Iran is dissembling. Despite official denials, the government there has had former FBI agent Robert Levinson under their control since March 8. The semantic game they are playing has to do with who in Iran is holding Levinson. New information from the last man known to meet with Levinson may demonstrate that the Iranians may have a very good reason for not owning up to be holding Levinson. It seems the former FBI agent in their custody may have brought highly embarrassing allegations of wrongdoing about at least one top-tier former Iranian leader. The National Security News Service has obtained the name of the former Iranian leader in question but is not releasing it at this time. 

At the behest of a former NBC producer Ira Silverman, Levinson told American fugitive David Belfield, who now lives in Iran and is known as Dawud Salahuddin, he had embarrassing financial information about one of the most powerful figures in Iran.

It has been gratifying to see the focus on terrorism and airline security since the publication of Unsafe At Any Altitude last October. Congress, which created the bipartisan disaster that is TSA, is finally asking a few hard questions about how TSA is so inferior to the tens of thousands of private screeners who were sacked after 9/11 in exchange for the nearly 50,000 feds we now have.

In tests the old private screeners detected more threats by a huge factor compared to TSA's screeners. More disturbing are the incidences of gun running on planes and theft among the federal TSA employees.

 

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."

 

[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.]

Boston Herald

“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 no fly list is a mystery to most travelers. Actually, it is one of the four watch lists totaling about 130,000 names that require the airlines either to re-screen a passenger or notify law enforcement or stop the passenger from boarding an aircraft.

We have learned that the lists are filled with errors, omissions and inaccurate information.  More worrisome is that the information coming from our most elite intelligence services is often wrong. Another concern for the airlines, passengers and TSA is that the government agencies supplying the names are so distrustful of the airlines that they will not pass on certain names for fear that terrorists have penetrated the airline staffs and will be able to warn terrorists who are on the lists. This is especially a concern with Middle Eastern and other overseas carriers.

[Security experts have long recommended that liquids be barred from flights.  Click here to read the The Los Angeles Times op-ed piece written by Susan and Joe Trento about about how the U.S. government still can't get it right.

The National Security News Service first reported in the fall of 2001 about how the CIA was fully aware of Al Qaeda's plan to use airliners as missiles to attack buildings.  NSNS also reported the CIA's awareness of a method successfully developed by Al Qaeda to bring liquid explosives on aircraft for the purpose of destroying planes.  In light of the discovery today by British authorities of an Al Qaeda cell's plans to bring down ten American planes over the Atlantic, we are reposting our original story to demonstrate that after spending 20 billion dollars on airline security, the U.S. government still can't get it right.]

The Kabuki show being carried out by Secretary of State Rice and the Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament, Nabih Berri, during their meeting on July 24 requires a reality check. Berri is not the helpful Lebanese negotiating partner that news reports of Rice’s stage-managed world would suggest. Rather, he is a longtime tool of the United States’ intelligence community and has served as a go between for Republican Administrations to Iran since the early 1980s. He has been a paid U.S. intelligence asset and members of the his family have been resettled in the United States as part of his deal with the CIA according, to top-level intelligence sources.