9/11 panel: FAA warned about al-Qaida

A Call To Action
BY SYLVIA ADCOCK AND DEBORAH BARFIELD BERRY
STAFF WRITERS

February 10, 2005, 7:20 PM EST

In the months before Sept. 11, the Federal Aviation Administration told some of the nation's largest airports that if a terrorist wanted to hijack a plane to commit suicide in a "spectacular explosion," it would likely be a hijacking on U.S. soil rather than overseas.

The vivid description is contained in a newly released report from the 9/11 Commission that gives a clearer-than-ever picture of what FAA officials knew about terrorist threats before the attacks of 2001. The unclassified version of the report -- which contains numerous blacked-out sentences and paragraphs -- was made available Thursday by the National Archives. The bulk of the commission's report was published in book form last year and became a best-seller.

The report took five months to release because of "classification issues," the White House said, including deletion of references to any existing security measures.

"Civil aviation seems to have been lulled into a false sense of security," the commission wrote, a lapse particularly surprising given the FAA's own intelligence assesment about growing terrorist threats.

Top Transportation Department officials apparently felt the government had "won the battle on hijacking," the commission said. So despite the new warnings that terrorists had an increased interest in hijackings, the FAA's security directives in the summer of 2001 did not address checkpoint screening to keep weapons off planes or the security of cockpits.

The commission was clear on one point: It found no evidence that the FAA had any information that terrorists planned to hijack airplanes in the United States and use them as weapons.

The agency "received numerous threat assessments from the U.S. intelligence community in the Spring and Summer of 2001," FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said in a statement Thursday. "However, the FAA received no specific information before 9/11 about terrorist means or methods directed at aviation in the U.S. that would have indicated specific countermeasures."

Lee Hamilton, former vice chair of the 9/11 Commission, said in an interview that because the FAA did not provide a direct warning about the new threats, "what you have here is a pattern, which was a pattern of complacency."

He noted that in 2001 it had been more than a decade since the last airline hijacking in the United States, and much of the FAA's focus was on congestion and flight delays, not security. There was "so little attention paid by the FAA, or anyone else for that, matter including the executive branch and Congress," Hamilton said. "We all got it wrong."

The report says that for two months in the spring of 2001, the FAA's office of civil aviation held classified briefings for 19 of nation's largest airports -- including Newark, Logan in Boston, and Dulles outside Washington, the departure points for the four hijacked planes. During those briefings, FAA officials discussed the growing threat from Osama bin Laden and a renewed interest in hijackings. In the briefings, security officials noted that a hijacking on U.S. soil would result in a greater number of American hostages but would be more difficult for terrorists to carry out. "We don't rule it out," the agency said of a domestic hijacking.

The FAA also conducted 27 briefings for airlines between May 1, 2001 and Sept. 11, 2001 -- but each briefing addressed hijacking threats overseas.

The report notes that the more than half of the FAA's daily intelligence summaries in the five months prior to Sept. 11, 2001, mentioned bin Laden. Of those, five mentioned hijacking and two mentioned suicide attacks, but not connected to aviation.

The FAA's intelligence reports were based primarily on reporting from the U.S. intelligence community. One top FAA security official complained to the commission that intelligence officials were not focused on domestic threats. "You guys can tell us what's happening on a street in Kabul but you can't tell us what's going on in Atlanta," the official said.

Pilots said Thursday that none of the information gathered by the FAA filtered down to them. "Not one word," said Dave Machett, a Boeing 737 pilot who is president of the Airline Pilots Security Alliance, a grassroots organization. "The flight crews were kept completely in the dark about this growing threat."

The revelations Thursday upset some families of 9/11 victims. said she was angry to learn that federal aviation officials had been warned about possible hijackings.

"If they knew about it, why the hell didn't they do something?" said Elaine Moccia of Hauppauge, whose husband, Frank died in Tower Two.

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