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Posted on Tue, Jan. 27, 2004

9 hijackers were considered security risks, Sept. 11 panel reveals




Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Nine of the Sept. 11 hijackers were identified as possible security risks by the government's passenger-profiling system before boarding their ill-fated flights, the commission investigating the attacks revealed Tuesday.

But, following the guidelines in place at the time, officials at three of the nation's airports merely searched their baggage for explosives rather than questioning or searching the men themselves.

Had the government required more intense screening for passengers identified by the computer-assisted passenger-screening program, officials might have found and confiscated the box cutters and utility knives used to hijack the four airliners, according to the preliminary report from the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.

At least three of the 19 hijackers set off metal detectors at Washington Dulles International Airport but were allowed to proceed to their gates. Two were scanned by screeners with hand-held metal detectors, according to an airport videotape.

At a hearing Tuesday, the commission also found that the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Civil Aviation Security considered the possibility of a suicide attack as far back as 1998 and mentioned it in a presentation to airlines in early 2001.

But a warning sent in July 2001 to airline companies didn't mention suicide attacks using airplanes. Government aviation officials remained focused almost exclusively on the more traditional scenario of terrorists attacking airliners by smuggling explosives aboard in luggage.

"The assumptions were turned on their head," former FAA Administrator Jane Garvey said Tuesday.

Panel commissioner Bob Kerrey, a former U.S. senator from Nebraska, chastised airline and government officials for not giving the idea of a suicide attack more credibility, given that such attacks were being used with greater frequency on the ground by Muslim extremists. A 1999 report from the National Intelligence Council also warned of possible suicide hijackings.

"I have a difficult time with the idea that no one could have predicted this," Kerrey said.

Tuesday's hearing showed an aviation security system tangled in bureaucracy and plagued by turf battles and a lack of communication among agencies.

Claudio Manno, the Transportation Security Administration's assistant administrator for intelligence, said the FBI had shared information with the FAA only when there was a specific threat related to aviation.

"There was not a lot of daily flow from the FBI," Manno said.

The lack of sharing was apparent in the area of watch lists.

On Sept. 11 there were about two dozen people on the FAA's "no fly" list, designed to protect the nation's skies from terrorists. The State Department had the most comprehensive list - called TIPOFF - with some 61,000 names of people suspected of ties to terrorism. But TIPOFF, which experts consider the premier anti-terrorism watch list, wasn't shared with the FAA and the FAA never asked for access to it.

The CIA added two of the Sept. 11 hijackers - Khalid al Mihdhar and Salem Alhazmi - to the TIPOFF list in late August 2001, just before the attacks.

Manno said the airlines would've had trouble checking the tens of thousands of names on the State Department list.

Commissioner John Lehman called that claim "ridiculous."

"They certainly have no trouble handling frequent flier lists," he said.

"Does it pass the common sense test to let young Arabs on (planes) with 4-inch blades?" Lehman said. "None of you applied common sense."

Cathal Flynn, the FAA's former associate administrator of civil aviation security, drew a gasp from some attending the hearing when he admitted he was in the dark about the existence of TIPOFF.

"I was unaware of it until yesterday," Flynn said.


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