9/11 Commission Report Blasts Former FAA Administrator

Since the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks released its report Friday, the FAA has taken a lot of the heat and no one there has been scorched more than former Administrator Jane Garvey.

"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 policy making process," the report said.

In other words, Garvey -- the former chief at Logan Field and now a consultant to the Democratic National Convention in Boston this week -- didn't pay "much attention" to the warnings she got from her own intelligence sources.

Garvey (right) disagreed with the 9/11 commission's characterization of the FAA under her command.

"The top secret and classified information was coming in fairly regularly that summer... early spring through August," she said, as quoted by the Boston Globe. "We were aware of more activity [but] the predominant information pointed to a concern for overseas terrorism. I think what is important, at least from the FAA's perspective and my perspective, is that I was receiving everything the agency was receiving."

But the report severely dinged the FAA for security lapses it said contributed to the 9/11 hijackings. Commission members said screeners (who worked for the airlines before the terror attacks) failed to detect "even obvious FAA test items." When confronted with the problem, the FAA under Garvey simply failed to act in an aggressive way to address the problem.

"Secondary screening of individuals and their carry-on bags to identify weapons (other than bombs) was nonexistent, except for passengers who triggered the metal detectors," the report said. ''Even when small knives were detected by secondary screening, they were usually returned to the traveler."

Even when the FAA did institute more stringent checks on some of the 19 hijackers, the report said, the checks amounted to only having their checked luggage examined. The hijackers themselves were -- with one possible exception -- treated as routine passengers.

FMI: www.faa.gov