"Pre-9/11 aviation failings exposed"

Wednesday, September 14, 2005   
 
Pre-9/11 aviation failings exposed
By Eric Lichtblau
The New York (NY) Times


WASHINGTON - American aviation officials were warned as early as 1998 that
al-Qaida could "seek to hijack a commercial jet and slam it into a U.S.
landmark," according to previously secret portions of a report prepared last
year by the Sept. 11 commission. The officials also realized months before
the Sept. 11 attacks that two of the three airports ultimately used in the
hijackings had suffered repeated security lapses.

Federal Aviation Administration officials were also warned in 2001 in a
report prepared for the agency that airport screeners' ability to detect
possible weapons had "declined significantly" in recent years, but little
was done to remedy the problem, the Sept. 11 commission found.

The White House and many members of the commission, which has completed its
official work, have been battling for more than a year over the release of
the commission's report on aviation failures, which was completed in August
2004.

A heavily redacted version was released by the Bush administration in
January, but commission members complained that the deleted material
contained information critical to the public's understanding of what went
wrong on Sept. 11. In response, the administration prepared a new public
version of the report, which was posted on Tuesday on the National Archives
Web site.

While the new version still blacks out numerous references to particular
shortcomings in aviation security, it restores several dozen other portions
of the report that the administration had previously considered too secret
for public release.

The newly disclosed material follows the basic outline of what was already
known about aviation failings, including that the FAA had ample reason to
suspect that al-Qaida might try to hijack an airliner yet did little to
deter it. But it also adds significant new details about the nature and
specificity of federal aviation warnings over the years, security lapses by
the federal government and the airlines, and turf battles between federal
agencies. Some of the details were contained in confidential bulletins
circulated by the agency to airports and airlines, and some were in its
internal reports.

"While we still believe that the entire document could be made available to
the public without damaging national security, we welcome this step
forward," the former leaders of the commission, Thomas H. Kean and Lee H.
Hamilton, said in a joint statement. "The additional detail provided in this
version of the monograph will make a further contribution to the public
record of the facts and circumstances of the 9/11 attacks established by the
final report of the 9/11 commission."

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