9/11: release of FAA report confirms whistle-blower charges.

A previously undisclosed report of the 9/11 Commission shows that in the months prior to September 11,2001 terrorist attacks, Federal Aviation Administration officials reviewed dozens of intelligence reports concerning Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, some of which specifically discussed airline hijackings and suicide operations. Release of the report had been blocked for five months by the Bush administration, angering some of the commission members, who had urged that the information be made public. The declassified report that was released on February 9 has many references blacked out, and commission members are urging that the administration release the full report.

Among other things, the report says that leaders of the FAA received 52 intelligence reports from their security branch that mentioned bin Laden or al-Qaeda from April to September 10, 2001. That represented half of all the intelligence summaries in that time. Five of the intelligence reports specifically mentioned al-Qaeda's training or capability to conduct hijackings, the report said.

The declassified report reinforces the claims of FAA whistle blower Bogdan Dzakovic, who testified before the 9/11 Commission concerning the FAA's stubborn refusal to implement security reforms, even in the face of repeated warnings. (Mr. Dzakovic was the principal subject of our October 18, 2004 article, "Unfriendly Skies.") At the time of the 9/11 attacks, Dzakovic was a 14-year veteran of the Security Division of the FAA. Since 1995, he had served as a Team Leader of the FAA's elite Red Team, which conducted undercover tests on airport security through simulated terrorist attacks.

"We were extraordinarily successful in destroying U.S. Flag commercial aircraft and killing large numbers of innocent people in these simulated attacks," Dzakovic told the 9/11 Commission on May 22, 2003. "This occurred with such regularity and ease," he noted, "as to present a frightening picture of the sorry state of aviation security on a worldwide basis, including our domestic airports." It was Special Agent Dzakovic's job to think like a terrorist and to expose security weaknesses so that they could be corrected. He was very good at his job. The problem was (and is, even after 9/11) that despite all the hi-octane talk from officialdom about stepping up aviation security, very little effort was made to fix the outrageous failures that were an open invitation to terrorists and a virtual guarantee of future catastrophe.

"Although we breached security with ridiculous ease up to 90% of the time," Dzakovic told the commission, "the FAA suppressed these warnings. Instead we were ordered not to write up our findings [in some cases] and not to retest airports where we found particularly egregious vulnerabilities to see if the problems had been fixed. Finally, the agency started providing advance notification of when we would be conducting our 'undercover' tests and what we would be checking."

What is most distressing is that the Transportation Security Administration, the branch of the new Department of Homeland Security that has absorbed the FAA's security functions, has promoted many of the same officials responsible for the neglect that permitted the 9/11 hijackings.