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The last line of defense

The 9/11 commission report and aviation security experts paint a damning picture of how America's airline security failed -- and is still failing.

By Kevin Berger

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Aug. 3, 2004 | So far, media coverage of the 9/11 commission report has been dominated by story lines out of John le Carré novels. We've learned that the CIA failed to penetrate al-Qaida in the Middle East and capture the deadly hijackers, how the FBI gave short shrift to an internal memo warning that suspected terrorists were taking flight lessons in the United States, and how President Bush let slide a daily briefing that an emboldened bin Laden planned to attack American shores.

The focus on the wrenching series of failures among intelligence groups is important and justified. But all of the international intrigue, not to mention partisan sniping over what president or government agency was at fault, has deflected attention from the one culprit that gets a universal thrashing in the 9/11 report: the Federal Aviation Administration.

Still more troubling, the 9/11 report portrays the successor to the beleaguered FAA, the Transportation Security Administration, as infected with a host of similar problems -- a charge amplified by a host of former FAA security analysts and aviation security experts.

"Look at security measures before 9/11 and look at them after 9/11," says Michael Boyd, president of the Boyd Group, an aviation consultant firm based in Colorado. "The flaws are still there."

The FAA -- the guardian of American skies and airports, with a special writ to protect travelers from criminal acts, including terrorism -- should have been the last line of defense. Instead, 19 terrorists slipped through its porous shield.

Here are just a few ways the 9/11 report gives the FAA an unequivocal thumbs-down:

  • Each layer of the FAA "relevant to hijackings -- intelligence, passenger prescreening, checkpoint screening, and onboard security -- was seriously flawed."
  • Jane Garvey, who guided the FAA from 1997 to 2002, did not review daily intelligence. As a result, she was "unaware of a great amount of hijacking threat information from her own intelligence unit."
  • Although government watchlists contained the names of tens of thousands of known terrorists, the FAA's own "no-fly" list contained names of just 12 terrorist suspects (including mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed).

    • In a rare moment of hyperbole, the report calls the discrepancy between the extensive terrorist roster and the meager FAA list, the one that airline clerks perused, an "astonishing mismatch."

    Indeed, reading how the hijackers slipped through cracks in security on Sept. 11 is astonishing. Four of the five hijackers on American Flight 11, the first jet to hit the World Trade Center, were flagged as suspect by airline clerks at check-in counters; their luggage was examined, no explosives were found, and they were sent on their way. Two of the hijackers on American Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon, set off the security gate alarm -- but the screeners didn't bother to resolve what caused the buzz. The hijackers were hand-wanded, cleared and allowed to march onto the planes.

    And that's just the airports. Revelations abound about what happened in the sky, beginning with the first chapter, "We have some planes," a reference to the first thing an FAA controller overheard a hijacker say on Flight 11. Thirty minutes passed before the controller figured out the significance of that statement. Things could have gone very differently had officials realized immediately that more than one plane was in the hands of terrorists.

    Next page: Experts charge that airline security was sacrificed for the bottom line

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