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November 28, 2006, 7:15 a.m. Earlier this year, a passenger at the Dallas-Forth Worth airport got a four-foot sword on an American Airlines airplane. How in the world did a sword that size manage to get through airport security? Who knows, but it did, and there it was for a plane full of Los Angeles-bound passengers to see.
A federal incident report recounts the story, and additional details about the sword came to me from Steve Elson, a former FAA Red Team member who, at the government’s behest, used to sneak fake bombs and weapons onto planes. “A four-foot sword?” I asked Elson. “A gentleman was on an airplane in Dallas / Forth Worth,” Elson replied, “and was trying to get an object in the overhead bin, but having trouble. The flight attendant came up to help and there it was, a four-foot sword.” The story is as absurd as it is horrifying. The “gentleman” passenger fortunately wasn’t looking to employ his sword, but the fact that such a weapon made it past aviation security warranted a few questions for the TSA. After all, we’re talking about a double-edged weapon as tall as my son. “No comment,” TSA spokesman Nico Melendez told me, adding, “Don’t know about it” — a handy, unexceptional TSA response. So I posed a few questions about the recent security debacle in Kona, Hawaii. In case you missed that one, a TSA screener there accidentally dropped a folder full of national security secrets in a passenger’s checked bag. In an interview with KITV in Honolulu, the passenger, Joe Langer, explained, “I went into my bag this morning, opened it up, just like this, and I found a three-ring binder that I did not recognize.” The three-ring binder was the TSA’s calibration record for its airport bomb detection machine. On the folder’s cover, in bold letters, it read “SSI — Property of the TSA.” SSI stands for “Sensitive Security Information,” and after passenger Lander discovered he was in possession of such a thing, the 23-year veteran of the Navy told reporters, “It makes me think, ‘Hey, what kind of people do we have working at TSA?’ Where they just accidentally leave this in a bag?” It’s an interesting question: How exactly does a three-ring folder fly out of a federal employee’s hands into a passenger’s bag? Our airport bomb-detectors don’t suffer from somnambulism or narcolepsy, but just good old-fashioned, bureaucratic I-don’t-care-ism. Melendez was not forthcoming with any more information about the folder. “We are looking into the facts of how this fumble occurred,” he told the public when the incident happened. But when I tried to gather further information from him (right after I asked about the sword), he told me, “We don’t comment on personnel matters” — yet another handy TSA response. Whatever can be said of the TSA itself, some TSA employees do care about transparency and security. An airport screener at Newark Liberty International Airport leaked information to the press about how undercover Red Team agents recently succeeded in smuggling an array of fake bombs and guns past security. These security breaches weren’t just a few cases of bombs sailing by a sleeping screener — the TSA failed 20 out of 22 times. So the TSA took this failure seriously (United flight 93 left from Newark on 9/11 after all) and initiated a hunt for the person who reported the failures. Aviation domain SSI was now in dangerous, civilian hands, and the TSA just cannot tolerate such violations. “An investigation is standard when Security Sensitive Information has been disclosed,” TSA spokeswoman Ann Davis told the New Jersey Star Ledger. To this end, the “TSA investigation team” was dispatched to Newark, where employees were told that the leaker could face jail time. New Jersey Congressman William Pascrell — a member of the Homeland Security Committee — stepped up to the podium on the whistleblower’s behalf. He pointed out that the Newark investigation was really a “witch-hunt to find out who revealed there’s a problem.” And New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine told the press, “It’s all about accountability. And people don’t want to be held accountable. Those statistics [a 90 percent failure rate] were pretty stark.” Yet the investigation continues. To err is human. That’s why we teach our sword-sized kids not to accept failure. The TSA has taken a different approach — it denies that its failings exist and tries to keep them hidden. The TSA’s double standard is clear: one TSA employee leaves SSI in a passenger’s bag and it’s considered a “fumble”; a fleet of TSA screeners fail 90 percent of their tests and it’s jail time for the employee who made the public-safety issue known. —Annie Jacobsen is the author of the book, Terror in The Skies, Why 9/11 Could Happen Again. A graduate of Princeton University, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and sons. |
