Kip Hawley, who runs TSA, went up to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation in January to praise his own agency for another great year. Hawley, who is typical of the glad handers President Bush likes to use to reassure the public, took his puppy- dog -wanna please you personae up to reassure the new folks running Senate oversight on TSA.
Hawley was finally forced to say something about the No-Fly List first exposed last October by the National Security News Service on 60 Minutes and in the book Unsafe At Any Altitude. After months of avoiding the issue, Hawley began by saying: “While we are aware of concerns regarding the effectiveness of the current system of screening domestic airline passengers against the No-Fly List, today any person on the No-Fly List will not fly. The No-Fly List is regularly kept up to date and changes are made as required.”
The truth is that people on the No-Fly List fly every day – just under different names our intelligence services don’t share with TSA. Because TSA is not considered a serious player by its intelligence colleagues, No-Fly aliases are not passed on to TSA by other intelligence agencies. TSA is treated by other members of the intelligence community like the last kid picked for team sports.
Hawley told the Senators: “Key to our efforts in improving passenger pre-screening has been the tremendous undertaking to systematically review names on the No-Fly List. The purpose of the review is to remove, or downgrade to the Selectee List, individuals that do not meet the established criteria for the No-Fly List. Just as the threat environment is fluid, so must the No-Fly List be maintained as a true list of individuals who currently pose a threat, rather than maintaining on the list those who were feared to have presented a threat in the past, but no longer do.”
Hawley, who came to TSA from Union Pacific, said, “TSA and the [Terrorist Screening Center], in collaboration with all the nominating agencies responsible for compiling the No-Fly List, are in the process of a thorough, name-by-name review of that list. We expect that by the time the review is completed in mid-February, the No-Fly List should be reduced by approximately 50 percent. A similar review will be undertaken with respect to the Selectee List.”
In other words, the list of 44,000 names was so bad that they are throwing out half of it. At least that was Hawley’s story.
Hawley is referring to the same ongoing review of the No-Fly List described by then-director of the Terrorist Screening Center on 60 Minutes in October 2006, according to TSA spokeswoman Amy Kudwa. “We are working with the Terrorist Screening Center to scrub the list, name by name, to ensure everyone on the list poses a threat to aviation. Individuals that no longer pose a threat to aviation have been removed.”
Unfortunately this reporter, who obtained the secret TSA No-Fly List, that caused all the publicity last fall, has managed to compare the list from last Spring to a December 2006 list and discovered that the clean-up Hawley claimed to Senators has not made much progress. The two lists were near duplicates with only hundreds of names that were different – not the 20,000 he was claiming would be removed by the end of this month.
Unable to reveal more “truthiness” to the committee, Hawley then made the outrageous claim that “2006 was a demanding year… most notable for the activities related to the liquid explosives plot… but it ultimately has demonstrated how far we have come in securing our nation’s transportation systems since the 9/11 Commission issued its report and recommendations.”
What Hawley did not mention is that TSA was not told about the British plot by U.S. intelligence services until just a few hours before the rest of the world found out, when liquids were banned on planes for fear that terrorists involved in the plot were still on the loose. So, British plotters on TSA’s No-Fly List could well have flown on U.S. aircraft even after the plot was uncovered.
Curiously, Hawley claimed that TSA’s response to the British plot showed that “TSA acted decisively and swiftly to protect the traveling public. Literally overnight, our dedicated TSOs [Transportation Security Officers] implemented major new screening protocols to focus on and protect against the imminent threat,” adding that “even though there were security delays in the first few days of the new process, the system operated smoothly from August right through the recent holidays.”
There was only one problem with this claim. TSA was so unprepared for the British bombing plot that it had to get U.S. authorities to deploy the National Guard at some airports. That is a sorry record, considering that the United States government first learned of a similar Al Qaeda liquid bomb plot in 1994. More curious is that the Al Qaeda plotter arrested by Manila police for that attempt has been in US custody for more than a decade. TSA is not the only agency that ignored what the bomb-maker had to say; the CIA also ignored his pre-9/11 warnings about airplanes filled with explosives flying into buildings.
Hawley is the personification of what the Administration intended with the creation of TSA: reassuring eye candy to convince us after 9/11 that everything is fine and that we can get on airplanes in blissful ignorance of the reality that we are more vulnerable than ever. Kip Hawley did not mention to the Senators that serious breaches in security took place at several major airports over the last year.
