The Foreign Service Journal, May 2003

SOS for Consular Work Would that AFSA really cared about consular affairs. If the State Department does not get the visa function right soon, it will be long gone to Homeland Security. I saw a virtual Homeland Security attaché at work last summer, when one of the finest consular officers I know was brutally removed from his post by an ambassador (a lawyer!) who, by all accounts, didn’t give a tinker’s dam about due process. His DCM (a consular officer, no less!) was unable to stop it. Where was AFSA on that one? AFSA is right to advise consular officers to obtain liability insurance. And yes, AFSA raised this issue with the secretary and with the Manage- ment Bureau. But what has come of it? I predict fewer and fewer consular officers (other than eunuchs and saints) will take senior jobs. Has AFSA taken a “robust” stand on any individual case? I doubt it, but would be pleased to see any information to the contrary. The Consular Officers Association should be revived — if not as a sub- unit of AFSA, then as a strong, inde- pendent union for consular officers. While I admire Maura Harty’s energy, leadership, loyalty to colleagues and other qualities that led to her appoint- ment to head Consular Affairs, I pre- dict she will not last more than a year. Then we’ll see the bureau handed to some retired general who will not tol- erate the kind of ineffective manage- ment that has characterized CA for too many years. That general also will fail, and the whole shebang will go to Homeland Security. Let us hope I am wrong! Thomas R. Hutson Consul General, retired Acting Section Chief in Tashkent (WAE) AFSA State VP Louise Crane replies: AFSA’s defense of the Bureau of Consular Affairs has been robust. When members of the House moved last July to strip the consular func- tion from State and move it to Homeland Security, AFSA was first off the mark. We sent a three-page letter to Congress explaining why CA should stay at State. The very next day, AFSA’s president was called to the Hill to make the same argu- ment to staff from the House com- mittees working on the legislation. The rest is history, and this history demonstrates that AFSA is exactly the “strong, independent union” Hutson argues consular officers need. When AFSA met with the new Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs, Maura Harty, we urged her to consider extending the U.S. gov- ernment’s subsidy of professional lia- bility insurance to include consular officers who issue visas. She agreed that consular officers should carry this insurance. However, getting them included in the program requires study and might involve a change in the law. As for the incident Hutson describes, if he felt so strongly about it, why didn’t he rise to his col- league’s defense and alert AFSA to this egregious miscarriage of justice at the time? And why does he lack faith in his consular colleagues’ ability to be as protective of national security as their domestic counterparts? AFSA has never ceded its members’ dedi- cation to national security to anyone and has consistently criticized those who have, including the chairmen of the House Judiciary and Government Reform Committees and even the department’s own former inspector general. A Remarkable Man As a former colleague of Brady Kiesling, I was distressed by his resignation from the Foreign Service, but not at all surprised that he did so as a matter of principle. Brady and I worked together in the European Bureau at State during the early 1990s when internal dis- agreement over U.S. policy in the Balkans provoked at least two Foreign Service officers and one civil servant, who were our colleagues, to resign from the State Department. Brady’s resignation reminds me of that diffi- cult time, the lessons that might be learned and — more hopefully — how disastrous situations sometimes gradually improve. L ETTERS M A Y 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 9