DC Bureau

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On Monday morning, September 14, 2009, the Joint Terrorism Task Force executed multiple search warrants in the Borough of Queens, New York. A Denver man was arrested and then released in connection with the terrorism raids. He had recently traveled to Pakistan and then, according to ABC News, showed up in New York last Thursday, September 10, with bomb-making documents. The question no one has asked is how was he able to fly around the world and in the United States unchallenged when thousands of innocent Americans are hassled by Transportation Security Administration agents every day.

If you think you’re safe getting on a plane in the United States — think again. The hundreds of billions of dollars we have spent on security and the huge Homeland Security workforce we have added to the federal payroll make for a feel-good marketing strategy that only fools us into believing we are safer. The truth is, the weaknesses in aviation security that were there prior to 9/11 are still there today.

The biggest danger we face is government agencies so sloppy and arrogant in their collection and distribution of intelligence that huge selectee and no-fly lists do not include some of the most dangerous terrorists. At the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency certain names and aliases are kept from the airlines and off the no-fly list to protect intelligence assets who are suspected or known terrorists. In other instances our intelligence agencies keep names off the list at the request of allies such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has botched every effort to get an accurate and up-to-date no-fly list and admitted in a report to the Office of Management and Budget that it gives only a dumbed-down version of the list to those responsible for the last line of defense of our skies — the airlines.

Whom the US government deliberately keeps off the no-fly lists is as odd as some of the names on it. Years after 9/11 members of Hezbollah and the A.Q. Khan nuclear smuggling network — some with loyalty to Al Qaeda and others with ties to terrorists — were not on the no-fly list. Some Islamic terrorists who have killed in the United States and in Europe are not on it.

Why are these people still allowed to fly? For several reasons. First, the entire selectee and no-fly list effort has been an enormous failure. The government’s inability to put together an accurate terrorist database is so acute that as of May 2006, fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, who are supposedly all dead, remained on the no-fly list. Officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and in Saudi Arabia admit that they are unable to confirm that the published names of the hijackers in The 9/11 Commission Report are those of the actual hijackers.

The mistakes, omissions, and political machinations found by going through the names on the no-fly list amounts to a national disgrace. The list is supposed to represent our nation’s best intelligence to protect the world’s skies against a repeat of 9/11. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security has allowed the TSA to privatize the compiling and computerization of the most important intelligence the airlines have to protect the public. Like FEMA, the leadership at the TSA has spent hundreds of millions of dollars giving out sweetheart contracts to politically well-connected but incompetent companies that have botched each attempt to create a useful passenger-screening database.  The Obama administration has not made cleaning up TSA a priority.  Congressional oversight since the Democrats took control is lax and ineffective.

Next time you are hassled at an airport because you have the same name as a government suspect on the no-fly list, think about David Belfield. Belfield assassinated an Iranian diplomat in suburban Washington, DC, under orders from the Iranian government and escaped to Iran, where he lives today. Belfield does not appear, under his true name or aliases, on the no-fly list.

Make the assumption that a member of Al Qaeda is employed at every major airport in America because that is the assumption government and airline counterintelligence experts have made. Yet TSA expends almost no effort on counterintelligence to make certain those who have regular access to the planes are not terrorist moles, planted in airports as employees.

Every day at every airport in America passengers wait to be screened, to be searched and inspected. We give up all expectation of privacy so we can have some expectation of flying safely. While we stand in line tens of thousands of airport workers carry bags, lunch pails, tool kits, and other items inside airports without getting a second look from anyone. According to TSA managers and airport executives, complete employee screening would bring the entire passenger aviation transportation system to a screeching halt.

How bad is it? Since the TSA was put into operation in 2002, weapons have been found behind the screening lines; bombs of identical design have been found at Seattle’s SeaTac Airport and other hubs around the country.

Not only was the nation’s largest private aviation security firm, Argenbright Security, blamed falsely for allowing 9/11 to happen, but its experienced security screeners were unceremoniously dumped. In their stead, the government has hired thousands of convicted felons as security screeners; the theft of passenger property is commonplace.

The worst news: The highly paid and well-uniformed forty-five-thousand-person-strong TSA screening force is much worse at detecting threats — bombs, explosives, and guns — than the private screeners they replaced. TSA tries to keep the test scores secret, but we learned that TSA screeners detect only about half the dangerous articles sent through airport security in tests. The private screeners routinely had an 80 to 95 percent detection rate.

