Kerry & Companys Homeland Insecurity
Joan Swirsky
Whatever the 9/11 Commission report reveals when it is issued at the end of July, it will still lack the testimony of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, whose failure to act in light of fair warning and overwhelming evidence holds the key to his unacceptability as a national and international leader.
Of course the credibility of the report is already in question, given not only its timing, during a presidential election year, but also the blatantly partisan nature of its panel and a number of its interviewees all of whom seem unable to resist mugging for the ever-present cameras, grandstanding and offering their own often caustic and slanted opinions.
But whatever the Commissions findings, its important to remember that two of the four planes the Islamic terrorists commandeered that fateful September day took off from Logan Airport in Boston, the home turf that Kerry has served as senator for nearly 20 years.
While the airline captains, attendants and passengers were completely oblivious to their imminent and horrifying deaths having never been warned that anything was amiss Kerry cannot claim the same.
That is because in May of 2001, four months before our nation was changed forever, Kerry received a letter from Brian Sullivan, who had recently retired as a special agent with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), where he spent over 10 years as a risk-management specialist charged with the security of air traffic control facilities throughout New England.
Sullivans letter told Kerry that, based on numerous government reports, Logan Airport was especially vulnerable to terrorist infiltration. His letter held these prophetic words:
"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? Think what the result would be of a coordinated attack that took down several domestic flights on the same day. With our current screening, this is more than possible. It is almost likely.
A few weeks later, Bogdan Dzakovic former FAA chief of the national airport-security covert Red Team (which conducted special ops in aviation-security matters) was asked to hand-deliver a videotape to Jamie Wise, a staff person in Kerrys office. He told Wise that the film depicted the ease with which undercover operatives had successfully broken through Logans security shields with potentially deadly weapons. Not once but 10 times!
I received no feedback," Dzakovic said.
Shortly after, FAA special agent Steve Elson a member of the Red Team, ex-Navy SEAL and the creative force behind the video that revealed Logans vulnerability prevailed upon Mr. Wise to pass the video along to Kerry.
Wise told him, in essence: Sorry, no access to Kerry because youre not a constituent!
Undaunted, Elson tried to reach Kerrys legislative director, Gregg Rothschild again to no avail.
Kerry is campaigning hard to convince the American public that he will protect our country more effectively than the sitting president. So, what did he do with the letter and videotape that Sullivan sent him?
Throughout May and June and most of July, he did virtually nothing! But at the end of July, he contacted Sullivan to inform him not that he had forwarded the letter and videotape to the State Police or the Massachusetts Port Authority (which was fined $178,000 by the FAA in 1999 for 136 security violations); not that he had stood up in the Senate to alert his colleagues; not that he had warned his constituents; and not that had alerted the president of the United States!
All he told Sullivan was that he had passed the letter on to the Department of Transportation's Office of the Inspector General (DOT OIG), which Sullivan had warned him would be pointless, given the DOTs consistent failure to take corrective action after investigating warning after warning.
More than 80 of Kerrys constituents met their untimely deaths aboard American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175. So much for how seriously he took the threat that his own state was one of two or three at the highest risk for a terrorist attack.
According to Sullivan, who is a registered Independent and decidedly nonpartisan, there is plenty of blame to go around when it comes to the failures of airport security that made 9/11 possible.
He also filed a complaint with the hotline of the FAAs chief administrator, Jane Garvey, and sent the videotape to Garvey herself, a holdover from the Clinton administration (ostensibly to provide continuity of airport and airline safety and security).
According to Sullivan, Garvey and her boss, Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta [another Clinton holdover] don't have a leg to stand on in claiming they were unaware of the threat or for failing to advise the National Security Council and President Bush. Ignorance is not an excuse. They knew the threat information before 9/11, or damn well should have!
