The Undocumented Mark Steyn (16 page)

And maybe someone says, “Well, you know, boss, maybe leaning on Deena Gilbey really isn’t where we ought to be concentrating our energies
right now. I mean, we did after all issue visas to every single one of those nineteen terrorists. Given that the fellows we let in then went on to murder Mrs. Gilbey’s husband, should we really be adding insult to the great injury we’ve done her?”

But, if anybody did say that, he was presumably put on sick leave, and the rest of the feds went back to business as usual.

As on September 11 itself, when the FBI, INS, FAA, and the other hotshot money-no-object acronyms flopped out big time, it was the local guys who came through. The Police Chief of Chatham, New Jersey, was outraged by the Government’s harassment of Mrs. Gilbey, and the British press picked it up, and eventually it came to the attention of the President, who in late October signed special legislation for the hundreds of law-abiding widows and children in Mrs. Gilbey’s position.

And then a week or so back, it all came up again. It turned out that the President’s special legislation designed to cover Mrs. Gilbey’s situation did not, in fact, cover it. The U.S.A. Patriot Act allows foreign-born widows and children of 9/11 to apply for permanent residency—the famous “Green Card.” But Mrs. Gilbey was told by the INS she didn’t qualify because “her paperwork had not reached a certain level of the process.”

Look at that phrase. Cut it out. Enlarge it. Pin it to the wall. Suspend it from the ceiling, lie on the carpet, and try to figure out what it means. It is, as they say in Mrs. Gilbey’s native land, bollocks. It is bollocks forward, sideways, and back-to-front. It is bollocks on stilts. It does not address the reality of the situation—that Mrs. Gilbey is the mother of American citizens, that her husband died saving the lives of American citizens, that he is buried in a vast mass grave on American soil, that his relict is no threat to anyone, and that the sensible thing to say is, “Oh, let’s just stamp the thing and give it to her. Every minute we waste on Deena Gilbey is a minute we could be devoting to the guys we should really be looking into.”

It is the kind of bollocks that makes you wish that Mohammed Atta, to whom the United States Government did give a visa, had hung a left at the
last minute and ploughed through whichever office the INS twerp who wrote that letter was working in.

The reason “the paperwork had not reached a certain level” was because, after applying for his Green Card way back in 1994, Paul Gilbey had then changed jobs—which meant he had to go to the back of the line and start from scratch. At the INS, having different U.S. companies competing for your services is cause for punishment. Regular folks don’t change jobs every decade, they join a government agency when they’re twenty-one and stay there for the next four decades until they retire on lavish benefits at taxpayer expense. So the Gilbey paperwork, having painstakingly climbed to the second level of the INS ladder, was now back down the garbage chute at the bottom.

Facing deportation yet again, Mrs. Gilbey this time lined up the support of not just the Chatham Police Chief but also New Jersey Senator Jon Corzine, Tony Blair, and even Hillary Rodham Clinton. And so last week it was announced that, barring the INS discovering further pretexts for deporting her, she’ll be allowed to stay.

Meantime, while Mrs. Gilbey has been frantically petitioning senators and prime ministers, Saudi citizens have been enjoying the benefits of a service called “Visa Express,” under which they can be processed for admission to the United States without having to be seen by any U.S. consular official. Instead, they are, to all intents and purposes, approved by their Saudi travel agent. Fifteen out of nineteen of the September 11 terrorists were Saudis. Yet ten months after September 11 this program was still up and running, still shoveling out pre-approved visas.

Visa Express was a pilot program, unique to Saudi Arabia. But, even before September 11, why would you pilot a fast-track admissions program in a country profoundly anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, anti-western? What do the American people gain by it?

The State Department now claims to have shut the program down, but not before revealing the surreal immigration preferences of the United States Government: Give them the best part of a decade and they cannot complete
Paul Gilbey’s Green Card application, but give ’em two minutes and the word of a Saudi travel agent and they’re happy to issue fast-track visas to three of Mr. Gilbey’s murderers—Salem al-Hamzi, Khalid al-Mihdar, and Abdul Aziz al-Omari. Mr. Gilbey’s widow needs to go through CIA clearance to remain in the country, but no such burdens weigh on the compatriots of his murderers. Indeed, the Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said on June 10, 2002, that even if the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force believes “the applicants may pose a threat to national security,” that’s “insufficient to permit a consular official to deny a visa.”

You can fly a jet at full speed into the bureaucratic mindset but it just bounces off, barely felt. The INS has no real idea who’s within America’s borders. One reason they have no idea is because it takes them a decade to process a routine Green Card application by a highly-employable, high-earning, law-abiding citizen of America’s closest ally. That’s a joke, and it brings the entire system into disrepute. But that’s big, sprawling, inefficient, your-paperwork-has-not-reached-a-certain-level government for you. The INS failed to get Messrs al-Hamzi, al-Mihdar, and al-Omari, but they did get Deena Gilbey. Congratulations, guys.

We talk about government “intelligence failure” as if it’s something to do with misreading satellite intercepts between Peshawar and Aden. But the “intelligence failure” of September 11 is more basic than that, a failure of intelligence in the moderately-competent grade-school sense.

