Who Us?

Here’s an interesting tid bit from my left brain

One of Rice’s answers today caught my attention. She was excusing why the Bush administration hadn’t acted on what she considered a “vague” threat:

…when you cannot tell people where a hijacking might occur under what circumstances I can tell you that I think the best antidote to what happened in that regard would have been many years before to think about what you could do, for instance, to harden cockpits. That would have made a difference. We weren’t going to harden cockpits in the three months that we had a threat spike. [emphasis added]]

[…]

After 9/11, it took the airlines fewer than three months to strengthen the cockpits by adding bars to the doors and other measures. In fact, it took them one month. Airlines were told to do something to secure cockpit doors in early October 2001 and the Transportation Secretary announced on November 9 that all airlines had completed this task.

Granted, it’s unlikely that they would have undertaken this job based upon vague threats, but it certainly was possible to achieve it if they had. And, today we found out that Norm Mineta didn’t even know there was a threat spike.

I realize that the airline industry was dragged into fixing those doors kicking and screaming and short of catastrophe they were unwilling to budge. Regardless, it’s a bit rich that Condi thinks that previous administrations should have done this, but not hers. Sadly for all of us, 9/11 happened on her watch, not theirs, and she was the one getting the highjacking warnings and had the head of CIA and her counterterorism chief running around screaming bloody murder.

Being a wholly owned subsidiary of US Industry made the Bush administration more able to accomplish this task than the previous one. Like Nixon and China, Bush should have been the guy to force the industry to bite the bullet. And it certainly makes you wonder why Condi and Company still haven’t done anything about this:

Even though small commercial aircraft are more likely to be lost in a shoulder-fired missile attack, two of the jet aircraft most familiar to American travelers have proven surprisingly vulnerable: Of the five Boeing 727s and 737s that have been hit by shoulder-launched missiles, three have been shot down, and in one of them 130 people died just after takeoff in Angola.

Despite the demonstrated risk that these missiles pose, no meaningful changes have been made to commercial aircraft design or flight operations to reduce it. While the president and other officials travel on aircraft equipped with countermeasures systems that protect them against a missile attack, most Americans do not. “The threats are real and the countermeasures exist,” a retired government anti-terrorism expert told Salon, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Some of us are perplexed as to why a greater sense of urgency hasn’t been demonstrated in securing our airspace.”