In fact, during the spring and summer of 2001, Garveys FAA sent out a CD-ROM of the incipient threats prepared by her security chief, Mike Canavan, to 700 airlines and airport executives. The FAA also had extensive data about al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden that was contained in the aviation agencys Criminal Acts Against Civil Aviation reports for 1999 and 2000. Those reports included the following excerpts:
In a May 1998 interview, bin Laden suggested that he could use a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile to shoot down a military passenger aircraft transporting U.S. military personnel, adding that his attacks would not distinguish between U.S. civilians and military personnel ... an exiled Islamic leader in the United Kingdom proclaimed in August 1998 that bin Laden would bring down an airliner or hijack an airliner to humiliate the United States.
Ramzi Yousef masterminded the 1994 conspiracy to place explosive devices on as many as 12 U.S. airliners flying out of the Far East. In September 1996, Yousef was convicted for this plan and for placing a device on a Philippine Airlines plane in December 1994 as a test for his more elaborate scheme. Although Yousef is currently in prison, at least one other accused participant in the conspiracy remains at large. There are concerns that this individual or others of Yousefs ilk who may possess similar skills pose a continuing threat to civil aviation interests.
... [T]he terrorist threat remains. The most recent significant aviation-related terrorist action was the December 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane by members of a Kashmiri separatist group. There continues to be concern that the hijacking may either be copied or spur others to commit acts because this incident succeeded in gaining the release of prisoners and the hijackers have never been caught. Another threat is attributed to terrorist financier Osama Bin Laden ... [who] has both the motivation and the wherewithal to do so.
In spite of all this, "I-dont-know-nuthin" Garvey in true Clintonesque fashion not only claimed ignorance of these threats in her 9/11 Commission testimony but also so much as said that Canavan had not provided her with the CD-ROM her own agency had distributed, and that she hadnt seen it until after September 11!
Aiding and abetting Garvey and Minetas buck-passing, Sullivan said, is Jamie Gorelick, a 9/11 Commission interrogator who was Clintons deputy attorney general and general counsel of his Defense Department.
Gorelick certainly had a vested interest in allowing her Democrat colleagues to paint themselves in a less-than-culpable light before the panel and an equally vested interest in not being called before the Commission herself!
Sullivan agrees. There is ample evidence that Garvey and Mineta were aware of the threat since it was a DOT agency, the FAA, which issued 15 warnings in 2001, at least one of which was the direct result of information provided at Richard Clarkes counter terrorism support group (CSG) meeting in early July of 2001.
After the meeting, he said, the FAA sent Information Circulars (ICs) to airports, but these are nothing more than vague warnings that have no urgency. What those in positions of power failed to do was issue Security Directives (SDs) that have more muscularity and would have yielded concrete action.
In effect, he continued, they did nothing down the chain of command and nothing up the chain of command to their superiors like the presidents national security-affairs advisor or to the president himself.
Sullivan points to the testimony of the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, as a prime example. When questioned by the Commission's John Lehman, Rice said she had never been informed by the FAA or the DOT prior to 9/11 that:
The entire Federal Air Marshal (FAM) force consisted of only 36 air marshals and none of them were assigned to domestic flights.
There was a disconnect between FAA guidance and information contained in the Air Transport Association's (ATA) Checkpoint Operators Guide (COG) pertaining to whether box cutters were or were not a prohibited item.
Knives with blades less than 4 inches long were not prohibited from being taken onboard our commercial airliners.
The FAA's Red Team had been successful at penetrating our aviation security system over 95 percent of the time.
The airlines both before and after 9/11 could be sued if more than two Arab males were pulled aside for secondary screening.
"If anyone needed proof that the old Clinton crowd didn't inform the new Bush crowd as to what was going on," Sullivan said, "Rice's testimony said it all."
And how, Sullivan asks, could Gorelick have said that her fellow Democrats, Garvey and Mineta, were unaware of what was taking place? She can't and she should have her feet held to the fire for this obvious display of partisanship.
He suggested that Mineta and Garvey be recalled before the Commission and that Gorelick testify as well, with no softball questions!
But in spite of all this, Mineta and Garvey and Canavan and Gorelick are not running for president!
Kerry is and this is what he has had to say on the campaign trail: I sounded the alarm prior to 9/11."
Sullivan said he begs to differ. Kerry washed his hands of the whole thing. A number of his constituents died on those two flights out of Logan on September 11 and if he'd look in the mirror, hed admit he could have and should have done more with the information we provided him.
The most egregious failure, Sullivan added, was that instead of Kerry demanding immediate corrective action at Logan when he received my letter and videotape, he contacted the very agency I told him was dragging its feet.
Still blanching from the security failures that led to the most deadly attack in our nations history, Sullivan who said, I threw up when those two planes hit the Twin Towers explained: Mohammed Atta was doing surveillance at Logan during the time I issued my warnings and if anything had been done to address them, security might have been enhanced and served as a deterrent to Atta and the other terrorists.
Sullivan also cited the failure of congressional oversight and the FAAs decision to place the airlines bottom line over the safety and security of the flying public in spite of their awareness of increased threats and numerous reports from the DOT OIG, the General Accounting Office (GAO, the investigative arm of Congress) and the media about what he called the porous state of aviation security.
Another failure, he said, was the neutering of the then-named Computer Assisted Passenger Profiling System, or CAPPS I. After 9/11, the title of the program was changed to the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, or CAPPS II, Sullivan explained, because of overzealous liberals, the American Civil Liberties Union and the diversity crowd who are hell-bent on insuring that political correctness is always implemented at the expense of our basic security.
Passenger screening policy, developed in 1997 by the Aviation Security Commission and headed by former VP Al Gore, mandated that passenger profiling must ignore ethnicity and nationality.
During the Clinton years, Sullivan said, FAA security personnel were placed in key management positions despite their limited experience in air security and their apparent ideological aversion to prescreen high suspect people: i.e., Arab males from the Middle East between the ages of 20 and 40.
Despite common sense, Sullivan said, we failed to take a harder look at some passengers than others. This is where affirmative action and diversity, when carried to the extreme, can kill us actually did kill us! I know this is attacking a sacred cow, but somehow common sense must be returned to the discourse.
Sullivan is not alone in his criticism. According to a new book by David Bossie, Intelligence Failure: How Clintons National Security Policy Set the Stage for 9/11, during the Clinton administration:
Terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, resulting in numerous deaths and injuries.
Terrorists blew up two American embassies in Africa, resulting in numerous deaths and injuries.
Terrorists bombed the American military barracks in Saudi Arabia, resulting in numerous deaths and injuries.
Terrorists bombed the USS Cole, resulting in numerous deaths and injuries.
During all of these horrific attacks on our country, the Clinton administration with the help of Jamie Gorelick and the full support and votes of John Kerry slashed our military and intelligence budgets to ribbons!
And as we now know, while our elected and appointed watchdogs were failing to heed the warnings provided to them, bin Laden and al-Qaida were paying close attention to our government's reports in their caves in Afghanistan.
Sullivan cites yet another egregious failure: the refusal of the former administration to act on the outside the box recommendations of the FAAs Red Team.
The Red Team thought and acted like terrorists and beat our systems 95 percent of the time, Sullivan said, but FAA management never reacted in an effective way to their findings.
Sullivan said that it is not too late to enhance airport safety and security significantly. His suggestions include:
1. Establish accountability. Instead of repackaging old wine in a new bottle, we have to stop promoting bureaucratic bunglers who have proven ineffectual. He cites as but one example Mary Carol Turano, who was removed as manager of the FAAs Civil Aviation Security field office (CASFO) at Logan Airport after 9/11, yet was later made the Deputy Director of Screener Training and Proficiency for the new Transportation Security Association (TSA). This in spite of the fact that Logan Airport had one of the worst records of serious security violations of any airport in the U.S.
2. Abandon the extreme limits of political correctness and diversity. Mineta's 'but for their ethnicity' rule after 9/11, Sullivan said, put America in jeopardy of another attack and now cripples the potential effectiveness of CAPPS II. From a security perspective, our current policy of prohibiting airlines from singling out more than two Arab males for secondary screening is both inane and dangerous.
3. Reinforce the Patriot Act. To do less, Sullivan says, helps maintain the wall between the FBI and CIA.
4. Eliminate market influences regarding government oversight of aviation security. As long as the airlines' bottom line is the determining factor in establishing our aviation-security system, Sullivan says, we are doomed to failure.
5. Focus on aviation security. Intelligence is both an art and a science and is open to the variances of interpretation, Sullivan explained, but aviation security is empirical and significantly less open to interpretation.
Sullivan also believes that it is imperative for Kerry to testify before the 9/11 Commission.
We practically gift-wrapped an opportunity for Kerry and others to possibly prevent 9/11. But he tried to cover his political caboose by passing the letter and video I sent him to the DOT, although I'd warned him about that agencys complicity in failing to act on threat warnings.
Sen. Kerry, Sullivan continued, must now answer several questions before the 9/11 Commission including, but not limited to:
What did he know?
When did he know it?
Why did he fail to take forceful action to protect Logan Airport?
Lets not forget that Kerry said that he sounded the alarm prior to 9/11" and that in a Washington, D.C., news report in October of 2001 expanded on that statement, saying: "We went to the Department of Transportation and brought it directly to their attention immediately and were told by the Department of Transportation that they were doing an undercover operation" at Logan.
The only problem with these two fictitious accounts is that (1) Kerry didnt sound the alarm and (2) there was, as Kerry knew, no federal security undercover evaluation at Logan prior to 9/11!
So, why hasnt Kerry been called before the 9/11 Commission? According to a commission spokesman, it is because Kerrys testimony would open the door to requests for other members of Congress to testify, which would consume the panel's remaining time.
Their time?! Then extend the timetable! Is it truth the commission is after or is it as most Americans now suspect an exercise in covering the caboose of many of their members, particularly those from the Clinton administration?
Sullivan says the reason given for not calling Kerry before the commission is ridiculous because no other senator had the warning we sent to him and no other senator had two planes hijacked from their home airport.
With more hearings scheduled in Washington, D.C., in mid-June specifically to address the issues of crisis management and the 9/11 plot it is both the duty and responsibility of every member of the 9/11 Commission to call Kerry to testify.
It is not unreasonable to think that Commissioner Lehman, former Secretary of the Navy, would be receptive to the idea. In a May 10, 2004, article in the New York Post, he noted:
Our enemy is not terrorism [but] violent, Islamic fundamentalism. None of our government institutions were set up with receptors, or even vocabulary, to deal with this. So we left ourselves completely vulnerable. Osama bin Laden has cited this as one of his dawning moments ... the vaunted United States is a paper tiger, Americans are afraid of casualties, they run like cowards when attacked. We had watch lists with 65,000 terrorists' names on them, created by a very sophisticated system in the State Department ... that existed before 9/11, but nobody in the FAA bothered to look at it. ...
In a few days, the 9/11 Commission will look at it coincidentally at the same time Americans are looking at presidential candidates, one of whom will lead our country through the next four perilous years.
Americans have the right to know why John Kerry failed to respond aggressively to the chilling warnings he received in the summer of 2001, why he exaggerated his role in sounding the alarm, what he has done in proposing legislation that will enhance our nations airline security, and why he hasnt insisted on going before the Commission, given that he wants the top job of protecting American citizens.
Sullivan has put it best: We deserve the truth. And if Senator Kerry wants to be president, he must not stonewall the American people!
Joan Swirsky is a New York-based journalist and author who can be reached at joansharon@aol.com
