Consular officials liken visa critics to neo-Nazis

High-level State Department officials have circulated e-mails accusing Rep. Dan Burton and Bush administration officials of McCarthyism and neo-Nazism for criticizing the visa system's failure to keep the September 11 terrorists out of the country.

The internal e-mails, copies of which were obtained by The Washington Times, come as the State Department announced that it has reprimanded two staffers for earlier e-mails criticizing a member of Congress.
Chuck Keil, the consul general in Rome, complained to several State Department officials — including Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman — that congressional critics have been saying terrorists "were able to enter the United States due to lack of vigilance or downright negligence."
"All of this smacks of the days of Senator Joe McCarthy, when a witchhunt conducted in the name of protecting Americans from the communist menace ruined the careers of Foreign Service Officers who had allegedly lost China to the Reds, or else helped Communist and Communist sympathizers obtain visas to enter the United States," he wrote.
Mr. Burton, Indiana Republican and chairman of the Government Reform Committee, "slanders [ousted Consular Affairs chief] Mary Ryan, the Bureau of Consular Affairs, Civil and Foreign Service employees of the State in Washington and overseas through a litany of half-truths and outright canards that would have done [McCarthy lawyer] Roy Cohn proud," Mr. Keil wrote.
One recipient of the Keil e-mail, Colombia A. Barrosse, is another consular official. She replied in an e-mail to some, but not all, of the same people that firing the popular Miss Ryan — after 36 years in the Foreign Service — makes it more likely that the visa function will be removed from State and given to the new Department of Homeland Security.
"We assume Mary's replacement will not be a career officer with a balanced approach but a neo-Nazi who views us as incompetent or criminal," wrote Mrs. Barrosse, who works in Washington. She declined to speak to The Washington Times.