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Flight School Fiasco: No Lessons Learned After 9/11
Thousands of foreign students are in U.S. flight schools illegally. Annie Jacobsen exclusively reveals an internal memo on the Transport

March 6, 2008 - by Annie Jacobsen

Most remember the shocking revelation.

Six months after Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi piloted hijacked planes into the World Trade Center, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) notified a Venice, Florida flight school that the men had been approved for visas.

The two terrorists were already dead, and so were the nearly 3,000 people they’d killed. The INS was caught with its pants down. There was no way for the unpopular agency to explain itself out of its horrific and embarrassing failure. Yet INS spokesman Russ Bergeron certainly tried when he said, “It does serve to illustrate what we have been saying since 1995 — that the current system for collecting information and tracking foreign students is antiquated, outdated, inaccurate and untimely.â€