Hamza al Ghamdi, a Saudi and one of the “musclemen” on UA Flight 175 that hit the Pentagon, applies for and receives a two-year B-1/B-2 (tourist/business) visa in Saudi Arabia. Typical of the Saudis involved in 9/11, his terrorist background went undetected and he was routinely granted a visa.
9/11 Commission investigators belatedly find out that his application is incomplete. He listed his occupation as “student” but left blank the question asking the street address of his school. The Commission also determines that Ghamdi’s travel patterns indicated that he may have presented a passport containing fraudulent travel stamps associated with al Qaeda when he applied for this visa.
In the investigation, the Commission found out that the State Department consular officer in Riyadh who adjudicated al Ghamdi’s case was not familiar with this kind of passport manipulation. He said that because of the workload, he rarely had time to thumb through passports. Ghamdi was never interviewed, the State Department said, because nothing in his application raised concerns in the mind of the consular officer who adjudicated it and there was no hit in the State Department watchlist (then called the CLASS system).