And not only are many of the TSA screeners incompetent, but many also take advantage of the federal system. A high-ranking TSA official says that his employees routinely abuse workers’ compensation. USA Today reported on January 11, 2006, that TSA has the highest rate of workers’ compensation claims in the country — higher than any other job, public or private — costing American taxpayers tens of millions of dollars a year. At any time about 30 percent of the TSA workforce is out of work recovering from reported work-related injuries. The rate of absenteeism for private screeners was about 3 percent at any given time. The result: “Absenteeism aggravates staffing problems in airport security. Screeners have missed training and violated a law requiring checked luggage to go through bomb-detection machines because of staffing shortages,” the newspaper reported.

The public relations illusion that America is serious about fighting terrorists and air piracy began with the Reagan administration. Because of the Iran-Contra scandal — the selling of weapons to Iran to fund the war in Central America — the Reagan administration ended up protecting Iran’s number one terrorist proxy, Hezbollah, while at the same time Hezbollah’s terrorists were killing and kidnapping hundreds of Americans. While secretly working with the Iranian government, the Reagan administration manipulated intelligence to blame Libya for terrorist attacks for which Hezbollah was responsible. During the 1980s Hezbollah killed and terrorized hundreds of Americans in Beirut, bombing the US Marine barracks, blowing up the CIA station, and killing State Department employees in a bomb attack on the US embassy. Hezbollah did all of this with the help of local militia leaders whom the United States relied on as its secret conduits to Iran for its sale of weapons.

One of Lebanon’s Amal Militia’s top operatives, Fawaz Younis, the only terrorist hijacker ever to take two planes in one week, tells the story of how one of his bosses, who was on the CIA’s payroll, actually ordered the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 so the Amal leader could impress the Americans by negotiating the safe release of the passengers and — at the same time — convince Hezbollah that Amal was tough enough to share power. His ruse worked.

Ten days before Christmas 2005 the German government released forty-one-year-old Mohammed Ali Hammadi, a member of Fawaz Younis’s hijacking team, from prison. The German parole board concluded that he had served enough time for his role in the murder of navy diver Robert Dean Stethem during the hijacking of TWA Flight 847. The Germans said they notified US authorities prior to Hammadi’s release.

Even though he was wanted under a 1985 indictment, the Bush administration took no action against — made no effort to arrest — the killer of an American hero before he was able to make it to the safety of Hezbollah-controlled territory in Lebanon.

Our intelligence services tracked him as he made his way back to Beirut to be welcomed as a hero by Hezbollah. He joined three other wanted hijackers in the TWA case in Beirut. All wanted men. All with $5 million FBI rewards on their heads. All live in the open; we were able to find them. Yet they remain mysteriously out of reach of the United States. Four months later Hammadi was welcomed in Tehran by the Iranian president as Hezbollah’s premier terrorist.

DCBureau’s investigation exposes the vulnerabilities of airline security and shows how our own government has put passengers at risk in the post-9/11 world. What our government promises about ending terrorism and protecting Americans is one thing. What it actually does is another thing entirely. The 9/11 Commission described the failure of the United States to prevent the 9/11 attacks as a failure of our government’s imagination: a failure to connect the dots. That conclusion is nonsense.

The failure was rooted in the financial interests of the airlines and short-term foreign policy goals. Our government does not connect the dots because to do so would reveal policies dating back to the Reagan administration that put American intelligence agencies in bed with the terrorists. Before 9/11, the United States relied on the Al Qaeda–penetrated Saudi intelligence service (GID) to track Al Qaeda. Even after our intelligence services learned that money was funneled through the Washington embassy accounts of Saudi Arabia’s then ambassador, Prince Bandar, to a pair of GID agents who were part of the team that hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 on 9/11, no action was taken. When the top Saudi Islamic fundraiser visited the World Trade Center and then spent the night of September 10, 2001, in the same Virginia hotel as the Dulles hijackers, the Saudi embassy succeeded in getting the FBI to call off a tenacious FBI agent who had tried to interview the Islamic benefactor. A few days later the Saudi financier left the United States without any serious interrogation.

Our government’s duplicity in going after those responsible for terrorism has undermined our security ever since. These secret schemes created a cynicism toward the United States that is prevalent today throughout the Middle East. The net result: Hezbollah and other Islamic terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda, have concluded that the United States is willing to capitulate to terrorists if we maintain an image at home of being tough on terrorism. The post-9/11 effort to protect our skies and our citizens is nothing more than public relations initiatives and what a senior TSA official calls “good eye candy.”