President Bush almost tossed up his coffee when he learned that the Florida flight school where two infamous 9-11 terrorists sought classes just received a letter this month from the INS saying they were A-OK to enroll. No kidding. Such foolishness is hard for Americans everywhere to swallow.

It would be laughable were the implications not so scary.

Here we have the White House chief of the Office of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, color-coding our terrorist threats  green is for low risk of attack; red we’re in for big trouble  into five levels for public consumption. As if this were to make us feel any safer. It gives new meaning to the term “dumbing down of America.”

Is this all the Bush administration has to show for homeland defense six months after the worst terrorist attacks on our nation?

On the same day that Ridge was unveiling his ranking system  right now, you must know that the nation faces a yellow alert, which means the threat of attacks is “significant” but not red-level “severe”  CNN alerted Americans to a more ominous problem: a lackadaisical Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Of course, the INS approval of student visas for Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, two of the terrorists who crashed hijacked planes into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, actually occurred a month or two before those horrendous acts. And INS officials say there was no information implicating either man as belonging to terrorist organizations.

As Rudi Dekkers, owner of Huffman Aviation in Venice, Fla., points out, “When they hit the buildings, they were approved to be here.”

Yep. It only took more than six months for the INS’ processing center, run by a private contractor in Kentucky, to send the student-visa approval information to the Florida flight school. The problem, INS officials say, is an antiquated system that still depends on loads of paperwork and only recently has started to come online into the computer age. We might as well be living in a banana republic.

What will it take to get our nation responding quickly and our agencies working together?

If the attacks on the Pentagon in Washington and the World Trade Center in New York weren’t enough of a wake-up call, then what must Americans bear next?

The INS has been overworked and understaffed for years. It’s an agency with conflicting roles. It’s supposed to protect U.S. borders from the bad guys and jail the illegal immigrants until they can be shipped back from whence they came. But it’s also supposed to handle all the paperwork for those good immigrants who want to become naturalized U.S. citizens.

Too often, the good people get caught up in the INS’ witchhunt for the bad guys, and the bad guys  well, we know what happens to them. They get visas to crash into our buildings.

Maddening enough for immigrants who are trying to work and get their papers in order in this country. They’re the ones now paying the price for the INS foul-ups. They’re the ones who can’t get a drivers license in Florida even when they technically are legal, simply waiting for the final approval from the INS.

That approval  it’s in the mail coming from banjo-strumming Kentucky?  can take months, though. Meanwhile, those are the foreign workers, most of them from Mexico and Latin America, who are abused by sinister employers here willing to get slave labor out of desperate people.

The president, his attorney general and the homeland security chief all promise that this nonsense will end and the INS will be fixed. The administration’s critics, meanwhile, are calling for a crackdown on student visas, even though foreign students aren’t the real problem. Terrorists are the problem, and a majority of the 9-11 terrorists weren’t here as students, they simply entered as tourists.

We can tighten the universities’ reporting of foreign students to the government. We can revamp the INS and better patrol our borders. But we can’t do any of it well if politicians in both major parties keep pointing the finger at the other.

We need to work together, as Americans first, holding up our civil liberties and freedom as the example to all. Instead, we seem willing to negotiate our freedoms away for the sake of appearances while a sluggish homeland-defense system exposes the truth that we’re as inept as we are color-coded.