Considering that two of the 9/11 pilots, the would-be Wall Street bomber and the Times Square bomber exploited the freewheeling student visa program to enter the country, this is an outrage. The alarming details are featured in a report published this week by a nonpartisan research organization dedicated to studying both legal and illegal immigration.

The probe focuses on the “sleepy agency,” the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP), charged with regulating educational institutions that host foreign students and overseeing the foreigners once they’re here. They range from prestigious Ivy League universities to little-known language schools, corrupt visa mills and the very flight schools that helped train the terrorists who attacked the nation in September 2001.

In all, the SEVP oversees about 1.2 million foreign students and their dependents in addition to more than 10,000 educational institutions. The agency is generously funded with $120 million in fee revenue and a staff of 750. A congressional mandate requires the SEVP to recertify all of its institutions every two years, but it has only bothered to recertify 19% of them. This is especially worrisome because one out of eight institutions that issue foreign student visas has no accreditation, the probe found.

Regardless, SEVP rarely rejects an institution’s application for the authority to issue foreign student visas—known as Form I-20—then it sits on its rump issuing a measly 2.2 indictments a year of “visa mills.” These are shady businesses posing as authentic educational establishments that profit handsomely from collecting tuition in exchange for visas to enter the U.S.   

Here is an example; a few years ago a south Florida language school got busted after easily tricking immigration officials into granting hundreds of visas to foreign nationals who posed as students. Practically none of the 200 foreigners who got the visas ever attended the hokey Florida Language Institute in each of the three years they were enrolled and most remain at large somewhere in the U.S.

In another alarming case, a Pakistani man indicted in Houston for aiding the Taliban and training with firearms for jihad against Americans, entered the U.S. with a student visa. He remained in the country long after the visa expired, became heavily involved in Texas Muslim groups and completed weapons and reconnaissance training at various area locations to terrorize Americans.

Around the same time an admissions clerk in the nation’s largest public university system got caught accepting bribes to fast track foreign students’ applications, many from the Middle East. The woman worked at one of the biggest schools within the California State University system, which has 23 campuses, a total enrollment of about half a million students and a faculty of 46,000.

After 9/11, the State Department vowed to clean up and heavily monitor the fraud-infested foreign student visa program precisely to avoid exploitations similar to the ones listed above. That’s because several of the 9/11 terrorists entered and lived in the U.S. with student visas and one of the attackers had enrolled—but never attended—a northern California language school similar to the one shut down by federal authorities in Florida years later.

An attack on the system, which carries electricity from large central generators to customers throughout the nation, could be devastating because all parts of the economy as well as human health and welfare depend on electricity. A new government report reveals this, stating that “power system disruptions experienced to date in the United States, be they from natural disasters or malfunctions, have had immense economic impacts.”

The audit was conducted by the federally-funded National Research Council to assess the vulnerability of the nation’s power system, which includes lines that span hundreds of miles and key facilities that are unguarded. “Considering that a systematically designed and executed terrorist attack could cause disruptions even more widespread and of longer duration, it is no stretch of the imagination to think that such attacks could produce damage costing hundreds of billions of dollars,” according to the report.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the power grid is being used in ways for which it was not designed. The system was originally designed to meet the needs of individual vertically integrated utilities and is being utilized to move power between regions. As a result many portions of the bulk high-voltage system are “heavily stressed” and especially at risk to multiple failures following an attack.

Additionally, crucial pieces of equipment are decades old and in desperate need of new technology that could sense and control outages and their consequences. In short, the country’s antiquated power grid is in horrible shape and virtually ignored by Homeland Security officials as pa potential target. Terrorists could carry out an attack with “little risk of detection or interdiction,” the report says. “Further well-planned and coordinated attacks by terrorists could leave the electrical power system in a large region of the country at least partially disabled for a very long time.”

There is one tiny bright spot in all this, according to researchers who probed the matter: “International terrorists have shown limited interest in attacking the U.S. power grid.” That doesn’t mean it can’t happen. There are many examples of terrorist and military attacks on power systems elsewhere in the world, the report points out. The lack of a domestic attempt should not be a basis for complacency.

