500. The inspector wondered whether he was a possible intending immigrant. Al Ghamdi finally convinced the inspector that he was a tourist and had enough money. We do know of one success by immigration secondary inspection that affected the 9/11 plot. An [apparent] Al Qa'ida operative, Mohammed al Kahtani. arrived at Orlando airport on August 4, 2001. Mohammed Atta was waiting there to meet him. Kahtani was referred to secondary inspection for reasons similar to the al Ghamdi case mentioned above. He then encountered an experienced and dedicated inspector, Jose MelendezPerez. We will hear his story later this morning. At least six 9/11 hijackers violated immigration laws during their stays in the United States. Earlier we mentioned Ziad Jarrah's failure to adjust his status while he was in flight school and the violations by Atta and al Shehhi. Hani Hanjour came on a student visa in December 2000 but then did not attend a school. Nawaf al Hazmi overstayed his term of admission by nine months. Satam al 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. Both programs had stalled during the 1990s. National security concerns about foreign students are not new. By the late 1980s the INS 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 Commissioner Doris Meissner 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 authorized a system to be installed by 1998, but then did not appropriate the money to build it. The INS nonetheless scraped together $10 million and launched a successful pilot program in the Atlanta area in June 1997. It included 21 schools, including a flight school. Officials at the NSC, at CIA, and at FBI were interested in the project. A year later it was readied for national development.

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The education of foreign students is a multibillion dollar business that serves a variety of academic and commercial interests, as well as important international goals. Advocates of those interests were troubled by this pilot project to track foreign students, arguing that it would be burdensome and costly for all involved. In 1998 the testing of the biometric student ID card was postponed. The project's manager was replaced. The program stalled. Senators took an interest in repealing the 1996 law and [blocking further appropriations] obstructing further INS funding for it. Thus, when the 9/11 hijackers were entering the U.S. in 2000 and 2001, there was no student tracking system available to detect those violations of immigration law. The INS also began working in the late 1980s on a system to track the entry and exit of foreign visitors, especially after the State Department widened the use of its visa waiver program. In 1996 the Congress passed a law requiring the Attorney General to develop an automated entry and exit program to collect records on every alien arriving and departing the United States. Principally concerned about illegal economic migration across the southern border, Congress had appropriated $40 million for this program by 1998. Millions of people cross America's borders. Advocates for border communities were concerned about the adoption of such an entry-exit tracking system, fearing interference with trade and routine movement. INS officials decided to forego such a system at the land borders. They also decided to automate only the entry process, but the first efforts to automate the 1-94 form were not successful. Hence the program Congress had envisioned in 1996 did not exist in 2001. It is notable that, in August 2001, once it was realized that Nawaf al Hazmi also had entered in the United States in January 2000 with Khalid al Mihdar, there was no INS system that could determine whether al Hazmi had left or was still here. The Department of Homeland Security has recently announced the installation of the first stage of new entry-exit tracking system, called US VISIT, at airports and some seaports. We are not yet ready to evaluate the design of this new system. We must also add that any discussion of the enforcement of immigration laws must be seen in the context of a much larger policy debate about immigration policy. Before 9/11 the INS had about 2,000 agents. The top enforcement priority was to remove aliens with criminal records from the United States. Absent some other factor, someone's overstay in the U.S. might not have attracted much enforcement attention, even if a system had been in place to detect it. Our purpose is not to pass judgments about U.S. immigration policy. What we can do is highlight, again, the way those policy choices affected the war on terrorism before 9/11, and can affect the war on terrorism today. Conclusion The Director of the FBI testified that "[e]ach of the hijackers ... came easily and lawfully from abroad." The Director of Central Intelligence described 17 of the 19 hijackers as "clean." We believe the information we have provided today gives the Commission the

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opportunity to reevaluate those statements. We looked at the travel documents that were being used, the visa process, the entries into the U.S., and the compliance with immigration law while the attackers were here. We believe that terrorists are most vulnerable when they move or communicate. The two vulnerabilities are linked, since a common response to concern about communications is to travel and meet individuals in person. Problems in traveling, in turn, can lead to risky communications. This happened in the 9/11 plot, but these vulnerabilities were not fully exploited by our government. hi this statement and another later today, we hope we have shown that [a concern] attention to international rules for legitimate travel is essential for preventing easy m o b i l i t y h\, [not just a matter of protecting our borders]. A comprehensive approach to terrorist mobility, from intelligence collection, to border management and international agreements, will offer excellent opportunities against the criminal document forgers, clandestine travel facilitators and corrupt passport, border, and transportation officials \vho provide the travel infrastructure that enables terrorists to achieve their global reach, [effective intelligence collection and operations against any terrorist organizations that seek global reach.]

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