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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (46744)	11/3/2005 11:58:22 AM
From: JakeStraw	Respond to of 93284

In May of 2001, four months before our nation was changed forever, John Kerry received a letter from Brian Sullivan, who had recently retired as a special agent with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), where he spent over 10 years as a risk-management specialist charged with the security of air traffic control facilities throughout New England. Sullivan’s letter told Kerry that, based on numerous government reports, Logan Airport was especially vulnerable to terrorist infiltration. His letter held these prophetic words: "With the concept of jihad, do you think it would be difficult for a determined terrorist to get on a plane and destroy himself and all other passengers? Think what the result would be of a coordinated attack that took down several domestic flights on the same day. With our current screening, this is more than possible. It is almost likely.” A few weeks later, Bogdan Dzakovic – former FAA chief of the national airport-security covert Red Team (which conducted special ops in aviation-security matters) – was asked to hand-deliver a videotape to Jamie Wise, a staff person in Kerry’s office. He told Wise that the film depicted the ease with which undercover operatives had successfully broken through Logan’s security shields with potentially deadly weapons. Not once but 10 times! “I received no feedback," Dzakovic said. Shortly after, FAA special agent Steve Elson – a member of the Red Team, ex-Navy SEAL and the creative force behind the video that revealed Logan’s vulnerability – prevailed upon Mr. Wise to pass the video along to Kerry. Wise told him, in essence: Sorry, no access to Kerry because you’re not a constituent! Undaunted, Elson tried to reach Kerry’s legislative director, Gregg Rothschild – again to no avail. Throughout May and June and most of July, he did virtually nothing! But at the end of July, he contacted Sullivan to inform him not that he had forwarded the letter and videotape to the State Police or the Massachusetts Port Authority (which was fined $178,000 by the FAA in 1999 for 136 security violations); not that he had stood up in the Senate to alert his colleagues; not that he had warned his constituents; and not that had alerted the president of the United States! All he told Sullivan was that he had passed the letter on to the Department of Transportation's Office of the Inspector General (DOT OIG), which Sullivan had warned him would be pointless, given the DOT’s consistent failure to take corrective action after investigating warning after warning. More than 80 of Kerry’s constituents met their untimely deaths aboard American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175. So much for how seriously he took the threat that his own state was one of two or three at the highest risk for a terrorist attack.

To: American Spirit who wrote (46744)	11/3/2005 12:03:52 PM
From: JakeStraw	Respond to of 93284

After the crash of TWA flight 800 and the bombing of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, both of which were thought at the time to possibly be connected to international terrorists, President Clinton assigned Vice President Al Gore to head a commission on air safety to counter the possible terrorist threat. With his usual technical thoroughness but cerebral obtuseness, Gore conducted a wide-ranging review of air-safety measures and set up a system to predict who would hijack a passenger airplane. The system, called CAPPS (Civil Aviation Passenger Protection System) was based in an algorithm that evaluated risk factors to spot hijackers. And CAPPS worked brilliantly on 9/11 - picking out 11 of the 19 hijackers for special scrutiny as possible terrorists. But. Gore's work was entirely based on the belief that nobody would commit suicide while hijacking a plane. So the only purpose of CAPPS was to assure that these passengers boarded the airplane with their checked baggage - since the feds assumed that the checked bags couldn't have a bomb in if the terrorist was on the plane himself. As naive and shortsighted as this assumption was - and as disastrous as it turned out to be - until now we have only been able to chalk it up to Al Gore's particular brand of myopia. But now we have evidence that one year after his report was issued, the White House received a warning that a suicide mission was a distinct possibility. Why did Gore or Clinton not spring into action and undertake a review of the 1997 Commission report to adjust its conclusions to take account of this new possibility? This oversight led to the horrendous lack of preparedness on 9/11. To be sure, the intelligence finding was cloaked in ambiguity with disclaimers that suggested that al-Qaeda would only use a suicide attack as a last resort and indicated that it did not feel such a tactic was likely. But the finding spelled out in black and white exactly what happened: Terrorists would hijack passenger planes in the United States and use them to destroy prominent public buildings. Had Gore and Clinton acted as they should have, all kinds of changes might have been made that could have forestalled 9/11. Boxcutters and small knives could have been barred from planes (after being specifically permitted in a change in FAA rules early in the Clinton years). Passengers identified by the CAPPS system could be investigated and barred from planes without special pat downs and screening. The entire system could have been refocused to take account of the suicide option in a way that it never was before 9/11.