"Mantra for accountability"

Monday, May 27, 2002

Mantra for accountability
Air Safety Week


"Without an investigation, changes cannot be made. Without changes,
Americans can never be safe," is the call from a citizens' group calling
for an independent blue-ribbon inquiry into the tragic events of Sept.
11, 2001, and how they might be prevented in the future. Dubbing
themselves the "September 11th Advocates," the activists plan to hold a
rally June 11 on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in support of the bill
introduced by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Joe Lieberman
(D-Conn.) to create a commission. Their legislation, S. 1867, calls for
the creation of a 14-member commission, with subpoena power and a
mandate to produce a preliminary report within six months and a final
report within one year containing findings, conclusions and
recommendations. The legislation contains a budget of $3 million, which
is far more than was provided to support the 1997 White House Commission
on Aviation Safety and Security, according to Dr. Gerry Kauvar, staff
director of the 1997 commission. In a telephone interview, Kauvar said
the 1997 effort cost considerably less than $1 million, in large degree
because that commission was supported by experts detailed from various
government agencies. 

Based on his experience, Kauvar said six months to produce a preliminary
report on a project of this magnitude probably is not enough time. 

The issue of such a commission is timely, given recent revelations about
intelligence warnings, their specificity or lack thereof, and actions
taken or not taken in the months, weeks and days leading up to the Sept.
11 attacks. President Bush declared fervently May 17, "Had I known that
the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I
would have done everything in my power to protect the American people."
Vice President Dick Cheney has warned against bogging agencies down
answering such a commission's questions, thereby distracting from the
ongoing war against terrorism. The administration already has provided
tens of thousands of pages of documents to a panel empowered by the
House and Senate Intelligence Committees to investigate the performance
of intelligence agencies leading to the Sept. 11 attacks. The vice
president indicated that supporting this effort is sufficiently
burdensome, and another blue ribbon commission would create "a circus
atmosphere." 

The Lieberman/McCain commission would cast a wider net than an
assessment of intelligence agencies. Readers may recall that Cathal
Flynn, former head of security for the Federal Aviation Admin-istration
(FAA), described the gap allowing passengers to take knives on board
airplanes as a "policy failure" (see ASW, Feb. 18). That type of very
specific security vulnerability transcends the intelligence domain. 

Sources we contacted are divided into two distinct camps - for and
against the Lieberman/McCain commission. Those against worry about the
specter of multiple, competing commissions. They also ask, if there had
been a specific warning of the Sept. 11 hijackings, what would have been
done differently? Most previous hijackings had had benign endings. If an
emergency order had been issued to lock cockpit doors, the four
airplanes hijacked Sept. 11 might have landed intact, although the
cabins might have been blood-spattered charnel houses of dead
passengers. It is not clear, according to these sources, if anything
would have been done differently if a more specific warning had been
received. 

Sources who support a thorough inquiry point to President Bush's
statements that had he known the hijackers' intentions, he would have
acted. This defense may sidestep the key issue, which is to prevent
hijackings. The question of nefarious intentions after the planes had
been hijacked is an important but distinctly secondary issue, according
to this line of thinking. 

Although many intelligence reports fall under the heading of vague
pabulum, a steady stream of reports had been issued since May 2001
warning of planned hijackings. Security officials could have gone over
all the basics, again, of the steps needed to prevent hijackings. The
policy of allowing passengers to carry razors and knives with blades of
up to four inches in length certainly should have come under hard
scrutiny. Indeed, officials could have issued an emergency directive
prohibiting such potential weapons in carry-on bags (as it turned out,
even fingernail clippers were banned in the immediate aftermath of Sept.
11, marking a policy shift from the irresponsible to the irrelevant in a
single step). All selectees under the Computer Assisted Passenger
Prescreening System (CAPPS), and their carry-on articles as well as
their checked bags, could have been subjected to additional screening
(apparently none were on Sept. 11, although internal FAA documents
indicate that CAPPS selected some of the hijackers). 

Moreover, airplanes had been hijacked to be used as cruise missiles
against ground targets before. Precedent goes back to at least 1988,
when an armed hijacker shot the copilot of VASP Flight 375 and tried to
ram the airplane into the presidential palace at Brasilia, according to
Capt. Frank Mueller- Nalbach, a German pilot who is a security expert
with the International Federation of Air Line Pilots' Associations
(IFALPA). 