And nothing we’ve learned in the last ten months—from Mohammed Atta’s posthumous flight-school visa issued by the INS six months after he’d reduced the World Trade Center to rubble to last week’s very belated suspension of the Saudi fast-track—suggests that federal officialdom has changed or is even willing to change. Paul Gilbey is buried in the dust of Ground Zero. At the very least America should also bury with him the bureaucratic inertia symbolized by his decade-long Green Card application.

1
    
The INS was dismantled by the Homeland Security Act of 2002, and in 2003 its responsibilities were divided among three agencies of the new Department of Homeland Security.

CHOC AND AWE

The Corner
, April 24, 2011

I AM LOOKING
this bright Easter morn at a Department of Homeland Security “Custody Receipt for Seized Property and Evidence.” Late last night, crossing the Quebec/Vermont border, my children had two boxes of “Kinder Eggs” (“Est. Dom. Value $7.50”) confiscated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Don’t worry, it’s for their own safety. I had no idea that the United States is the only nation on the planet (well, okay, excepting North Korea and Saudi Arabia and one or two others) to ban Kinder Eggs. According to the CBP:

         
Kinder Chocolate Eggs are hollow milk chocolate eggs about the size of a large hen’s egg usually packaged in a colorful foil wrapper. They are a popular treat and collector’s item during holiday periods in various countries around the world, including those in Europe, South America and even Canada. A toy within the egg is contained in an oval-shaped plastic capsule. The toy requires assembly and each egg contains a different toy. Many of the toys that have been tested by the Consumer Product Safety Commission in the past were determined to present a choking hazard for young children.

And yet oddly enough generations of European and Latin American children remain unchoked. The very name “Kinder” is German for “children.” (There was a BBC telly series a couple of decades back called
Die Kinder
—“the children”—whose title initially confused me because I assumed it was some sort of
Die Hard
sequel, with Bruce Willis re-tooled for the caring Nineties.)

Gotta love that “even Canada,” by the way: Is that an implied threat that Kinder Egg consumption is incompatible with participation in NORAD or membership of NAFTA?

         
The Food and Drug Administration has issued an import alert for Kinder Eggs, because they are a confectionery product with a non-nutritive object imbedded in it. As in years past, CBP, the Food and Drug Administration and CPSC work in close collaboration to ensure the safety of imported goods by examining, sampling and testing products that may present such import safety hazards. Last year, CBP officers discovered more than 25,000 of these banned chocolate eggs. More than 2,000 separate seizures were made of this product.

Let’s see—CBP, FDA, CPSC. I’m impressed it takes a mere three agencies from the vast alphabet soup of federal regulation to keep us safe from the menace of confectionery products with non-nutritive embeds. As Janet Napolitano would say, the system worked. I hope America’s chocolate soldiers are enjoying their seized eggs this Easter.

Bonus prediction: What’s the betting that the first jihadist to weaponize a Kinder Egg makes it on to the plane?

P.S.: My kids asked the CBP seizure squad if they could eat the chocolate in front of the border guards while the border guards held on to the toys to prevent any choking hazard—and then, having safely consumed the chocolate, take the toys home as a separate item. This request was denied, and, indeed, my ten-year-old was informed that by proposing it he was obstructing a federal official in the course of his duties.

Could have been worse. Could have been a three-hundred-dollar fine, plus a $250 fee for seized-egg storage.

P.P.S.: The real choking hazard is the vise-like grip of government.

In the years since, the Kinder Egg Orange Alert has become an Easter tradition in my family. In 2014, heading back from Montreal late one night a couple of days before Good Friday, I pulled up in front of the guard on the U.S. side of the Quebec/Vermont border. He asked the usual questions, and then said, “Are you bringing anything back from Canada?”

“Oh, just some Easter eggs,” I said, breezily—and instantly regretted it
.

The hitherto somewhat lethargic agent sprang visibly alert. “Easter eggs?” he said, with a palpable menace in his voice
.

“Not Kinder Eggs,” I replied, trying very hard not to roll my eyes. “Just regular home-made Québécois Easter chocolate
.”

He de-bristled, and waved us through. “Close call, Dad,” said my daughter
.

Indeed. I’d smuggle in a dirty nuke before I’d risk another Kinder Egg in the car. My children are older now, and can take or leave them. But, precisely because of that CBP guard, they make a point of always eating some whenever we’re north of the border. I’m worried that, by making Kinder Eggs cool and transgressive, the Department of Homeland Security has increased the exposure of my children to this “choking hazard.” Maybe I can get in on a class-action law suit against DHS. . . .

THE ALL-SEEING NANNY

Maclean’s
, September 3, 2009

TO PASSING TOURISTS
, catching yet another government poster apprising you of electronic surveillance looming in the distance, the initials “CCTV” can be oddly reminiscent of “CCCP,” the Cyrillicized abbreviation for the USSR. In fact, CCTV is the United Kingdom’s ubiquitous acronym. Nobody needs to be told what it stands for. It accompanies you as you make your way to work, whether by car, bus, train, or taxi. And it’s there waiting for you at the end of your shift, as you go to buy your groceries or head to the movies. Last year, when David Davis resigned from the shadow cabinet because of the remarkably bipartisan insouciance about the “erosion of fundamental British freedoms,” he claimed there was “a CCTV camera for every fourteen citizens.” The British, according to another well-retailed line, are apparently the most video-monitored people in the world other than the North Koreans. In an aside in his new novel
The Defector
, the American author Daniel Silva lays out the background: