Whistleblowers Say FAA Ignored a Decade of Pre–9-11 Warnings

[paulthompson]

I had a pretty large, though uncredited, role in this article, as I sent most of the info to the author. I wish he'd asked me the part about Kerry, though, because I believe that's incorrect.

(Note that this is LBN because it contains new info, such as interviews with FAA whistleblowers Steve Elson and Bogdan Dzakovic).

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0507,mondo1,61134,6.html

Fear of Flying
Whistle-blowers say the FAA ignored a decade of pre–9-11 warnings

by James Ridgeway
The Village Voice

The staff report from the 9-11 Commission, declassified last week, raises the curtain on a Federal Aviation Administration whose disregard for security is downright ludicrous. Employees of the FAA had been warning for years of the disaster waiting to happen. The FAA's top management not only ignored the warnings, but took steps to make sure the people issuing them shut up.

...

In exasperation, Red Team leader Bogdan Dzakovic went over his supervisors and, citing the numerous failures in the system, pleaded with Administrator Jane Garvey. "The U.S. faces a potential tidal wave of terrorist attacks," he wrote. Garvey never replied.

...

The Red Team renegades wanted people at the FAA or the Department of Transportation, its parent, to pay attention to what was going on, meeting with the chief criminal investigator for DOT. According to fellow Red Team leader Steve Elson, that man would say only, "The whole FAA is so corrupt, I don't know where to begin."

...

One little noticed example concerned novelist Salman Rushdie, who told the London Times after 9-11 that he believed U.S. authorities had known of an imminent terrorist strike when they banned him from taking domestic flights in Canada and the U.S. shortly before the attacks. According to the Times account, the FAA made an emergency ruling on September 3, 2001, to prevent Rushdie from flying unless the airline adopted new and costly security measures. The airline refused. The author's publisher said it was told by the FAA that U.S. intelligence had given a warning of "something out there," but gave no details. The FAA confirmed it had stepped up security measures around Rushdie, but would not say why.

[cthrumatrix]

1. time for a "full blown investigation" ...911 report never covers this shit

[justiceischeap]

2. Why the special protection for Salman Rushdie?

Is there something out there I don't know about? (Well, there's lots of that but you know what I mean)

[paulthompson]

11. I think Rushdie is key

Think about it. Rushdie was and is under a fatwa that said it was religious duty to kill him. He's an international jet setter flying often between cities like LA and New York. What if he'd been on one of the hijacked flights? What a huge coup that would have been for al-Qaeda!

If you're a believer in LIHOP or MIHOP, then it would make sense that, of all people, the HOPers would want to make sure Rushdie wasn't one on of those planes.

[justiceischeap]

13. I guess I just don't understand why protecting his life

Was much more important than those who died. The whole thing just pisses me off!

[paulthompson]

15. Not only Rushdie

How about this warning:

According to a Newsweek report on September 13, “he state of alert had been high during the past two weeks, and a particularly urgent warning may have been received the night before the attacks, causing some top Pentagon brass to cancel a trip. Why that same information was not available to the 266 people who died aboard the four hijacked commercial aircraft may become a hot topic on the Hill.” (NEWSWEEK, 9/13/01) Far from becoming a hot topic, the only additional media mention of this story is in the next issue of Newsweek: “a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns.” (NEWSWEEK, 9/17/01)

Of course the 9/11 Commission never mentioned this, or the Rushdie warning.

[seemslikeadream]

16. Ashcroft Flying High

WASHINGTON, July 26, 2001

Attorney General Ashcroft, with President Bush (AP)

"There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines."
FBI spokesman

(CBS) Fishing rod in hand, Attorney General John Ashcroft left on a weekend trip to Missouri Thursday afternoon aboard a chartered government jet, reports CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart.

In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a "threat assessment" by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term.

"There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines," an FBI spokesman said. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department, however, would identify what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it.

A senior official at the CIA said he was unaware of specific threats against any Cabinet member, and Ashcroft himself, in a speech in California, seemed unsure of the nature of the threat.
http://propagandamatrix.com/ashcroft_flying_high.html

[DemoTex]

19. The Ashcroft "threat assessment" changed my crew briefing in 7/2001.

There were general hijack warnings disseminated to airline pilots in the summer of 2001. I knew enough to be nervous and wary. However, when I heard that Ashcroft was no longer flying on commercial airlines because of a "threat assessment" I knew that the situation was much worse than the FAA or my airline was admitting. That was when my crew briefing, done aboard the aircraft (prior to boarding passengers) before the first flight of a trip series, was changed to include a very thorough review of all security procedures, especially hijack procedures. Additionally, I briefed my flight attendants and first officer that entry into the cockpit was to be extremely limited. I required some strict security practices that are now standard in the industry.

By August 2001 the airline security picture was looking even worse. I had the premonition of an impending security crises. How bad was my feeling? Bad enough to push me to take my entire 401k account out of the stock market and put it all in a low-yield government money market account.

Ironically, I was medically grounded just before 9/11 for high blood pressure. The stress of the summer of 2001 had not been good for me. I remain on long-term-disability now, three-and-a-half years later.

[Straight Shooter]

20. We need to know how often trips are cancelled and under what circumstances

For example, if it's unusual to cancel plans "suddenly," then it's a topic of suspicion. If it happens randomly, yet not rarely, then this can be brushed off as tinfoil territory. Personally, the whole scenario stinks to me.

Now, as for Kerry, this is new info to me. I cannot pretend to be unconcerned. Without his input addressing this, it's speculation. Kerry of course is used to going through channels; it's how he operates, and may explain the lack of rah-rah-sis-boom-bah in his response.

Maybe Kerry was playing his cards close to his chest by not raising a stink about the tainted election. Think about it: If Kerry had "won" the election, and if all this information were to be released via leaks from vindictive losers, how rabidly and rapidly do you think the right wing would have ignored the roles of bush and condi, and instead would have assimilated and gone on a witchhunt against Kerry?

I think we all know the answer to that.

[JDPriestly]

3. I believe I researched the Kerry bit a year ago

and learned that he reported the complaint about security at the Boston airport to someone in the FAA.

[Old and In the Way]

4. This seems to be a RW talking point these days.

Kerry got info on Logan security problems and didn't do anything. Well, what could he do? He wasn't President during this time period. And who really knows if he didn't send this on through his staff. Given what we do know about this administration's complete disinterest in US security via their trashing of the Hart-Rudman Bi-Partisan Report on this very topic, I'd doubt it would have done any good anyway.

What I do find of interest is that all the people in charge of security at the airports where the terrorists flew out of have all been promoted. An interesting pattern for many people who contributed to the US response failure on 9/11....

[HysteryDiagnosis]

9. What I do find of interest is that all the people in charge of security

Sit Ubu sit, good boy, here's a treat.

[leveymg]

5. Paul, the scapegoating of the FAA reminds of that line in Apocalypse Now:

Brando, as Col. Kurtz, says to Sheehan, the assassin, who has just described himself as as "patriot":

"No. You're a delivery boy sent by a group of grocery store clerks to collect a bad debt."

None of these guys were central players. The FAA was further outside the need to know list than Colleen Rowley. Forewarnings by FAA mean little. They didn't know. Ask Tenet. He knows what he told Bush, Rummy, Condi and Myer on 8/24/01.

Greetings -

[paulthompson]

6. Here's info on the Kerry thing

Claims that Kerry didn't do anything first came from an FAA whistleblower named Brian Sullivan. Here's an exerpt from an NBC News article quoting him on Sept. 16, 2001:

Besides helping the TV journalists, Sullivan says he expressed his concerns to the FAA administrator's hotline. He also says he sent a letter to Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, a letter that now seems all too prophetic. From the letter:

"... do you think it would be difficult for a terrorist to get on a plane and destroy himself and all other passengers? Think for a moment how vital the air transportation industry is to the overall economic well being as a nation. Think what the result would be of a coordinated attack which took down several domestic flights on the same day. The problem is, with our current screening system, this is more than possible. Given time, considering current threats, it is almost likely."

