Kerry knocks Bush for 9/11 performance

MSNBC.COM ^ | Today | MSNBC staff and news service reports

[LongsforReagan]

“Had I been reading to children and had my top aide whisper in my ear that America is under attack, I would have told those kids very nicely and politely that the president of the United States has something that he needs to attend to,” Kerry said.

[twhitak]

Kerry is done. He's toast. I've never seen a candidate go so out of his way to lose a campaign... It's just amazing.

THAT'S IT! I've always felt like the Dems knew they didn't have a chance in this election. I'd almost bet that the Clintons are behind this whole fiasco, getting Kerry to take a dive so that Hillary will be well-positioned to run in 2008. (I'm still uncertain if Kerry actually knows about it or if the Clintons are just orchestrating all this behind the scenes.)

[Prost1]

Kerry doesn't remember what he did as Atty General. Can't remember what he's done as Senator. Can't remember he voted against every major defense effort. Can't remember he voted to gut intelligence. Can't remember he was warned about security problems at Logan, and did nothing.

But he knows what he would have done if he were talking to children.... He is a pathetic gigolo.

[onyx]

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DAY OF INFAMY 2001
Official: Kerry failed
to act on pre-9/11 tip
3rd agent to say he warned security lapses made Boston airport ripe for 'jihad' attack

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Posted: March 19, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern


By Paul Sperry
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

WASHINGTON – A third federal aviation-security agent, one still with the government, has stepped forward to say he also warned Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry about security lapses at Boston's Logan International Airport before the 9-11 hijackings there.

Earlier this week, two former FAA agents said the Democratic presidential hopeful failed to take effective action after they gave him a prophetic warning that his home airport was vulnerable to multiple hijackings.

Brian Sullivan, a retired special agent from the Boston area, advised Kerry in a May 7, 2001, letter (page 1, page 2) that Logan was ripe for a "jihad" suicide operation possibly involving "a coordinated attack." He cited serious breaches at Logan security checkpoints exposed by an undercover investigation he and another former agent helped a Boston TV news station conduct.

Sullivan says he had a copy of the undercover videotape hand-delivered to Kerry's office.

It turns out the person who delivered it was a senior FAA agent in Washington who's now with the Transportation Security Administration. The agent, Bogdan Dzakovic, headed covert testing of airport security across the country before TSA took over aviation security from FAA after 9-11.

In an exclusive interview, he says he gave the tape to Jamie Wise, a Kerry staffer at the time.

After the office visit, "I received no feedback from anyone there," Dzakovic told WorldNetDaily.

Kerry boasts in campaign ads he "sounded the alarm on terrorism years before 9-11."

But he waited three months to reply to Sullivan's letter. And his July 24, 2001, letter, a copy of which was obtained by WorldNetDaily, merely offers to pass Sullivan's warning on to the Transportation Department's inspector general – even though Sullivan had made it clear in his letter that going to his old agency was a dead end. He and other agents, including Dzakovic, had complained about security lapses for years and got nowhere.

"The DOT OIG has become an ineffective overseer of the FAA," Sullivan told Kerry.

He suggested Kerry show the tape to peers on committees with FAA oversight. He even volunteered to testify before them.

Yet the correspondence stopped there. Kerry never followed up with him.

"He just did the Washington shuffle," said Sullivan, who thinks Kerry had a chance to prevent the Boston hijackings.

Another former agent, Steve Elson, who set up the TV sting at Logan, tried to follow up with Kerry, but was told by Wise he wasn't a constituent. (Elson, formerly of the elite Red Team that did covert testing, was a Houston field agent at the time.)

He came unglued, warning the staffer that if Kerry didn't act soon he'd risk the lives of planeloads of his actual constituents.

"What would the senator say if a large plane filled with holiday travelers took off from Logan at Thanksgiving for somewhere in California and went – boom – spattering men, women, children and babies all over the landscape at a couple of hundred knots?" demanded Elson, an ex-Navy SEAL.

His warning now looks like prophecy: At least 82 Kerry constituents were murdered aboard American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175.

Elson says he also dealt with Gregg Rothschild, Kerry's legislative director at the time. Attempts to reach him were unsuccessful.

Dzakovic laments the lack of attention to their warnings.

"We could have fed fish at the aquarium and accomplished just as much," he said.

Sullivan is perhaps the most frustrated. His two-page warning to Kerry four months before the Logan hijackings was eerily prescient.

"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?" he wrote. "Think what the result would be of a coordinated attack which took down several domestic flights on the same day. With our current screening, this is more than possible. It is almost likely."

The toll from such an attack would be economic, as well as human, he predicted with chilling accuracy.

And the Logan security failures he highlighted in the letter included breaches at the very checkpoints the hijackers would later exploit.

The undercover investigation by Fox affiliate WFXT in Boston showed crews penetrating security checkpoints at Logan with knives and other weapons in nine of 10 tries.

Elson says the crew, led by reporter Deborah Sherman, walked through with Leatherman tools concealed in fanny packs. The Leatherman is a fancy utility knife. The 9-11 hijackers used utility knives. Sherman says she also had no luck getting Kerry to act on the video he apparently saw.

"It was always being 'reviewed' every time I called," she said. "There was no comment or action taken on the senator's part other than passing the tape along to someone else."

Sullivan – a registered independent who's also critical of Bush's handling of aviation security, both before and since 9-11 – thinks Kerry could have saved the Twin Towers, which were toppled by the Boston jetliners, and thousands of lives.

"John Kerry should have – and could have – prevented 9-11," he said.

How? "He could have taken direct action to address the concerns we had identified by visiting Logan and the MassPort authorities at Logan or the Massachusetts State Police," he said.

If that didn't work to bring about corrective action, he could have applied political pressure by having Sullivan and other agents testify before Congress, he says.

"Enhanced security would have prevented the hijackings, virtually without question," Elson agreed. If nothing else, it might have discouraged ringleader Mohamed Atta, who monitored security procedures at Logan weeks before the hijackings.

Phone calls to Kerry's campaign were not returned.

Right after 9-11, he told the Boston Globe that he'd triggered an undercover probe of Logan security by the General Accounting Office in June 2001, based on the TV report.

Only, he wrote Sullivan no such thing in his July letter, stating only that he passed his warning and the tape on to Transportation, not GAO.

And GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, did not test security at Logan. (Kerry confessed he didn't know the outcome of the probe he says he initiated.)

GAO spokesman Jeff Nelligan says there is no evidence Kerry requested anything specific with regard to Logan, although he says GAO had communications with "a number of interested members and staff, including Sen. John Kerry's office" about airport screener testing work in 2001.

He would not elaborate.

Sullivan and Elson, joined by aviation-security experts David Forbes and Andrew Thomas, want to see Kerry called before the 9-11 Commission, as well as President Bush, to answer questions about what he knew about Logan's lapses, and specifically what he did about them, before that fateful day. They also recommend GAO and Transportation officials testify to sort out discrepancies in Kerry's story.

Calls to the panel were not immediately returned.

"We don't have to wait for a tragedy to occur to act," Sullivan urged Kerry in his letter.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=37642

[My2Cents]

Excellent catch, onyx!

OK, we need a two-pronged approach: one to point out Kerry's own "inability to think" on 9-11 as America was under attack, and the second to point out Kerry's ignoring warnings about soft security at Logan Airport.

Letters to the editors can be sent via email through this portal on GWB.com -- http://www.georgewbush.com/GetActive/WriteNewspapers.aspx

[cajungirl]

Had his hair done, changed his tie, gotton ready for the press conf, practise looking grave.

This man is beneath contempt. He is truly revolting to say something like this.

[Chode]

i wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't TOLD to keep reading for a few minutes... it would take that much time to get things locked down and his cars up to the front door with guards out let alone starting to get AF-1 warmed up and a safe NEW route from the school to the airport etc. etc... did i miss anything???

[cajungirl]

The President of the US on that terrible day took seven minutes to think when he heard the news.

Whatever happened that THINKING about something became a cause for criticism.

I am glad he THOUGHT FOR SEVEN MINUTES rather than leaping up without a single moment's reflection, shouting, running to a camera and pushing the nuclear button.

[PISANO]

However.....this is NOT a NEGATIVE attack!! Let GW SIGHT Effingkerry's VOTING RECORD and that is CONSIDERED a NEGATIVE attack. We live in "WONDERLAND"!!

[onyx]

Letters to the editors can be sent via email through this portal on GWB.com -- http://www.georgewbush.com/GetActive/WriteNewspapers.aspx

[Lady Jag]

Kerry and his little friends are acting so childish I can't imagine anything but a Bush landslide. Nevertheless I'm going to keep working my fingers to the bone and praying up a storm.

[Lady Jag]

Here's a little more beautiful calm.

[Wolfstar]

Re your #157, thanks for the information. I've got some digging to do on this, and any pointers FReepers can pass along are very helpful.

[PJ-Comix]

“Had I been reading to children and had my top aide whisper in my ear that America is under attack, I would have told those kids very nicely and politely that the president of the United States has something that he needs to attend to..."

"...namely waiting for the permission of France before we could attack Al-Qaeda."

[Lady Jag]

LJ, as an aside, I've seen a number of your posts this morning, and they've all been terrific! [Now, back to the fray.]

Thank you very much! Pictures mean a lot to me because they speak volumes.

See?

[Protect the Bill of Rights]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1120637/posts

I wonder if he would do this differently?

God, why won't someone ask him?

I cannot remember a candidate having so many issues exposed in so short of a time. And he seems not to worry about any of them. I wonder if they have something in their back pocket which they think will overide anything and everything.

Not saying it is there mind you, but do they think they may have something?

[Wolfstar]

Onyx, thank you very much for finding that article and posting it. This evening, I'm going to try to pull together the items folks post on this thread or email to me, and see what I can do to make a coherent piece out of it.

[happydogdesign]

[Wolfstar]

Kerry is a fraud.

Indeed.

[Bahbah]

How different from the pictures I see of the Heinz-Kerrys together. ;)

[Lady Jag]

Thank you! I love you, too. God bless you.