Can 11 Egyptian students really enter the U.S. and vanish?
Yes, they can. It is hard to believe that something like this could happen five years after Sept. 11, but federal officials admit that 11 Egyptian exchange students who were supposedly headed to Montana State University actually landed in New York July 29. And then they simply vanished.
The FBI warns that none of the 11 young men, aged 17 to 22, have any “known associations to any terrorist groups,” but warns that “if found they should be approached with caution.” That careful phrasing suggests the FBI knows more about these Egyptian “students” than it admits.
The truth is, however, far more likely to be that neither the FBI nor federal immigration officials can have much confidence in what they think they know about these individuals. Even the 11 names made public by the FBI are suspect, because terrorist groups are quite capable of stealing identities and personal histories of individuals born in foreign lands to facilitate embedding in America.
What is beyond question is that the American people should have zero confidence that the current immigration screening system is even remotely capable of consistently identifying and stopping those seeking to enter the U.S. in order to kill Americans or otherwise commit acts of terrorism.
Consider these horrifying facts presented to Congress July 27 by Michael Maxwell, former Director of Security and Investigations for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency in the Department of Homeland Security:
» The DHS Inspector General recently reported that, from 2001 through the first half of 2005, 45,000 high risk aliens from state sponsors of terrorism and special interest countries have been released into American communities because of the inability of DHS to conduct a thorough background check on aliens.
» An internal USCIS document reveals a backlog, as of late September 2005, of more than 41,000 immigration applications with IBIS (i.e. national security/criminal records) hits requiring further investigation.
» Senior-level USCIS staff have information indicating that suspected terrorists have established bogus educational institutions in multiple U.S. communities and used the student visa program to move recruits into the United States.
If Maxwell is right about the sorry state of U.S. immigration programs — and we are convinced he is — it is quite possible that these 11 Egyptian students are merely the latest in a long parade of terrorist agents posing as students, businessmen, engineers, political refugees and aspiring airline pilots who have entered America and then disappeared. At some point, they expect to receive orders to carry out assassinations, suicide bombings, sabotage, espionage or other forms of chaos and destruction throughout the American homeland.
Rep. Edward Royce, R-Calif., chairs the House subcommittee that heard Maxwell’s testimony (which was also presented to a Senate panel headed by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa). After listening to Maxwell, Royce concluded: “The system, it’s clear, is rigged to approve immigration applications and the system is rigged to short change security.”
Is it any wonder that those 11 Egyptian “students” were so easily able to vanish? And Congress and the president are on recess?
