----- Original Message -----
From: pquatt@...
To: WesternCarolinaSurvivalists@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, June 10, 2004 9:55 AM
Subject: [WesternCarolinaSurvivalists] Kerry


THE WARNING KERRY IGNORED

By PAUL SPERRY

---------------------------------------------------------------

March 15, 2004 -- SEN. John Kerry boasts how he "sounded the alarm
on terrorism years before 9/ 11," referring to his 1997 book The New
War. Too bad he didn't blast it when it really counted - four months
before the hijackings, when he was hand-delivered evidence of
serious security breaches at Logan International Airport, with
specific warnings that terrorists could exploit them. Former FAA
security officials say the Massachusetts senator had the power to
prevent at least the Boston hijackings and save the World Trade
Center and thousands of lives, yet he failed to take effective
action after they gave him a prophetic warning that his state's main
airport was vulnerable to multiple hijackings.

"He just did the Pontius Pilate thing and passed the buck" on back
through the federal bureaucracy, said Brian Sullivan, a retired FAA
special agent from the Boston area who in May 2001 personally warned
Kerry that Logan was ripe for a "jihad" suicide operation possibly
involving "a coordinated attack."

Rewind to May 6, 2001 That night, a Boston TV station (Fox-25) aired
reporter Deborah Sherman's story on an undercover investigation at
Logan that Sullivan and another retired agent helped set up. In nine
of 10 tries, a crew got knives and other weapons through security
checkpoints - including the very ones the 9/11 hijackers would later
exploit.

The next day, Sullivan fired off a two-page letter to Kerry
highlighting the systemic failures.

"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?" he warned. "Think what the result would be of a
coordinated attack which took down several domestic flights on the
same day. With our current screening, this is more than possible. It
is almost likely." The toll from such an attack would be economic,
as well as human, he predicted with chilling accuracy.

Sullivan followed up by having the undercover videotape hand-
delivered to Kerry's office.

More than 11 weeks later, Kerry finally replied to his well-informed
and anxious constituent. "I have forwarded your tape to the
Department of Transportation's Office of Inspector General [DOT
OIG]," he said in a brief July 24, 2001, letter, a copy of which
I've obtained.

Yet Sullivan had made it clear in his letter that going to his old
agency was a dead end. He and other agents had complained about
security lapses for years and got nowhere. "The DOT OIG has become
an ineffective overseer of the FAA," he told Kerry. Sullivan
suggested he show the tape to peers on committees with FAA
oversight. He even volunteered to testify before them.

But he never heard from Kerry again.

At that point, Steve Elson, the other agent who'd teamed up on the
TV sting, decided to take a crack at the junior senator.

A fiery ex-Navy Seal, Elson spent three years as part of an elite
FAA unit called the Red Team, which did covert testing of airport
security across the country, before retiring as a field agent in
Houston. He offered to fly to Washington at his own expense to give
Kerry a document-backed presentation about the "facade of security"
at Logan and other major airports.

But a Kerry aide said not to bother. "You're not a constituent,"
Elson was told just a few weeks before the hijackings. He went
ballistic, warning that if Kerry didn't act soon he'd risk the lives
of planeloads of his actual constituents. That warning now looks
like prophecy: At least 82 Kerry constituents were murdered aboard
American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175.

"Enhanced security would have prevented the hijackings, virtually
without question," Elson says. If nothing else, it might have
discouraged ringleader Mohamed Atta, who monitored security
procedures at Logan weeks before the hijackings.

Yet the warnings apparently did stick in Kerry's mind: In the days
after 9/11, Kerry told the Boston Globe that he'd triggered an
undercover probe of Logan security by the General Accounting Office
in June 2001!!

But he wrote Sullivan no such thing in his July letter, stating only
that he passed his warning and tape on to Transportation, not GAO.
And GAO, though it is the investigative arm of Congress, didn't seem
to know what the senator was talking about. The agency had tested
security at two airports before 9/11, but neither one was Logan. And
Kerry confessed he didn't know the outcome of the probe he says he
triggered.

Some follow-up, senator.

Sullivan and Elson, joined by aviation-security experts David Forbes
and Andrew Thomas, want to see Kerry hauled before the 9/11
Commission to answer questions about what he knew about Logan's
lapses, and specifically what he did about them, before that fateful
day. It's a reasonable request - especially since Kerry has
complained that President Bush will only give the panel an hour of
his time.

Where was Kerry's sense of urgency? Where was his leadership? These
are fair questions to ask of someone vying for Bush's job.

"We don't have to wait for a tragedy to occur to act," Sullivan
urged Kerry in his letter. But tragically, that's exactly what
happened - at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and on both sides of
the aisle.

Paul Sperry is a Washington investigative reporter and author
of "Crude Politics."

THIS MUST BE SENT TO EVERY COMPUTER IN AMERICA


Yahoo! Groups Sponsor
ADVERTISEMENT





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yahoo! Groups Links

a.. To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WesternCarolinaSurvivalists/

b.. To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
WesternCarolinaSurvivalists-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

c.. Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]