Kerry’s Scariest Choice
Joan Swirsky
Tuesday, Aug. 24, 2004
After less than a year of campaigning, John Kerry has already given the American public a chilling preview of the misguided choices he would make in the unlikely event he is elected president.
Kerry hired leftist Joseph Wilson – proven liar – as a foreign-policy advisor, only to dismiss the Pinocchio-like former ambassador after the bi-partisan Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously discredited his claims that there were no attempts by Iraq to buy uranium from Niger and that his wife had no role in getting the CIA to send him to Niger.
Kerry hired leftist Sandy Berger – self-admitted pilferer – as another of his foreign-policy advisors, only to dismiss him after the former national security advisor under Clinton was caught appropriating secret documents from the National Archives.
Kerry hired leftist Dr. Susan E. Rice to replace Berger. A former NSA advisor to Berger, former secretary of state for African affairs under Clinton, and former advisor to Howard Dean, Rice’s stellar credentials included playing a central role in the former administration's appeasement of Osama Bin Laden and in the decision to refuse an offer from the Sudan to hand him over in 1996-1997 – before his murderous henchmen bombed the U.S. embassies in Africa. An advocate of fighting terror through “law enforcement” and “neighborhood watches,” Rice now whispers in Kerry’s ear on matters of international terrorism.
Kerry hired former Dean advisor and Marxist-embracing, anti-Catholic Mara Vanderslice as his so-called religious outreach advisor, fully aware that among her hateful activities was spitting on the Eucharist at a protest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, only to dismiss her when the Catholic League waged a successful protest.
Kerry than hired Rev. Brenda Bartella Peterson, who was again slammed by Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League, for being one of 32 members of the clergy to file a court brief on behalf of the atheist who challenged the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, whereupon Peterson resigned after only two weeks.
These are but a few examples of Kerry’s impaired judgment about whom and which philosophies are good for the United States of America.
It gets worse. But a little history must precede Kerry’s scariest choice.
Kerry Drops the Ball Before 9/11
Four months before Sept. 11, 2001, recently retired Brian Sullivan, a former risk-management specialist (for over 10 years) in charge of physical security of air-traffic control towers and air-route traffic control facilities in New England, was so concerned about the lax security at Logan Airport that he wrote a letter to Sen. Kerry, warning him of the potential for a terrorist disaster at the airport. Sullivan followed up by sending Kerry a videotape that showed the ease with which undercover reporters had successfully penetrated Logan’s security screening 10 times with potentially deadly weapons.
For three months, “I’ll protect America” Kerry did nothing with the information, finally sending it to the one agency (the Department of Transportation’s Office of the Inspector General: DOT OIG), that Sullivan had specifically told him had been consistently remiss in taking action after such warnings.
Two of the four planes that attacked our nation on September 11 took off from Logan Airport and 80 of Kerry’s constituents died. Yet Kerry, who held evidence in his hands of Logan’s vulnerabilities, has yet to explain his failure to take meaningful action – action that well may have prevented the horrors of that fateful day.
When questioned about this failure, the same Kerry who has recently insisted that his trip to Cambodia in 1968 was “seared – seared” in his memory, claimed that he “sounded the alarm prior to 9/11" and that he was told by the DOT that “they were doing an undercover operation" at Logan. Of course, neither was true: he didn’t “sound the alarm” and there was no federal security undercover investigation at Logan during the summer of 2001!
Look Who Else Dropped the Ball!
Significantly, Sullivan also filed a complaint with the Hotline of the Federal Aviation Administration’s chief administrator Jane Garvey (a Clinton holdover) and had the incriminating videotape delivered to her office.
Who is Jane Garvey? In the mid-‘90s, she was the former top administrator at Logan Airport, where it was no secret that the airport’s security system was riddled with problems. Strangely, however, the unremarkable job she did at Logan was thought worthy of reward by the Clinton administration.
In a gesture that served to affirm the validity of the Peter Principle – in which people are promoted until they reach their ultimate level of incompetence – Clinton appointed Garvey to be director of the FAA in 1997.
During her tenure, Sullivan said, “FAA security personnel were placed in key management positions despite their limited experience in air security and their apparent ideological aversion to prescreen high-suspect people”: i.e., Arab males from the Middle East between the ages of 20-40.
Two years after Garvey took the helm, the FAA fined the Massachusetts Port Authority $178,000 for 136 security violations at Logan that included failure to screen baggage properly and allowing easy access to restricted areas and parked planes. On one occasion, a 17-year-old man cut the razor wire on a perimeter fence surrounding Logan and walked for two miles across restricted areas, finally stowing away on a British Airways Boeing 747.
Were those violations addressed? Did Garvey’s FAA follow up? In the criminal indictment she never received, surely Exhibit A would have been September 11!
“I thought that as the former director of the Massachusetts Port Authority at Logan and then head of the FAA,” Sullivan said, “Garvey might take a personal interest in the information about Logan's insecurity in the lead up to 9/11. I was wrong!”
Garvey’s Failures Exhaustively Documented
It is public knowledge that during the spring and summer of 2001, Garvey’s FAA sent out a CD-ROM of potential terrorist threats prepared by her security chief, Mike Canavan, to 700 airlines and airport executives. The FAA also had extensive data about Al Qaida and bin Laden in its Criminal Acts Against Civil Aviation reports for 1999 and 2000.
But when Garvey testified before the 9/11 Commission, she claimed ignorance of any threats – saying that she hadn’t seen the CD-ROM until after September 11! Which was apparently her inexcusable excuse for failing to alert the National Security Council and President Bush!
To wit, the 9/11 Commission's report, page 83, states: "… the FAA's intelligence unit did not receive much attention from the agency's leadership. Neither Administrator Jane Garvey nor her deputy routinely reviewed daily intelligence, and what they did see was screened for them. She was unaware of a great amount of hijacking threat information from her own intelligence unit, which, in turn, was not deeply involved in the agency's policymaking process. Historically, decisive security action took place only after (my emphasis) a disaster had occurred or a specific plot had been discovered."
Further, according to Kevin Berger of Salon.com, commenting on reaction to the 9/11 Commission’s Report: “The focus on the wrenching series of failures among intelligence groups is important and justified. But all of the international intrigue, not to mention partisan sniping over what president or government agency was at fault, has deflected attention from the one culprit that gets a universal thrashing in the 9/11 report: the Federal Aviation Administration.
Jane Garvey’s FAA, that is. |