Numerous signals indicated that terrorists, and Al Qaeda in particular,
had shifted from the traditional hijacking as a trip to Cuba or some
other destination to more sinister purposes of mass destruction. A plot
to destroy 11- 12 U.S. jetliners with bombs planted aboard was uncovered
almost by accident, when an explosion in a Manila apartment, the
terrorists' bomb-making laboratory, uncovered the plot (see ASW, Aug. 6,
200). This scheme was organized by Ramzi Yousef, who later was convicted
of plotting the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. An accomplice,
one Abdul Hakim Murad, was arrested after the explosion in the Manila
apartment. Under questioning, he revealed that one part of the overall
operation, known as "Project Bojinka" (a Serbo-Croatian term for "loud
bang), was to seize and crash an airplane into Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) headquarters. Had this act been carried out, hundreds would
have been killed, as evidenced by the death toll when American Airlines
[AMR] Flight 77 hit the Pentagon Sept. 11. 

Further indications occurred in 1994, when a pilot crashed a small plane
onto the grounds of the White House and Algerian terrorists hijacked an
Air France flight. Their plan to dive the jet into the Eiffel tower was
foiled when French commandos stormed the airplane during a refueling
stop and killed the hijackers. 

These various events formed the basis of a 1998 threat assessment
prepared for FAA security officials. Dr. Stephen Gale, a terrorism
expert at the University of Pennsylvania, was a member of this effort.
Gale recalled that the analysis featured two scenarios. In one,
terrorists commandeered airliners and crashed them into nuclear power
plants dotted along the U.S. East Coast. In another, they hijacked
Federal Express cargo planes and crashed them into the World Trade
Center, the Pentagon, the White House, the Sears Tower in Chicago, and
into San Francisco's Golden Gate bridge. 

This scenario, in light of the Sept. 11 attacks, resonates with chilling
prescience. 

In 1999, a National Intelligence Council report on the psychology of
terrorism cited the plot uncovered in the Philippines and warned that Al
Qaeda's "Martyrdom Battalion" might well use airlines packed with
explosives to attack the Pentagon, the White House and CIA headquarters.


Yet senior government officials consistently have claimed that no one
could have foreseen the use of hijacked jetliners as weapons of mass
destruction. 

The current brouhaha was triggered by the recent revelation that Kenneth
Williams, a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent in Phoenix,
Ariz., warned in a memorandum to his superiors this past July that Al
Qaeda followers might be training at U.S. aviation schools. It appears
that his report never got above the middle levels of the FBI
bureaucracy. In Capitol Hill testimony last week, agent Williams
characterized his report as "routine." 

A week before the Sept. 11 hijackings, the FBI advised the FAA that
student pilot Zacarias Moussaoui, taken into custody in August on
immigration charges, had flunked out of a Minnesota flight school, where
he had evidenced a great interest in learning to fly 747s, but not
landing them. The FAA elected not to advise airlines and airports of
this development. 

In a May 21 editorial, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen said
answers, not scapegoats, are needed. "The FBI wasn't talking to the CIA
or, for that matter, to itself. The FAA and the INS [Immigration and
Naturalization Service] were doing their own things," he wrote. "The
whole government was chirping warnings like birds on a power line, and
yet no one could make out the message." 

Whether the message was intelligible enough to prompt preventative
action, and what corrective measures could be taken to prevent a deadly
recurrence, is the purpose of the Lieberman/McCain commission. That is,
if it never gets off the ground. One is reminded of the aphorism, "If
you can't stand the answer, don't ask the question." 

Sen. McCain seems determined, calling for the commission in a May 22
guest editorial in the Post. So far as Cheney's concern that such an
inquiry would distract from the war on terrorism, McCain said such an
inquiry would be no more burdensome on the administration "than a
similar inquiry after Pearl Harbor impeded Franklin D. Roosevelt's
prosecution of World War II." 

To move the commission into action, a Senate aide said S. 1867 might be
appended to the fiscal 2003 defense authorization bill. 

'Conduct an Investigation' 

"A Bill (S.1867) to establish the National Commission on Terrorist
Attacks Upon the United States (extracts) 

Purpose. "[To] ascertain, evaluate and report on the evidence developed
by all relevant governmental agencies regarding the facts and
circumstances surrounding the attacks ... make a full and complete
accounting of ... the United States' preparedness for, and response to,
the attacks, and ... report corrective measures that can be taken to
prevent acts of terrorism. 

Function. "Conduct an investigation that: 

   (A) Investigates relevant facts and circumstances relating to the
terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, including any relevant legislation,
Executive Order, regulation, plan, policy, practice or procedure, and 

   (B) May include relevant facts and circumstances relating to - 

     (i) Intelligence agencies; 

     (ii) Law enforcement agencies; 

     (iii) Diplomacy; 

     (iv) Immigration, nonimmigrant visas, and border control; 

     (v) The flow of assets to terrorist organizations; 

     (vi) Commercial aviation, and 

     (vii) Other areas of the public and private sectors determined
relevant by the Commission for its inquiry.


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