Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” —Ronald Reagan
Jane F. Garvey, former administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, is being considered for transportation secretary in the Obama administration. She spent four years at the Federal Highway Administration, as deputy administrator and then acting administrator.
Mr. Obama appointed Ms. Garvey to his transition team for transportation despite her support for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton during the primaries.
Bush administration officials who followed Ms. Garvey at the F.A.A. criticized her as being too generous in negotiations with the air traffic controllers' union. She was the head of the F.A.A., the agency in charge of airline security, at the time of the 9/11 attacks, although she was never widely blamed for the failure to foresee the possibility of suicide hijackers.
Her nomination should be no surprise, when you consider that President Obama and his "crack" vetting team are considering Randy Babbitt as the next head of the Federal Aviation Administration. After all, Mr. Babbitt is former head of the country’s largest union representing airline pilots,(ALPA) and we know how near and dear to Mr. Obama’s heart unions are. If you have any doubt look at the "stimulus bill" with little being asked in the way of cuts in salary and benefits to Unions members to save the Big 3!
To understand what a horrible – indeed, dangerous – choice Ms. Garvey would be in the sensitive position of insuring the safety of Americans’ land and air travel, a little history is in order.
Four months before Sept. 11, 2001, recently retired Brian Sullivan, a former risk-management specialist (for over 10 years) in charge of physical security of air-traffic control towers and air-route traffic control facilities in New England, was so concerned about the lax security at Logan Airport that he wrote a letter to Sen. Kerry (D-MA), warning him of the potential for a terrorist disaster at the airport.
His letter held these prophetic words: "With the concept of jihad, do you think it would be difficult for a determined terrorist to get on a plane and destroy himself and all other passengers? Think what the result would be of a coordinated attack that took down several domestic flights on the same day. With our current screening, this is more than possible. It is almost likely.”
Sullivan followed up by sending Kerry a videotape that showed the ease with which undercover reporters had successfully penetrated Logan’s security screening 10 times with potentially deadly weapons.
For three months, Kerry did nothing with the information, finally sending it to the one agency – the Department of Transportation’s Office of the Inspector General: DOT OIG – that Sullivan had specifically told him had been consistently remiss in taking action after such warnings.
Two of the four planes that attacked our nation on September 11th took off from Logan Airport and 80 of Kerry’s constituents died. Yet Kerry, who held evidence in his hands of Logan’s vulnerabilities, took no action – when his action may well have prevented the horrors of that fateful day.
Significantly, Sullivan also filed a complaint with the Hotline of the Federal Aviation Administration’s chief administrator Jane Garvey (a Clinton holdover) and had the incriminating videotape delivered to her office.
During her tenure, Sullivan said, “FAA security personnel were placed in key management positions despite their limited experience in air security and their apparent ideological aversion to prescreen high-suspect people”: i.e., Arab males from the Middle East between the ages of 20-40.
Two years after Garvey took the helm, the FAA fined the Massachusetts Port Authority $178,000 for 136 security violations at Logan that included failure to screen baggage properly and allowing easy access to restricted areas and parked planes. On one occasion, a 17-year-old man cut the razor wire on a perimeter fence surrounding Logan and walked for two miles across restricted areas, finally stowing away on a British Airways Boeing 747.
SOURCE:MICHNEWS.COM
The terrorist threat remains. The most recent significant aviation-related terrorist action was the December 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane by members of a Kashmiri separatist group. There continues to be concern that the hijacking may either be copied or spur others to commit acts because this incident succeeded in gaining the release of prisoners and the hijackers have never been caught. Another threat is attributed to terrorist financier Usama Bin Laden...[who] has both the motivation and the wherewithal to do so.
But when I-don’t-know-nuthin’ Garvey testified before the 9/11 Commission, she claimed ignorance of any threats – saying that she hadn’t seen the CD-ROM until after September 11!
The 9/11 Commission didn’t believe her. On page 83, its report states: "... the FAA's intelligence unit did not receive much attention from the agency's leadership. Neither Administrator Jane Garvey nor her deputy routinely reviewed daily intelligence, and what they did see was screened for them. She was unaware of a great amount of hijacking threat information from her own intelligence unit, which, in turn, was not deeply involved in the agency's policymaking process. Historically, decisive security action took place only after (my emphasis) a disaster had occurred or a specific plot had been discovered."
Further, according to Kevin Berger of Salon.com, commenting on reaction to the 9/11 Commission’s Report: “But all of the international intrigue, not to mention partisan sniping over what president or government agency was at fault, has deflected attention from the one culprit that gets a universal thrashing in the 9/11 report: the Federal Aviation Administration.” Translation: Jane Garvey!.
