Others have commented on this, but I can’t let it pass. The INS has belatedly issued student visas to Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi to take flying lessons.

They are both, of course, six months deceased, having notoriously flown airplanes into the World Trade Center, sans such visas.

In a related story, President Bush is angry about it.

“The president is very displeased. He wants to know how and why this happened and he wants it fixed,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. “This is unacceptable.”

Former INS District Director Tom Fischer told CNN that “the letters should never have been sent.”

No kidding?

Their delivery, he said, was “a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing.”

Can someone remind me, again, just why it was so important and urgent to federalize airport security?