The faulty “life-saving” technology, known as BioWatch, was supposed to detect biological attacks. However, it’s never come close to meeting its goal of accurately detecting pathogens that cause anthrax, tularemia, smallpox, plague and other deadly diseases. Instead it is well known for false alarms and other glitches. In short, it’s turned out to be a worthless money pit for U.S. taxpayers.  

The system became such a joke that state and local authorities didn’t bother ordering evacuations when its alarm triggered. In fact, before DHS pulled the plug in BioWatch a few months ago, it was revealed that federal agencies documented 56 false alarms since 2008. Regardless, DHS kept pouring money into it and even planned to invest billions more to upgrade the inept BioWatch system this year. DHS’s chief medical officer even vouched for the upgrade, telling a congressional committee that it was “imperative to saving thousands of lives.”

This outraged several members of Congress—both Democrats and Republicans—who have demanded accountability from DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. The scrutiny forced DHS to put the scheduled multi-billion-dollar BioWatch upgrade on hold, but that hasn’t made the problem disappear as agency heads would like. Federal lawmakers want internal records that could help answer key questions about this outrageous waste.

In July, two congressional committees investigating the matter asked DHS and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for records related to BioWatch. So far both agencies have failed to comply, forcing the lawmakers who head the panels to write hard-hitting letters to Napolitano and CDC Director Thomas Frieden, reminding of “insufficient responses” to their months-old inquiry.

“The response from DHS to date has been inadequate, raising serious questions about the Department’s willingness to cooperate with efforts to ensure the success of the BioWatch program and transparency about its potential failures,” says the letter to Napolitano. The congressmen chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the oversight and investigations subcommittee.

The lawmakers indicate in the letter that DHS resisted the effort from the start, but that perhaps an agreement for disclosure was reached; “Although DHS raised concerns with our inquiry and the Committee has attempted to accommodate, the Department continues to withhold key documents more than three months after our initial request.”    

Frieden’s letter also says that the CDC gave the committees “insufficient responses” to BioWatch-related requests that date back to July.  The agency is involved because it helps DHS coordinate with state and local health authorities that use BioWatch. Also, if there is a biological attack, the CDC delivers emergency medicines. The congressional committees set a new deadline, November 26, to receive the records. Stay tuned.

Since it was launched in mid-2011, the federally-funded “Text Against Terror” project has produced no credible tips, according to a local newspaper report that reveals the feds have poured $5.8 million into the initiative. Police in New Jersey claim 307 tips have been texted so far and that includes people “testing the system.”

Of the 307 text messages, 71 “referred to something regarding homeland security,” according to the New Jersey police chief quoted in the story. The majority of the 71 texts were investigated, the chief says, and “eliminated as a cause for concern.” In other words, the costly program, funded with a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) public awareness grant, is a cash cow that’s accomplished nothing.

The taxpayer dollars have paid for advertising time on local radio and television as well as fliers and ads on buses and trains. Other expenses include reserving a domain for unlimited texting capability. In a “rare instance” when a tip has required a follow-up, the New Jersey police chief says a state Joint Terrorism Task Force is available to get the job done. It includes state police, New Jersey’s transit and port authority police and the FBI.

News of this disturbing waste of public funds for an ineffective homeland security program comes on the heels of a U.S. Senate report blasting a huge post-9/11 counterterrorism program that’s received north of $300 million but hasn’t provided any useful intelligence. Even scarier is that DHS has covered up the mess from both Congress and the public, according to the bi-partisan investigators who conducted the lengthy probe.

The inept domestic counterterrorism program features fusion centers that are supposed to share terrorism-related information between state, local and federal officials. But nine years and more than $300 million later, the national centers have failed to provide any valuable information, according to Senate investigators.

Instead they have forwarded “intelligence of uneven quality – oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.” A review of more than a year of fusion center reports nationwide determined that they were irrelevant, useless or inappropriate.

None uncovered any terrorist threats nor did they contribute to the disruption of an active terrorist plot, the Senate report says. In fact, DHS officials acknowledged that the information produced by the fusion centers was “predominantly useless.” One branch chief actually said “a bunch of crap is coming through.” Evidently, the same thing applies to the costly New Jersey text experiment.