Berger documented the 9/11 Commission’s findings of the grievous failings of the FAA under Garvey:
▪ Each layer of the FAA that was relevant to hijackings – intelligence, passenger prescreening, checkpoint screening, and onboard security – was seriously flawed.
▪ Although government watch lists contained the names of tens of thousands of known terrorists, including a State Department TIP-OFF list with 60,000 names, the FAA's own "no-fly" list contained names of just 12 terrorist suspects.
▪ At Logan’s check-in counters, airline clerks tagged four of the five hijackers on American Flight 11 (the first jet to hit the World Trade Center) as suspect, yet they were allowed to board the plane.
▪ Two of the hijackers on American Flight 77 from Dulles, which crashed into the Pentagon, set off the security gate alarm but the screeners didn't bother to investigate further and, again, allowed the hijackers to board the plane.
▪ And most damning, Jane Garvey did not review daily intelligence and so was "unaware of a great amount of hijacking threat information from her own intelligence unit."
It was also under Garvey that the then-Computer Assisted Passenger Profiling System, or CAPPS I was neutered. After 9/11, the program was renamed the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, or CAPPs II, because, according to Sullivan, “of overzealous liberals, the American Civil Liberties Union and the diversity crowd who are hell-bent on insuring that political correctness is always implemented at the expense of our basic security.”
And Sullivan cites additional flaws in Garvey’s FAA, all of them omitted from the 9/11 Commission’s report. For instance:
▪ A memo dated April 2001 from Joe Lawless, director of security at the Massachusetts Port Authority, citing terrorist ties to Logan Airport and the need to address the airport’s known vulnerabilities.
▪ The rejection of another Lawless memo by the Logan Airline Managers Council (LAMCO) and the FAA's federal security manager at Logan, proposing that the Mass. State Police begin undercover testing of screening checkpoints in July '01.
▪ Reported sightings of Mohammed Atta at Logan in May and early September '01, involved in suspicious activity on the Air Operations Area and surveillance of checkpoints.
Yet all this is not where Garvey’s egregious mismanagement of the FAA ends. According to NY Times reporter Matthew L. Wald, Garvey ignored both past incidents and those under her watch, including:
▪ 1994: The hijacking of two jetliners (one by an Islamic “militant” group) with the intent of “crashing them into buildings.”
▪ 1994: A man stormed the cockpit of a domestic flight with the intention, according to his fellow employees, of crashing the plane into a building in Memphis.
▪ 1994: A lone pilot crashed a stolen single-engine Cessna into a tree on the White House grounds near the president's bedroom.
▪ 1996: The crash of T.W.A. Flight 800, which to this day many people believe was a terrorist attack.
▪ 1999: A report of an exiled Islamic leader in Britain who said in August 1998 that bin Laden would ''bring down an airliner or hijack an airliner to humiliate the United States.''
▪ 2000: The FAA’s annual report saying that although Osama bin Laden ''is not known to have attacked civil aviation, he has both the motivation and the wherewithal to do so...bin Laden's anti-Western and anti-American attitudes make him and his followers a significant threat to civil aviation, particularly to U.S. civil aviation.”
“But aviation security officials,” Wald said, “never extrapolated any sort of pattern from those incidents.” That includes the top official – the FAA’s Jane Garvey.
Yet in spite of mountains of evidence pointing to Garvey’s complete incompetence, and in spite of the all the security experts in the United States – which include former or active police chiefs, retired FBI and CIA operatives and private companies that spend 24/7/365 assessing threats and formulating “coping” strategies – Kerry chose Garvey as an “expert” consultant in charge of security for the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
That’s right, Jane Garvey, who was singled out by the “we won’t point fingers” 9/11 Commission as taking action “only after a disaster had occurred ...” and whose FAA got “a universal thrashing” in the report.
A commentary in Aviation Insight & Perspectives said that: “Appointing Garvey head of convention security is like making John Gotti the head of the FBI.”
How on earth could the Obama administration be considering Garvey for the No. 2 spot at the FAA.
After less than three weeks in office, the woefully inexperienced Mr. Obama has offered our country the services of three tax cheats (Geithner, Daschle, and Killefer), a man under criminal investigation (Richardson), and a host of leftist policymakers that would do the Marxist-Leninist Politburo proud.
Yet the Media still talks about the health care crisis, the environmental crisis,the oil crisis and banking crisis. ALL THE WHILE THEY IGNORE THE ONLY CRISIS THAT MATTERS, our SURVIVAL CRISIS AS A FREE REPUBLIC!
The possible appointment of the incompetent Jane Garvey to the deputy’s job at the DOT – which has oversight of the FAA – should be the last straw for Americans of every political stripe, or at least those who care about the still-looming terrorist threat and their own safety on our roads and rails, and in the skies.
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