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Despite this greater policy emphasis and push for action and
resources at the top of the Clinton administration and the White House,
the federal agencies continue to drag their feet in many ways.
And as 9/11 approach,
we're willfully unprepared in both resources and policy and
just general culture and approach for dealing with this emerging threat of terrorism.
And I'm going to run through some of these agencies to give you a flavor
for the state that they were in as the years of the century began to tick down.
First let's start with the Federal Aviation Administration,
which at that time was responsible for transportation security in the air sector.
Now in many ways, the FAA was thinking about the past,
and you can see that from a variety of its policies.
Of course, the hijackings of the 1970's and 1980's,
and then the most recent tragic aviation disaster:
the terrorist attack in Lockerbie on Pan Am Flight 103,
where a bomb exploded in the cargo hold and
killed all the passengers on board and some on the ground.
The FAA's policies though were really designed to prevent that instead
of looking at the aspects of this emergency- emerging threat.
It had an intelligence unit that was supposed to be gathering
information about threats to the air sector,
but it was receiving virtually no information about
terrorism and terrorist organizations from the FBI,
from the CIA or any other intelligence entities.
The FAA was keeping a no fly list of passengers that should not be allowed on the plane;
however, there were only 12 people on that list.
The State Department, which was doing
a much more comprehensive job on counter-terrorism at the time,
had a separate list of 60,000 people who
had evidence or information about them and their connection to terrorism,
but the FAA was not linked with them in any ways.
The screening checkpoints, which was
of course an important part of transportation security,
was being run by the airlines,
who were constantly pushing to cut corners and to not invest in these resources.
They had low quality equipment in magnetometers.
People who were working there were not paid very much.
And there was often evidence from Inspector Generals that corners were being cut.
There was a system for identifying
passengers because of their background or where they paid for their tickets.
It might be a threat to security.
But, because of the mindset,
oftentimes in large scale additional scrutiny was not put on these passengers.
One of the important checks was that they had to make sure that
the passenger's bags actually and the passenger both made it onto the plane,
showing that there was no anticipation of the threat potentially of a suicide bombing.
They were thinking just of the past Lockerbie incident.
Flight crews were trained and instructed if there is a hijacking,
to work to calm the situation and encourage the hijackers to get the plane
to land and then the military law enforcement would take over.
The cargo doors for the cockpits were not secure and indeed there was a policy
to make sure that the people could get into the doors in
case there was an emergency or something was wrong with the pilot.
And evidence show that often the doors were not even locked or closed.
So, you can see the FAA policies
were not evolving to meet the growing threat, an emerging threat.
David SchanzerAssociate Professor of the Practice
