Diffused Authority Opens Door to Attack

Your May 19 editorial about 9/11 was 100% on target. We must use the experiences leading up to 9/11 to stop future attacks. We should not blame President Bush or former President Clinton. We should blame a governmental system where authority and responsibility are diffused.

When counter-terrorism policy involves 50 different agencies at the federal level alone, information is bound to fall through the cracks. Take LAX, for example. Dozens of organizations are involved in its security. These include the Federal Aviation Administration, the FBI, the CIA, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the new Transportation Security Administration, local police and, most of all, the airlines.

These are organizations with vastly different missions, jurisdictions and cultures. The airlines focus on getting passengers out the door as efficiently as possible. The FAA is in the regulation business, creating safety rules that, before 9/11, focused principally on preventing accidents. The FBI’s core mission has been to investigate crimes. The INS seeks to prevent illegal immigration. Today, security functions are split between the airlines, which conduct aircraft searches, receive cargo and match passenger IDs, and the Transportation Security Administration, which conducts ticket counter searches and checkpoint screening. Who is in charge when it comes to counter-terrorism?

What the country needs is a head of security (such as Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge) who has the rights, powers and resources to receive and act on all information filtering through the bureaucracy and to disseminate it to local venues. LAX and other critical local venues also need heads of security with the same rights and powers.

Richard J. Riordan

Los Angeles

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Your editorial suggests that it would not have been “a simple matter to prevent the unprecedented use of aircraft as terrorist-guided missiles.” I couldn’t agree more and am disgusted with politicians who suggest otherwise.

However, it would have been a simple matter to prevent 9/11, if warnings over many years had been heeded. Airline cockpits had long been “open to the public.” Many of us part-time pilots wondered why, because to have prevented access to cockpits would have prevented many airline hijackings over many years, in addition to 9/11. Those warnings should have been the reason for recent finger-pointing, not the unexpected suicidal hijackings. The fingers could be pointed in many directions: the FAA, Congress, etc.

And the lesson is still unlearned by some. On a recent major airline flight from Managua, Nicaragua, to Panama City, I noticed that the cockpit door was open for much of the flight and unlocked for all of it. What will it take?

Clark W. Robins

Whittier