By Debbie Schlussel

It’s good to know that, despite America falling back into a deep sleep after 9/11, authorities are still keeping their eyes on Muslims and flight schools, after ignoring flight school owners’ pleas and tips before the Al-Qaeda attacks.  A Southern California woman ran a flight school scam, illegally helping to bring foreign nationals–many of them Muslims from Egypt–to the U.S. via visa fraud.  Congrats to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who busted this case wide open. The thing is that, in many cases like this, the students then disappear somewhere into the American abyss, and ICE never finds them, so don’t believe the claims by ICE and the news reports that there is no national security problem here. There is. Note that the story doesn’t say whether all the students had been located, detained, and put in deportation proceedings. That’s because they probably haven’t found many of them.

Federal agents on Wednesday arrested a Lake Elsinore woman accused of bringing foreign students to train at her flight school on fraudulent visas without government authorization.

Karena Chuang, 28, was arrested at a friend’s house in Rancho Cucamonga, charged with visa fraud for allegedly enrolling students from Egypt, Sri Lanka and Taiwan at her La Verne-based flight school, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said.

“It is a huge vulnerability,” said Claude Arnold, special agent in charge of ICE Homeland Security Investigations in Los Angeles. “If these people aren’t going through the proper screening process that is required by the U.S. government, then we don’t know their intentions, we don’t know their origins.”

Agents raided the flight school, Blue Diamond Aviation, confiscating boxes of material as evidence.

Investigators said Chuang assisted foreign students in applying to government-approved flight schools knowing they would instead enroll in her program, which was not approved.

The department says more than a dozen students gained entry into the U.S. under the scheme.

The alleged scheme began to unravel in June 2010 after U.S. embassy officials in Cairo got conflicting statements from two potential flight students.

“We do know for sure that the students were coached by her not to say that you’re going to be attending Blue Diamond, her flight school, because they would be questioned by officials at the embassy,” Arnold said.

The agency says they have not uncovered any threat to national security as a result of the fraud. Arnold said none of the foreign students who trained at Chuang’s school since 2006 had ties to terrorism.

Uh-huh. Riiight. And they know this because . . . ? Didn’t he just say that we don’t know their intentions or origins? And, by the way, since she got these students to bait-and-switch the U.S. with their flight school applications, the government would have had no way to know where they were or how to track them, as they went to her school, instead of those which they were supposed to attend.

It isn’t the first time flight schools have let foreigners train without proper authorization. In 2010, a flight school in El Cajon, Calif., pleaded guilty to creating fake visa documents for foreign students and a Massachusetts flight school was found to have trained illegal immigrants from Brazil.

If convicted, Chuang could face a maximum sentence of up to 10 years in prison, according to federal prosecutors.

Don’t worry. Someone will quickly come in to fill her shoes in the visa fraud industry. There are plenty more like her operating with impunity right now. Muslims should learn to fly somewhere else. If only we had the gumption to take that stand.  Oh, and get this, apparently some dumbass liberal professor forgot about the flight school lessons obtained by the 9/11 hijackers:

John Mueller, a political science professor at Ohio State University, said he believed training foreigners at unauthorized schools to fly small planes posed a minimal security threat and that maneuvering a larger commercial aircraft would take a tremendous amount of skill that aspiring terrorists don’t likely have. . . .

The training offered at Blue Diamond involved smaller aircraft but a majority of Egyptian students who enrolled there planned to continue onto another flight school to learn how to fly larger planes, said Virginia Kice, an ICE spokeswoman.

Um, Professor Mueller, apparently you forgot the 9/11 Muslim hijackers who took flight lessons on how to steer a plane, but not how to take off or land. Clearly, it didn’t take a tremendous amount of skill. Numbskull. Yup, this idiot is “teaching” your kids.