[Susan and Joe Trento will be featured on CSPAN2 BookTV - December 31, 2006, 7:00PM and January 2, 2007, 6:45AM. Watch the broadcast online with RealPlayer.]
“We may be less safe flying today than we were before 9/11, and we have spent billions of dollars in tax money going backward.”
So say Susan B. Trento and Joseph J. Trento in their provocative new book, “Unsafe at Any Altitude: Failed Terrorism Investigations, Scapegoating 9/11, and the Shocking Truth about Aviation Security Today” (Steerforth Press, $25.95).
The book takes readers behind the scenes at big-city airports and inside what they term“the remarkably inept” Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
In this excerpt, the Trentos – she’s a former congressional staffer, he’s a former CNN reporter – examine the government’s no-fly list of “questionable,” “undesirable” and “dangerous” passengers prohibited from boarding planes inside and bound for the United States.
“The no-fly list is a mystery to most travelers. Actually, it is one of four lists totaling about 130,000 names that require the airlines to rescreen, notify law enforcement, or stop passengers from boarding an aircraft. The most important list of the group, the no-fly list, currently comprises about 49,000 names.
The second-most important is the selectee no-fly cleared list, which requires the airlines to double-check identities and to do additional screening before permitting passengers to fly. This list has slightly more than 50,000 names on it.
The newest lists are of passengers who have been removed from the no-fly list and selectee lists because of either updates or mistakes; these lists simply tell the airlines that additional security is no longer required.
Remarkably, the names of 14 of the 19 9/11 hijackers are on the no-fly list. More than five years after their suicide attacks, these 14 are consdered threats from beyond the grave.”
Budget bungles accuracy
“For the airlines, the government watch lists have been a public-relations nightmare. The airlines had run private watch lists of their own years prior to the (Transportation Security Administration). At the beginning, the first TSA no-fly list had only 16 names on it. But according to government security experts, the biggest problem is the quality of the intelligence that makes up the list.
One former FBI official says the bureau’s contribution to the list “had not been properly vetted and policed for years. Getting an accurate list is manpower-intensive, and the budget wasn’t there to do it.” The net effect has not been lost on those mistakenly on the list.
Robert Johnson has trouble flying, even today. He is on the no-fly list, but he is not a terrorist. Robert Johnson, once a TSA spokesman, ironically, later became a Bush appointee at the Department of Transportation.
“Robert Fitz Clarence Johnson/Bobby Johnson” is on the no-fly list. Both names seem to be aliases of a convicted Trinidadian Islamic terrorist named Robert Junior Wesley. As shown on the government list, all three names share the common birthdates of “13-Jan-44” and “4-Apr-54.”
According to an article written in The Trinidad Guardian, Wesley/Johnson also uses the alias Wali Muhammad. The name Abdoul Walid Mohammad appears on the no-fly list with both the January 1944 and April 1954 birthdates. Press reports of Wesley/Johnson’s arrest in December 1993 gave his age as 49, consistent with a January 1944 date of birth.
The media said Robert Junior Wesley (aka Robert Fitz Clarence Johnson, aka Bobby Johnson, aka Wali Muhammad) was arrested in October 1991 for plotting terrorist attacks in Canada as part of Jamaat Al-Fuqra, a Muslim sect with a history of terrorism in North America.
Wesley and three other Al-Fuqra members planned to set off bombs simultaneously in a local Hindu temple and at a Toronto movie house. The plotters were arrested when Canadian border police went through their vehicle and discovered documents and maps detailing the bombing plot. The Canadians deported Wesley in April 2006 after he completed a 12-year jail sentence.
That has not helped U.S. citizen Robert Johnson. He is not the only government official who can be confused on the list. John E. Lewis is the FBI special agent in charge in Phoenix – not a suspected terrorist – but he is repeatedly stopped because his name appears on the no-fly list.
Sometimes the entire government effort to produce an accurate list gets it wrong by missing a major event in a subject’s life, such as his death.
Take Francois Genoud, who is listed on the no-fly list as “Francois Georges Albert Genoud 26-Oct-15.” Francois Genoud, a Nazi sympathizer who was also a banker to Middle Eastern extremists and defender of Islamic terrorists, killed himself at the age of 81 by taking poison with the help of a Swiss pro-euthanasia group. Unfortunately our intelligence services seemed to have missed the fact that Mr. Genoud’s suicide took place a decade ago.
Who’s missing
“Perhaps the most outrageous oversight on the no-fly list is American David Theodore Belfield. Belfield converted to Islam as a young man and joined a group of Muslims devoted to the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s. By 1980 he had carried out an assasination in Washington.
After changing his name to Dawud Salahuddin, Belfield carried out a fatwa by borrowing a scenario he had seen in the Robert Redford film “Three Days of the Condor.” Salahuddin, dressed as a mailman, bribed a postal worker to get hold of a mail truck and pretended to deliver a package that required the signature of the addressee, the former spokesman for the shah of Iran in Washington, Ali Akbar Tabatai’e. At 11:45 a.m. on July 22, 1980, when Tabatai’e came to the front door, Salahuddin shot him at point-blank range three times.
With that act Salahuddin became the first American Islamic terrorist. He successfully escaped to Tehran, where he carried out additional operations for Iran, including fighting with the mujahideen in Afghanistan as well as a special mission to Tripoli to warn Libya not to undertake any terrorist attacks without first coordinating with Tehran.
Belfield is not on the list either by his true name or by any of his known aliases.