For more fully documented facts on the Solyndra debacle, Obama’s Watergate: Operation Fast and Furious, the Obama administration’s $20 billion extortion scheme and more order the New York Times best selling book The Corruption Chronicles by Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton here.

View the trailer for Judicial Watch’s upcoming blockbuster documentary The District of Corruption here. 

This went on for months at Honolulu International Airport, according to an audit released by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General. It gets better. Supervisors from the DHS agency in charge, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), admitted they knowingly violated the rules.

In some cases TSA officers “were not screening any bags at all” for overseas flights, TSA Administrator John Pistole admits. Pistole also agrees with many of the abhorrent things his agency watchdog uncovered, acknowledging “widespread and frequent failures” in security at Honolulu Airport. Dozens of TSA officers and supervisors have actually admitted they knew they were blowing off the rules.

So now what? TSA says it fired more than 30 workers, including its Hawaii-based security director. In its report the DHS IG recommends the obvious; that the TSA better supervise and monitor staffers in Honolulu and that supervisors ensure assigned staff are performing screening duties in accordance with all standard operating procedures. This goes without saying and shouldn’t have to be put in writing by an agency watchdog.

The report is simply the latest of many outlining serious problems with airport security. Congress created the monstrous, 65,000-employee TSA after the 2001 terrorist attacks to secure the nation’s transportation system—mainly aviation—yet the agency’s transgressions have been well documented in a variety of federal audits.

Over the summer a congressional audit revealed that the TSA is so inept the country remains inexcusably vulnerable to a repeat of 9/11. That’s because, according to the probe, the TSA fails in one of its key missions; to properly vet foreign flight students before they can take lessons or get a pilot’s license in the U.S. Remember that Islamic terrorists trained as pilots at U.S. aviation schools before intentionally crashing planes into the World

Over the years the TSA has also committed a number of other transgressions, including regularly missing guns and bombs during random tests at major U.S. airports and failing to meet federal standards by not screening cargo and passengers on hundreds of thousands of planes. Last fall a scathing report issued by a House Transportation Committee called for an overhaul of the TSA, saying that the bloated agency has failed miserably to fulfill its mission. The TSA has “grown into an enormous, inflexible and distracted bureaucracy” that has lost its focus on transportation security, according to the committee’s report. It further states that the TSA “lacks administrative competency” and “suffers from bureaucratic morass and mismanagement.”

In another zinger earlier this year, the former head of the TSA called the agency a national embarrassment that’s hopelessly bureaucratic and disconnected from the people it is meant to protect. In a newspaper article promoting his new book about the agency’s inner workings, former TSA had Kip Hawley assures that “airport security in America is broken” yet it has transformed air travel into an “unending nightmare for U.S. passengers and visitors from overseas.”

Scathing details of the wasteful program were uncovered in the course of a two-year bipartisan investigation by a key U.S. Senate oversight committee. This week the panel released a 141-page report blasting one of the country’s largest domestic counterterrorism programs, fusion centers that are supposed to share terrorism-related information between state, local and federal officials.

Nine years and more than $300 million later, the national centers have failed to provide any valuable information, according to investigators. Instead they have forwarded “intelligence of uneven quality – oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.”

 A review of more than a year of fusion center reports nationwide determined that they were irrelevant, useless or inappropriate. None uncovered any terrorist threats nor did they contribute to the disruption of an active terrorist plot, the report says. In fact, DHS officials acknowledged that the information produced by the fusion centers was “predominantly useless.” One branch chief actually said “a bunch of crap is coming through.”

DHS has long known about the program’s failures but has opted to conceal the “serious problems plaguing its fusion center and broader intelligence efforts” from Congress and the American public, the report says. Adding insult to injury, the agency can’t account for a chunk of change (as much as $1.4 billion, according to the report) earmarked for the fusion program and some centers listed by the DHS don’t even exist.  

It gets better; a review of the expenditures of five fusion centers found that federal funds were used to purchase dozens of flat screen TVs, two sport utility vehicles, cell phone tracking devices and other surveillance equipment unrelated to the analytical mission of an intelligence center. “Instead of strengthening our counterterrorism efforts, they have too often wasted money and stepped on Americans’ civil liberties,” said Senator Tom Coburn, the Subcommittee’s ranking member who initiated the investigation.

