Posted on 08/24/2004 10:34:37 AM PDT by italianquaker
kerry 9-11 failure send to all get the word out
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.
More of Garvey’s Failures
Berger further documents the 9/11 Commission’s findings of the grievous failings of the FAA under Garvey:
Each layer of the FAA that was relevant to hijackings – intelligence, passenger prescreening, checkpoint screening, and onboard security – was seriously flawed.
Although government watch lists contained the names of tens of thousands of known terrorists, including a State Department TIP-OFF list with 60,000 names, the FAA's own "no-fly" list contained names of just 12 terrorist suspects.
At Logan’s check-in counters, airline clerks tagged four of the five hijackers on American Flight 11 (the first jet to hit the World Trade Center) as suspect, yet they were allowed to board the plane.
Two of the hijackers on American Flight 77 from Dulles, which crashed into the Pentagon, set off the security gate alarm but the screeners didn't bother to investigate further and, again, allowed the hijackers to board the plane.
And most damning, Jane Garvey did not review daily intelligence and so was "unaware of a great amount of hijacking threat information from her own intelligence unit." It was also under Garvey that the then-Computer Assisted Passenger Profiling System, or CAPPS I was neutered. After 9/11, the program was renamed the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, or CAPPs II, because, according to Sullivan, “of overzealous liberals, the American Civil Liberties Union and the diversity crowd who are hell-bent on insuring that political correctness is always implemented at the expense of our basic security.”
And Sullivan cites additional flaws in Garvey’s FAA, all of them omitted from the 9/11 Commission’s report. For instance:
An April '01 memo from the director of security, Joe Lawless, of the Massachusetts Port Authority, citing terrorist ties to Logan Airport and the need to address known vulnerabilities there.
The rejection of another Lawless memo by the Logan Airline Managers Council (LAMCO) and the FAA's federal security manager at Logan, proposing that the Mass. State Police begin undercover testing of screening checkpoints in July '01.
Reported sightings of Mohammed Atta at Logan in May and early September '01, involved in suspicious activity on the Air Operations Area and surveillance of checkpoints.
Old story. And, frankly, I never thought it was anything. Why would you go to your US Senator (and the junior one, at that) about a local airport problem?
Pretty good...
I know a lot of people who are airport executives. Almost every aspect of their existence is ruled by the Federal Government, so they try to be as cozy as possible with any federal officials.
The seniority of a congressperson doesn't matter as much as what committees they sit on, and what personal crusades float their boat.
I agree that this is probably a non-issue, but not any more so than all the ridiculous Bush 911 conspiracy theories that have been floating around for 3 years.
Kerry was a MA Senator, right?
Well, yeah, but a problem with an airport in Boston is one for the Boston Mayor, or the governor of Mass., or the head of the state transporation authority, or the FBI, or even a state senator. You'd go to the guy who represents you in Washington if you need an FAA regulation changed or something, not to get a problem fixed back home by people back home.
Oh really? I have always considered Jane Garvey to be the "20th Hijacker"!
Garvey is not a pilot, but an attorney. Garvey was promoted to FAA Administrator by Bill Clinton for her work in MA on behalf of his presidential campaign. Jane Garvey is nothing more than a political party hack (spit!) and a sad accomplice to a terrible tragedy.
Anyone who ever flew in Logan should have noticed the security was a mess...
As in most things in Boston, the employees were totally incompetent.
To include the Celtics.
It's obvious that you really don't know who is responsible for security of persons and objects aboard an aircraft that will be flying in US airspace. It's the Federal Government, as in Federal Aviation Agency. The minute a person or object is on board an aircraft that will fly in federal air space, those persons or objects are subject to federal law and regulations, not state. When the wheels of any aircraft lift one inch from the runway of an airport in the United States, the aircraft is in federal airspace. Even if the runway it is over is within the city of Boston and the State of Massachusetts.
May she never have another night of sleep.
I had never heard this set of details before. Here is another great investigative reporter story....OOOPS I forgot- We don't have many of those anymore. ANN COULTER--where are you?
It ain't the Senate.
Yes it is. If you walk the tragic facts of 9/11 from Jane Garvey's front door back into her history, you will find another queen of the Peter Principal and political cronyism. A large part of the blame for 9/11 belongs on her front door.
I beg your pardon, but it is. Congress has oversight over ALL federal agencies.
And he passed the info on to the DOT. What exactly do you think he should have done? And why him?
I suppose Brian Sullivan thought that Kerry would do his job. Who do you propose Sullivan tell, "Big Bird".
If Sullivan really thought he had a security issue of great magnitude, I would expect him to tell anyone and everyone even remotely likely to be able to get the issue the attention he thought it needed. If it really was appropriate to hand this off to a Senator, for example, why not both of them?
He probably did. Kerry may have been Sullivan's last sorry act of desperation. And what? Tell Ted Kennedy! How does one get his attention? Send a case of Scotch and include the video of Logan security violations! Get real.
BTAIM, the responsibility for 9/11 rest squarely on the federal governments shoulders, not local or state. I can just imagine the Mayor of of Boston showing up at Logan Airport, in the AM of 9/11, and requesting that the Muslim men, without valid visa's, be stopped from boarding their aircraft. The mayor wouldn't see another term and would be sued for discrimination. Even, if by a miracle, he had stopped the Logan hijackers.
You're not going to 'get' Kerry with "he probably did." Or Kennedy's incompetence.
I can just imagine the Mayor of of Boston showing up at Logan Airport, in the AM of 9/11, and requesting that the Muslim men, without valid visa's, be stopped from boarding their aircraft. The mayor wouldn't see another term and would be sued for discrimination. Even, if by a miracle, he had stopped the Logan hijackers.
Well, sure, but that would apply to any elected official in the land. That doesn't speak to responsibility, though.
Wasn't there flap at the time of 9/11 that the director of security for Logan was a political appointee hired to please...I think it was the governor? And wasn't the security firm that actually handled security a private contract and, again, from the state or city?
Probably, considering the patronage tradition of Boston Democrats, but I don't know that for sure.
And wasn't the security firm that actually handled security a private contract and, again, from the state or city?
Many US municipal airports, National and International, are in charge of security, on the ground to a point. And yes, many of the security services are private contractors and provide minim wage security. These arrangements may be under the auspices of municipal or state government, but the ultimate authority is still the FAA.
That doesn't speak to responsibility, though.
Just what, exactly, is your point? What part about the "Federal", in "Federal Aviation Agency", don't you comprehend?
If you want to argue just for fun, I am more than willing to play because I always win. The article that began this thread was about FAA Administrator, Jane Garveys's incompetence and her being a political hack of Clinton and Boston Democrats. The rest is as irrelevant as is your understanding of aviation law.
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