Family Is No Threat To U.S. Security, Government Says

As many as 12 of Osama bin Laden's relatives hold pilot certificates issued by the FAA, some received as little as three months ago, according to records provided by Safe Banking Systems.

ABC News reports that both the FAA and TSA say none of the terrorists' relatives pose any threat to U.S. security. None are thought to be "potential terrorists to harm the flying public." The FAA did revoke the license held by Bakr bin Laden, Osama's half brother, due to "security concerns." Bakr, along with another half-brother Yeslam, are named in a lawsuit brought by families of 9/11 victims claiming they helped finance Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda operation in the 1990's.

TSA, the agency charged with clearing the 4 million people who hold some kind of FAA license, says the process is complicated because of a lack of data in the FAA database, such as dates of birth and addresses, as well as typographical errors and multiple spellings of names that could be 'bin Laden'. TSA this summer finished checking all the names on the pilot's list against the FBI's terrorist screening database, TSA spokesperson Lauren Gaches told ABC News. "TSA now conducts the name matching process for these nearly four million records on a daily basis," she said.

But Mark Schiffer of Safe Banking Systems, a computer security contracted to analyzed FAA records, says "The many different spellings of bin Laden in the database make it impossible to determine exactly who has a license. The information is so thoroughly compromised that any vetting system built on it is unreliable."

FMI: www.tsa.gov, www.safe-banking.com