Getting the records to conduct the probe wasn’t easy. When congressional investigators started digging around for information, DHS went into serious cover-up mode, initially refusing to provide lawmakers with crucial records by asserting that they were protected by privilege, too sensitive to share, by confidentiality agreements, or did not exist at all.

In fact, fake documents can still be used to easily get a valid driver’s license or state-issued identification, according to a federal audit made public this month by the investigative arm of Congress, the Government Accountability Office (GAO). It’s as if the security officials responsible for protecting the country have learned nothing from the horrific 2001 terrorist attacks.

When authorities confirmed that several of the 9/11 hijackers had exploited weaknesses in the way states across the country issue driver’s licenses, a national identification measure (Real ID Act) was enacted to verify the authenticity of every driver’s license applicant. It was recommended by the 9/11 Commission and forces states to require that documents—such as a birth certificate or passport—submitted to get the card are legitimate and that the applicant is in the United States legally.

The goal is to establish a much-needed standardized national driver’s license system that will be less prone to fraud and will prevent terrorists from abusing it as did several of the 9/11 hijackers. New Mexico and Washington State still allow illegal immigrants to get driver’s licenses and Utah offers them a special driving privilege card that can’t be used as official government identification.

Under the Real ID Act, which has been postponed several times, a newly created federal database will link all licensing data that must be checked before states issue new cards. Residents of states that don’t comply with the law will be greatly inconvenienced because their driver’s licenses will not be accepted as proof of identification at airports, federal buildings or when applying for any sort of federal benefits.

The latest news from the Obama Administration is that the law will finally be implemented by 2013, but it has been a work in progress. The feds are supposed to be working with states towards the common goal of fully implementing it. Instead, states are complaining that DHS has failed to provide an adequate verification system to help them enhance security procedures. As a result criminals can easily steal the identity of a person in one state and use it get a license in another because there is no way to consistently detect such cross-state fraud.

In fact GAO investigators conducting the probe were able to use counterfeit out-of-state driver’s licenses and birth certificates to fraudulently obtain licenses in three states under fictitious identities. They used a mixture of names, Social Security numbers, birth dates and counterfeit documents. In two states investigators managed to get two licenses with different names using only one person’s face.

These are the same techniques that the 9/11 hijackers used to get dozens of driver’s licenses and official state ID cards as they planned their attacks. Besides terrorism, the GAO points out that driver’s license fraud can have significant financial and domestic security consequences. In 2010 alone, more than 8 million Americans were victims of identity theft totaling $37 billion, the report says.

DHS doesn’t seem terribly concerned, however. Despite the approaching January 2013 compliance deadline, investigators say the agency has failed to provide timely, comprehensive or proactive guidance on how states can meet the identity verification requirements. Here is the icing on the cake; “DHS did not concur with these recommendations, saying its ongoing efforts are sufficient.”   

Known as BioWatch, the program has turned out to be a worthless money pit for U.S. taxpayers. The mainstream newspaper that first exposed its shortcomings calls it the biodefender that cries wolf because it’s been plagued by false alarms and other failures. It has never come close to meeting its goal of accurately detecting pathogens that cause anthrax, tularemia, smallpox, plague and other deadly diseases.

Instead the technology has produced dozens of false alarms and cannot be counted on to detect a real attack, according to government tests cited in the story. Since 2008 federal agencies have documented 56 BioWatch false alarms so state and local authorities don’t even bother ordering evacuations or taking any other type of action when the system’s alarm is triggered.

Regardless, the DHS decided to pour more money into it, announcing that this year it would invest an additional $3.1 billion to upgrade the inept BioWatch system. In fact, just a few months ago the DHS’s chief medical officer told a congressional committee that the costly upgrade was “imperative to saving thousands of lives.”

However, several members of Congress—both Democrats and Republicans—have demanded accountability from DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano after reading about BioWatch’s many shortcomings in the paper. The various lawmakers have independently sent Napolitano separate inquiries asking for documents on BioWatch and two House subcommittees have scheduled hearings to address the matter this week.