Sullivan says Sen. Kerry responded to his letter and asked the Department of Transportation's Inspector General look into the matter. "I think Sen. Kerry did get it to the right people and they were about to take action."

The FAA also responded, but in a way that left Sullivan unconvinced that anything would happen anytime soon.

----

However, in March 2004 Kerry is running for president, and the right wing rag the New York Post gets a very different answer on the same subject from Sullivan:

"He just did the Pontius Pilate thing and passed the buck" on back through the federal bureaucracy, said Brian Sullivan, a retired FAA special agent from the Boston area who in May 2001 personally warned Kerry that Logan was ripe for a "jihad" suicide operation possibly involving "a coordinated attack."

...

More than 11 weeks later, Kerry finally replied to his well-informed and anxious constituent. "I have forwarded your tape to the Department of Transportation's Office of Inspector General ," he said in a brief July 24, 2001, letter, a copy of which I've obtained.

Yet Sullivan had made it clear in his letter that going to his old agency was a dead end. He and other agents had complained about security lapses for years and got nowhere. "The DOT OIG has become an ineffective overseer of the FAA," he told Kerry. Sullivan suggested he show the tape to peers on committees with FAA oversight. He even volunteered to testify before them. But he never heard from Kerry again.

---

However, despite the partisan tone, I guess Sullivan has a point, because the article goes on to say that around August 2001:

At that point, Steve Elson, the other agent who'd teamed up on the TV sting, decided to take a crack at the junior senator. A fiery ex-Navy Seal, Elson spent three years as part of an elite FAA unit called the Red Team, which did covert testing of airport security across the country, before retiring as a field agent in Houston. He offered to fly to Washington at his own expense to give Kerry a document-backed presentation about the "facade of security" at Logan and other major airports.

But a Kerry aide said not to bother. "You're not a constituent," Elson was told just a few weeks before the hijackings. He went ballistic, warning that if Kerry didn't act soon he'd risk the lives of planeloads of his actual constituents. That warning now looks like prophecy: At least 82 Kerry constituents were murdered aboard American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175.

---

So while calling Kerry "Pontius Pilate" is election hyperbole and Kerry did do something, it seems that he could have done more. Since this Village Voice author interviewed Elson, I assume the comment about Kerry not doing enough came from Elson. And from what I know about Elson, which is a good amount, I think it's say to say that he's no Bush supporter. He rails against what the Bush Administration has done to the FAA.

[paulthompson]

10. By the way...

While looking in my files for info on Kerry, I stumbled across this:

"On the night of September 11 Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts told CNN that CIA director George Tenet informed him before the attack that the Agency had recently thwarted an attack by bin Laden's organization."

http://www.counterpunch.org/bombsense.html

Yet more info that the general public isn't supposed to know about, I suppose. I'll try to find out more about that. It may be a reference to the Genoa summit in July, 2001, or perhaps not, because it would be a real stretch to say the CIA were the ones who thwarted that.

[bobthedrummer]

14. The devil's in the details-great work Paul.

:thumbsup:

[Generator]

7. Something's rotten in the FAA

Sounds like Danish to me.

[aikido15]

8. Reopen 9/11

It was an inside job!

http://www.reopen911.org/

[RamboLiberal]

12. Interesting bit in article about if hijackers smuggled guns aboard

That's another thing I believe has been covered up - I remember the early reports about a passenger being shot. I to this day think the hijackers may have smuggled guns aboard or that cohorts placed the guns in the planes.

The serious government interest in 9-11 now is not who is to be held responsible but how to make sure the airlines get off the hook. Shortly after the attack, the companies turned to Capitol Hill for a bailout. Now they are faced with lawsuits from victims' families, and a key question will be whether any of the hijackers had smuggled a gun aboard one of the planes. It's one thing to move through security with a legal box cutter in a pocket—quite another to make it through with a firearm. The presence of a gun would clearly illustrate a lack of security. And if a gun had been planted aboard a plane, it could be an indication that Al Qaeda had breached our security system even further than previously supposed.

