Writer Joel Mowbray explains how the State Department is still fighting reform of the visa process in a column today. He points toward a recent letter sent by Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage to the new Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force (FTTTF). The letter says the Justice Department must provide specific reasons for rejecting a visa application on national security grounds or the visa will be approved. This means a terrorist could get a visa if the Justice Department does not expose potentially sensitive intelligence information. According to Mowbray, "The law is unequivocal: If someone is deemed a threat to national security, that person can be denied a visa. State, however, finds the law inconvenient, so it intentionally distorts the law." Armitage wrote, "[I]f there are no grounds under the law on which to deny an alien a visa, the consular officer is required to issue a visa." Mowbray asserts that, "This is simply not true. . . . State is fighting for the rights of suspected terrorists to enter the United States at the same time that it is fighting in Congress to hang on to the authority over visa issuance."

Former Foreign Service officer E. Wayne Merry makes a similar point in the Washington Post today. "The FBI and CIA have, at least in part, acknowledged their shortcomings in the Sept. 11 disaster, but the State Department remains in double denial: denial that it had a role in the failure to prevent the terrorists' entering this country and denial that it can and must improve the way visas are granted....Citizens now have the right to expect our highest public institution, Congress, will ensure that a visa is no longer an invitation to crime or terrorism but is again an instrument of American sovereign authority and the first line of national defense." Merry argues that all visa powers should be taken away from the State Department, although he doesn't explain why that would offer greater protection to the American public.