Under fire from the media and now Congress, the DHS has responded with a three-sentence posting to a government website saying that it will essentially delay the multi-billion-dollar BioWatch upgrade. No further explanation was offered, according to a follow-up piece in the paper that broke the story, and a DHS spokesman declined to comment.

The agency was quick to defend its deficient program when the media first published stories criticizing it, however. In a piece posted on its website, the DHS insisted that “unsubstantiated” media reports “incorrectly claimed that BioWatch is prone to false alarms that create confusion among local officials and first responders.” The DHS further assured that more than 7 million tests have been performed by dedicated public health lab officials and there has never been a false positive result.

Among the key goals is to find ways to keep “loose nukes from falling into the hands of terrorists,” according to the State Department. Announced this week, the contest is called the “Innovation in Arms Control Challenge” and the agency asks a simple question: “How can the crowd support arms control transparency efforts?” Officials plan to collect new ideas that can affect the implementation of arms control, verification and nonproliferation policy.

That the world’s most powerful nation enlists help from the general public for such a serious matter may seem downright scary, though also somewhat comical. It might lead some to wonder if the State Department, the executive agency responsible for the country’s international relations, is having difficulty in this area. The winner of the contest will get $10,000 from the government and, though legal U.S. residency is necessary to cash in, all ideas are welcome.

The State Department claims to be looking for creative projects that use commonly available technologies, such as smart phones and tablet applications, to support arms control policy efforts. The agency explains that these are treaties or international arrangements addressing weapons, nonproliferation and confidence building measures. The treaties support mutual security and stability, but sometimes parties violate the provisions. “This is commonly understood as cheating,” the agency explains.  

So, it seems that Uncle Sam needs help from the public to catch cheaters that may be trafficking in weapons of mass destruction. This probably means that the “diplomatic tools” that governments—especially the Obama Administration—use to keep each other in check aren’t working so well. Otherwise, the administration wouldn’t need to offer civilians money to come up with a more effective tool.

The public is challenged with the following question: “Can apps be created to aid on-site inspectors in verifying and monitoring armaments and sensitive material?” It’s not that the State Department can’t figure it out on its own, the contest is in the spirit of “harnessing the ingenuity of the American people,” while the agency reshapes its diplomatic agenda. At least that’s what it claims in its announcement.

 “By creating this platform for public participation, collaboration, and openness, we aim to deepen our understanding and bring to bear the networks, technologies, and human potential of our increasingly inter-dependent and interconnected world,” the State Department further writes in its contest ad.  

So much for the feds protecting nuclear labs from a terrorist attack with topnotch—and costly—security systems; this staggering story comes from the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It’s operated by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which is responsible for the management and security of the country’s nuclear weapons, nuclear nonproliferation and naval reactor programs.

This is serious stuff, which is why Uncle Sam allocates hundreds of millions of dollars to secure facilities like the Y-12 National Security Complex. It has a sophisticated $500 million system that includes high-tech cameras and sensors, according to a news wire dedicated to covering homeland security issues. There is also a substantial staff of guards and the property is surrounded by huge security towers and special fences.

After all, the Y-12 National Security Complex is the country’s main storage facility for bomb-grade uranium and it makes uranium parts for every warhead in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Old weapons are also dismantled at the compound, which claims to “maintain the safety, security and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.” On its website the Y-12 also assures that it reduces the “global threat posed by nuclear proliferation and terrorism” and that it provides “safe and effective nuclear propulsion systems for the U.S. Navy.”

So how did an 82-year-old Catholic nun, a renowned antinuclear activist long on the government’s radar, and her two buddies—one 63 and the other 57—penetrate the facility and go undetected by security for two hours? With flashlights and bolt cutters, according to various news reports. The trio of protesters also splashed blood around the nuclear complex and hung banners outside its walls.

The story was so unbelievable that one the nation’s largest newspapers wrote a profile on the Roman Catholic nun, Sister Megan Rice who has been charged with federal trespassing and destruction of property. She’s been arrested before for acts of civil disobedience, the story says, but this was the biggest security breach in the history of the nation’s atomic complex. This is a huge embarrassment for President Obama, the article points out, reminding that he led a campaign to eliminate or lock down nuclear materials as a way to fight atomic terrorism.