Bush team tried to suppress pre-9/11 report (ZOT!!! Help, I'm bein' suppressed!)

officials at the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) did receive warnings, they were "lulled into a false sense of security".

Every bit of veracity in this piece evaporates in the above phrase.

The FAA is the Federal Aviation Administration, not the "Authority." As an effective police or security enterprise, this subset of the Department of Transportation is on par with the Sheriff's Department of Steuben County, Indiana; that is, nice guys, but don't expect a lot. Furthermore, the FAA is woefully underfunded and does 3 things well - controls air traffic, maintains its integral electronic equipment, and spot checks commercial and private pilots and aircraft. Anything beyond the scope of those actions is beyond the scope of the FAA.

As an employee of the FAA for over twenty years, I can say with assurity that, of the hundreds of weekly reports received by this DOT department, including noise complaints, UFO sightings, bomb threats, gremlins on the wings, drug running, ad nauseum, a few reports of possible plane hijacking and suicidal terrorists got stuffed in the same bin as the McDonald's wrappers from yesterdays lunch.

If the Feds have tried to suppress such reports as these, the logic for doing so seems easy to fathom. The word from the top to all government agencies, after 9/11, was to compile a list of any and all items prior to 9/11 that might have been a clue to the terrorist's plan. There are probably dozens of reports, having been culled from every obscure gov't factotum's data base, that imply a report of suspicious activity relating to the actual hijackers' intentions. This is the ongoing damage control investigation of suspicious activity that the Feds are conducting to determine how to be prescient for the next attack.

In short, anyone who knows of the incompetent bureaucracy that is the administration of the FAA has to be rolling in the aisles with laughter at the proposition that this government backwater could have, in any way, been holding usable evidence to avert 9/11. As an aside, when 9/11 hit, it wasn't the decision of the mighty heads of the FAA to halt all aviation from flight, it was the quick and independent response of a subaltern in the Air Traffic Management branch in Washington, D.C.

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