WASHINGTON: Faced with the embarrassing news that a Florida flight school had belatedly received visa approval notices for two dead Sept 11 hijackers, the Immigration and Naturalization Service hastened to make two points.

First, officials said, the visas were actually approved before the terror attacks. Second, officials had no knowledge that the two men were connected to terrorist groups at the time.

Left out of the response were all the other ways in which the US immigration system stumbled in the case of Mohammed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehh — as it does in tens of thousands of other student visa cases every year.

The tale of Atta and Al-Shehhi underscores the extent to which the INS’s antiquated and sluggish visa system not only fails to work properly, but also is really not expected to, according to immigration experts, educators and former INS officials.

“This kind of thing happens all the time to people who aren’t terrorists, but then it’s not news,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a frequent critic of the INS.

As of last fall, nearly 660,000 foreign nationals held student visas in the United States, including more than 10,000 enrolled in flight training, trade schools and other non-academic programmes, according to INS statistics.

But critics charge that INS officials have little grasp of the foreign student population, including how many are taking classes illegally or while out of status. Another Sept 11 hijacker — Hani Hanjour, who piloted the plane that hit the Pentagon — entered the United States on a student visa but never showed up for class.

These and other problems after Sept 11 prompted the Justice Department’s inspector general, Glenn Fine, to launch a wide- ranging probe of the student visa system last fall. In the furore after Monday’s revelations, Fine was also assigned to investigate the Atta and Al-Shehhi cases after President Bush ordered an investigation.

Immigration officials, in one of their earlier statements on the hijackers’ mix-up, blamed much of the problem on an “antiquated, inaccurate, untimely” record-keeping system that still relies to a large extent on paper files.

The INS is in the process of implementing the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, a computerized system that was mandated by Congress in 1996 but has been plagued with delays since.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-California, said in an interview last week that Congress has allocated 800 million dollars to the agency over the last 10 years to upgrade its computer system. But she said despite repeated requests, she has never received a report on how the money has been spent.

Interested parties, including colleges and immigration watchdogs, disagree on whether the automated system will solve many of the chronic problems.

“The (current) system is extraordinarily complicated, very paper-intensive and very, very slow,” said Terry Hartle, senior vice president at the American Council on Education, which represents about 18,000 schools.

But Eric H. Holder Jr., who was deputy to former attorney general Janet Reno, said the delayed student visa notices are the result of more than an antiquated paperwork system.

“There were lots of mandates and administration initiatives that never were implemented,” Holder said.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service.