The Foreign Service Journal, April 2003

on the grounds, relatives, their hus- bands — God knows who else was there behind the scene,” she said. “My daughters had no chance to say what they wanted to say,” she said. Burton wrote a memo in late September to other members of the Government Reform Committee in which he sided with Roush. He said the only person who might be able to communicate effectively with the sisters was their mother, who was not informed of the London visit until afterward. The trip, euphe- mistically described as a “vacation,” was paid for by the Saudi govern- ment. Burton wrote that the trip seemed intended to undermine his mission to Saudi Arabia before their plane had even landed in Riyadh. William McGurn, the Wall Street Journal ’s chief editorial writer, agreed with Burton. He said the London trip should not be construed as the last word because all it did was bring the sisters “out of one controlled environment into another.” Enter Maura Harty Roush, no great admirer of the State Department, was an outspo- ken critic of President Bush’s choice this past summer of career diplomat Maura Harty to replace Mary Ryan as assistant secretary for the Consular Affairs Bureau. Rightly or wrongly, Ryan had been a lightning rod for criticism follow- ing the disclosure that her bureau had issued visas to the Sept. 11 ter- rorists. The opposition of Roush and other parents of abducted children to Harty’s nomination was based mostly on Harty’s role in creating and overseeing the Office of Children’s Issues in the Consular Affairs bureau in the mid-1990s. Abductions are a prime responsibil- ity of that office. Roush told the A P R I L 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 65