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perceived as deadlier than hijacking and therefore of greater consequence. In
1996, a presidential commission on aviation safety and security chaired by Vice
President Al Gore reinforced the prevailing concern about sabotage and explo-
sives on aircraft.The Gore Commission also flagged, as a new danger, the pos-
sibility of attack by surface-to-air missiles. Its 1997 final report did not discuss
the possibility of suicide hijackings.
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The FAA set and enforced aviation security rules, which airlines and air-
ports were required to implement.The rules were supposed to produce a "lay-
ered" system of defense.This meant that the failure of any one layer of security
would not be fatal, because additional layers would provide backup security.
But each layer relevant to hijackings--intelligence, passenger prescreening,
checkpoint screening, and onboard security--was seriously flawed prior to
9/11.Taken together, they did not stop any of the 9/11 hijackers from getting
on board four different aircraft at three different airports.
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The FAA's policy was to use intelligence to identify both specific plots and
general threats to civil aviation security, so that the agency could develop and
deploy appropriate countermeasures. The FAA's 40-person intelligence unit
was supposed to receive a broad range of intelligence data from the FBI, CIA,
and other agencies so that it could make assessments about the threat to avia-
tion. But the large volume of data contained little pertaining to the presence
and activities of terrorists in the United States. For example, information on
the FBI's effort in 1998 to assess the potential use of flight training by terror-
ists and the Phoenix electronic communication of 2001 warning of radical
Middle Easterners attending flight school were not passed to FAA headquar-
ters. Several top FAA intelligence officials called the domestic threat picture a
serious blind spot.
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Moreover, the FAA's intelligence unit did not receive much attention from
the agency's leadership. Neither Administrator Jane Garvey nor her deputy rou-
tinely 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
a disaster had occurred or a specific plot had been discovered.
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The next aviation security layer was passenger prescreening. The FAA
directed air carriers not to fly individuals known to pose a "direct" threat to
civil aviation. But as of 9/11, the FAA's "no-fly" list contained the names of
just 12 terrorist suspects (including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed), even though government watchlists contained the names of
many thousands of known and suspected terrorists.This astonishing mismatch
existed despite the Gore Commission's having called on the FBI and CIA four
years earlier to provide terrorist watchlists to improve prescreening.The long-
time chief of the FAA's civil aviation security division testified that he was not
even aware of the State Department's TIPOFF list of known and suspected ter-
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