On March 11, a Florida flight school received notice from the Immigration and Naturalization Service that Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi had been granted student visas. This approval came six months to the day after those two applicants drove hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center, using training they had already received from that same flight school. It seemed the pinnacle of cruel timing and absurd bureaucratic bungling had been reached.

Now it has been topped. The Justice Department announced Sunday it is investigating why an INS official improperly granted visas to the 27 crew members of a Russian cargo ship that docked in Norfolk, Va., last week. Nineteen of the crew are Pakistani, four were missing when the ship sailed a few days later and remain at large. One of those four had a previous immigration violation in his INS file, yet it was not discovered until he had disappeared.

The Bush administration and Congress are furious with INS and are engaged in a furious competition with each other over who can express the greatest outrage and propose the most comprehensive rebuilding of the troubled agency. The fury and outrage are warranted. So is the rebuilding, but a blueprint should come first.

There is much wrong with INS, and much of it is the agency’s own fault. INS is famous among federal agencies for lacking strong central leadership – it is said the 33 district directors often ignoring directives from Washington. Despite the information-intensive nature of its business, INS is notoriously behind in information technology – it has spent $800 million during the last decade to upgrade its computer system, yet records still are stored in cardboard boxes and Congress has never received a report on how the money was spent. The old maxim that federal bureaucrats can never be fired, but instead are reassigned, must have been coined at INS.

Much of what is wrong at INS, however, is not the agency’s fault. The nation wants to control illegal immigration. At the same time it wants commerce – goods and people, from farm-workers to software engineers – to flow freely. Now it wants protection from terrorists. INS’s marching orders are a hash of mixed messages.

One example: Two years ago, INS responded to congressional concerns about abuse of student visas with an ambitious plan to tighten controls on foreign nationals wanting to study here. Colleges and universities, fearing the loss of students who pay full retail tuition, lobbied Congress heavily and the plan was killed.

Another: In 1986, in response to intense lobbying by the travel industry, Congress created a program that waived visa requirements for travelers from certain countries. Over the protests of INS officials, that program now has grown to cover 28 countries. Zacarias Moussaoui of France – the alleged 20th hijacker – and Richard Reid of Great Britain – the accused shoe-bomber – took advantage of that program.

And another: For years, INS has complained that its inspectors at airports and border crossings were denied access to the State Department’s consular database, making it virtually impossible to detect altered or forged visas. Only after Sept. 11 was this access granted.

The two leading proposals to rebuild INS start with first tearing it down. Many in Congress favor abolishing INS entirely and doling out its various functions to other agencies. The White House’s more modest idea is to of split the agency into two parts – one to handle immigration services, the other to enforce immigration law.

A third option goes in the opposite direction. Rather than breaking immigration functions into smaller parts, a new cabinet-level agency of immigration affairs would be created, consolidating tasks now handled by various agencies – visas (State Department), airport inspections (INS), shoreline security (Coast Guard), foreign-worker documentation (Labor Department) and refugee resettlement (Health and Human Services).

What all of these proposals have in common is that none will work unless guided by a coherent and consistent immigration policy. Developing one should be a priority for Congress and the White House, now that their outrage has been safely vented.