On 9-11, in the hours after the attacks, the FAA issued an executive summary of what went on aboard Flight 11, which hit the World Trade Center. "At approximately 9:18 a.m., it was reported that the two crew members in the cockpit were stabbed. The flight then descended with no communication from the flight crew members," the report read. "The American Airlines FAA Principal Security Inspector (PSI) was notified by Suzanne Clark of American Airlines Corporate Headquarters that an onboard flight attendant contacted American Airlines Operations Center and informed them that a passenger in seat 10B had shot and killed a passenger in seat 9B at 9:20 a.m. The passenger killed was Daniel Lewin, shot by passenger Satam al Suqami. One bullet was reported to have been fired."

That afternoon, say Dzakovic and Elson, an FAA security officer in Washington saw the word "gun" on a bulletin board set up to keep staff members abreast of what was going on in the agency's command center. The FAA subsequently changed its report, removing the reference to a gun, and the 9-11 Commission concluded there had never been one.

However, on Flight 93, passenger Tom Burnett, a medical executive, had called his wife, Deena, and, in one version of the call, said, "They've already knifed a guy. There is a bomb on board. Call the FBI." Deena immediately called emergency officials. Another version of the call had Burnett saying, "One of them has a gun." Tom's call to Deena was not recorded, but Deena's call for help was; on the tape, she says Tom told her: "They just knifed a passenger and there are guns on the plane." Deena later told the London Times, "He told me one of the hijackers had a gun. He wouldn't have made it up. Tom grew up around guns. He was an avid hunter and we have guns in our home. If he said there was a gun on board, there was."

[spooked911]

17. Yes== this is a really interesting point.

The airlines are definitely in on the 9/11 coverup.

[spooked911]

18. It's quite possible there was a MOLE in the FAA who was blocking the

dissemination of these warnings. The same way there were clearly moles in the FBI who were blocking the warnings from "whistleblowers' such as Colleen Rowley.


The moles are key to the 9/11 conspiracy, this is no joke.

[evolvenow]

21. Thank you Paul! When the truth of 911 is REALLY known, B*sh/R*ve Thugs

and war criminal pals will be sent to the Hague.
Cannot begin to imagine the karma of murdering all of the people on 9/11 plus illegal wars, over 121,400+ plus people, devastating the planet's resources, and profiting from such absolute evil. At some point, it will tip in the direction of what really happened.

Excellent article.

[JohnOneillsMemory]

22. 9/5/01 80 FBI agents raid Muslim IT server in Dallas. They knew something.

(Looks like someone's hair was on fire that week before 9/11, doesn't it?-jom)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,549590,00.html
(UK Guardian - Monday September 10, 2001)

"US pulls the plug on Muslim websites"

Five hundred websites - many of them with an Arab or Muslim connection - crashed last Wednesday when an anti-terrorism taskforce raided InfoCom Corporation in Texas.

The 80-strong taskforce that descended upon the IT company included FBI agents, Secret Service agents, Diplomatic Security agents, tax inspectors, immigration officials, customs officials, department of commerce officials and computer experts.

Three days later, they were still busy inside the building, reportedly copying every hard disc they could find. InfoCom hosts websites for numerous clients in the Middle East, including al-Jazeera (the satellite TV station), al-Sharq (a daily newspaper in Qatar), and Birzeit (the Palestinian university on the West Bank).

It also hosts sites for several Muslim organisations in the United States, among them the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim Students Association, the Islamic Association for Palestine, and the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.

>snip<

The FBI, meanwhile, insisted the search had nothing to do with religion or Middle East politics. "This is a criminal investigation, not a political investigation," a spokeswoman said. "We're hoping to find evidence of criminal activity."

>snip<

According to the New York Times, citing unnamed government officials, the purpose of the search was to discover whether InfoCom has any links to the militant Palestinian organisation, Hamas.

>snip<