With what color should terrorist visas be coded?

It was an irony in the worst possible taste. But more significantly, the announcement that the Office of Homeland Security would be color-coding its terrorism alerts coming within hours of the revelation that the Immigration and Naturalization Service had finally gotten around to notifying a Florida flight school that visas had been approved for two of the Sept, 11 terrorists makes clear how much more must be done to make Americans safe.
And having President Bush tell reporters that he "was stunned and not happy, & quot; after being told of the incident isn't quite the reassurance the American public might need.
Unless the Bush administration wants to be seen as focusing more on symbols than substance, it will be far more concerned about the failed bureaucracy of the INS than about marketing the all-new five bold-color marker set for law enforcement agencies in a community near you. Martha Stewart would have had better sense.
It will make little difference if terrorism comes with a blue, green or yellow tag, if the INS can't possibly keep track of those already in the United States who might inflict more devastation in this country.
Inadequacies: Of course, the immigration agency's systems are woefully inadequate, and of course, the agency is understaffed. Still, if it takes six months for visa notifications to be sent out -- and then to have them sent for dead murderers -- the problem goes beyond funding new technology and increasing staff. Congress must demand a management team that can change the INS mindset from one of pushing papers to one of protecting the nation.
Log on to the INS website and you'll be welcomes yo the "Welcome to the Quality and Integrity home page where you can find information about how INS promotes economy, efficiency, and effectiveness within the INS and deals with and processes complaints surrounding employee misconduct."
Not this time.
Bush said, & quot;This is an interesting wake-up call for those who run the INS. It needs to be modernized so we know who's coming and who's going out and why they're here. & quot;
Let's call that an understatement.
There are millions of undocumented aliens in the United States that the INS has no way of identifying, a backlog of hundreds of thousands of citizenship applications, a myriad of woefully obsolete computer systems that can't interface with one another, and a recently appointed commissioner who doesn't have the tools he needs to overhaul this lumbering monstrosity.
It's all very well for the White House, the attorney general, and Congress to be up in arms over this most unwelcome anniversary gift's arriving on March 11, exactly six months after the two killers were part of the plot to take down the World Trade Center. And we should all be glad to hear that INS Commissioner James Ziglar expects to have a new system to track foreign students in place by January 2003.
But what's supposed to happen in the until then? Adequate homeland security does not come cheap. Let's hear no more talk of tax cuts until the United States can pay for making the nation safe. That's a constitutional obligation.