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Today's joke:

WASHINGTON -- Six months to the day after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a Florida flight school where two of the suicide hijackers trained received letters from the Immigration and Naturalization Service indicating that the men had been approved for student visas.

Rudi Dekkers, president of Huffman Aviation in Venice, Fla., said the INS documents certifying the visa status of hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi arrived in Monday's mail. The documents came nearly eight months after the federal government approved the pair's request to stay in the USA to take flight courses at Huffman.

The student visas had been approved several weeks before Atta and Al-Shehhi piloted two hijacked jets into the World Trade Center towers and killed nearly 3,000 people. When the visas were approved last summer, neither Atta nor Al-Shehhi was on terrorist watch lists maintained by U.S. intelligence agencies.

But for the INS, the delay in notifying Huffman about the visa approvals was an embarrassing reminder of the inefficiency that has long plagued U.S. immigration offices. Critics say such problems made it particularly easy for foreign terrorists to enter the USA.

''I was surprised to see the letters,'' says Dekkers, whose school was under no legal obligation to verify the immigration status of the students. ''I didn't know when they walked in the door (that Atta and Al-Shehhi) were the animals and beasts they proved to be.''

INS officials say the letters sent to the flight school should have been stopped once authorities realized that Atta and Al-Shehhi were among the suicide terrorists. They acknowledge that such glaring mismanagement of documents underscores the need for the U.S. government to improve its tracking of immigrants.

''Perhaps this embarrassing situation will emphasize the importance of getting a computerized (document) system on line,'' INS spokesman Russ Bergeron said Tuesday, referring to a $34 million system scheduled to be in place soon.

The journey of the hijackers' INS paperwork began in August 2000, when the two men applied to change their visa status from tourists to students in preparation for classes at Huffman. INS records indicate that Atta, a 33-year-old Egyptian, was approved for a student visa on July 17, 2001. Al-Shehhi, 23, of the United Arab Emirates, was approved on Aug. 9, 2001.

Letters of approval were mailed to both men at addresses in Florida. But according to INS procedure, copies of student visa papers are issued to schools only after the INS updates its computer records from the information contained on the original documents -- in this case, the visitors' visas that had been held by Atta and Al-Shehhi.

The papers sent to Huffman last week had been at a document processing facility in London, Ky., where contractors for the INS have been updating the agency's records and reducing a backlog of tens of thousands of visa applications.

Bergeron says the contractors in Kentucky were never told to cancel delivery of Atta's and Al-Shehhi's papers. He said the records do not indicate any attempt by the hijackers to circumvent the immigration system. Rather, the men's attention to detail reflects what authorities view as their effort not to attract attention as they prepared to attack.

Dekkers said the INS papers brought a strange sense of relief. ''It's important that people know that we didn't do anything wrong here,'' he said. ''We couldn't know who these people were. The government didn't appear to know, either.''