Posted on 11/29/2002 7:49:29 AM PST by spycatcher
With Al Gore sticking his head back up in the political arena, and the recent missile fired at an Israeli passenger jet I'm reposting this from last year on our "would be President:"
What Was Al Gore's Role?
Neal Boortz
Monday, Sept. 24, 2001Did Al Gore let the airlines off the hook so he and Bill Clinton could have a little more campaign cash?
Here's the story, according to NewsMax.com and the Boston Globe.
After TWA Flight 800 crashed in 1996, Al Gore was named chairman of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety. It came to be known as the "Gore commission."
So, on Sept. 9 of that year, the Gore commission produced a preliminary report – one that proposed several measures to improve security at airports. The proposals included matching every piece of baggage to a passenger and better training for airport screeners.
But the airlines complained. They said the new procedures would cost too much money. They said that more rigorous screening and baggage matching would take too much time, causing more delays and missed connections.
Ten days after the preliminary report came out, Gore sent a letter to Carol Hallett, an airline lobbyist. He promised her that the commission's findings would not result in any loss of revenue.
Within the next two weeks, the Democratic National Committee received a series of contributions from the following airlines:
TWA: $40,000 American: $265,000 Delta: $120,000 United: $115,000 Northwest: $87,000
That's a total of $627,000 for the 1996 Clinton-Gore presidential campaign. The Boston Globe notes that "over the preceding 10-week period, the airlines gave the Democrats less than half that sum."
Then, after the election, Gore issued a draft of his final report. All of the security measures from the preliminary report were gone, according to one insider. Two members of the Gore commission balked. So did CIA Director John Deutch. Gore pulled the draft final report.
The final report came out a month later. It included the tough security requirements of the preliminary report – but gave no deadline for meeting them. Basically, without a timetable, the report wasn't worth the paper it was printed on.
It doesn't end there. Gore capped his commission's report with a lie. In a meeting with other commission members in 1997, Gore said he would allow room for dissent by those who disagreed with the report. But, minutes later, he announced to Bill Clinton and the public that the report was the work of a unanimous commission!
The true Clinton-Gore legacy is starting to emerge, my friends, and it ain't pretty. It's a legacy that includes gutting intelligence budgets and letting the airlines off the hook in exchange for political contributions. Would 6,700 people be alive today if the CIA had the necessary resources and the airlines weren't so damned lax on security? We'll never know.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsmax.com ...
June 18, 1997
Gore Sued in Row Over Report on TWA Crash
FROM TOM RHODES IN WASHINGTON
A WOMAN who lost her husband in the Lockerbie disaster and was appointed to a White House airline safety commission is suing Al Gore, the United States Vice-President, over the report into last year's TWA Flight 800 crash.
Victoria Cummock has filed a suit in federal court against Mr Gore and the Department of Transportation, alleging that the Vice-President forced her to abandon a call for specific counter-terrorism measures and demands for their implementation. A magazine report claimed yesterday that Mr Gore's decision may have been influenced by large-scale campaign contributions from the airlines.
Mrs Cummock has not endorsed the accepted theory that the Boeing 747 was brought down by mechanical failure and believes a terrorist bomb could have been the cause of the disaster.
She claims that Mr Gore, as chairman of the commission, refused to publish her detailed dissent as part of the group's official recommendations after last July's TWA crash off Long Island in which all 230 passengers and crew were killed.
The report, when presented to President Clinton in February, was said to have the unanimous support of all 21 members of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security. It recommended that special bomb detectors should be installed at only 54 of America's 450 airports and, even then, only bags deemed suspicious would be checked.
Mrs Cummock refused to sign the report and, according to The American Spectator, she then received a fax from Gerry Kavauer, the commission's executive director, promising her dissent would be published if she relented. She was later told Mr Gore would not agree to include her comments. The magazine alleges that Mr Gore's initial enthusiasm for anti-terrorist measures, which could have cost airlines up to $1 billion (about £600 million), was curbed by large donations to the Clinton-Gore re-election campaign by many airlines, including TWA.
Federal Election Commission documents show that airlines gave nearly $500,000 in soft money to the Democratic Party after Mr Clinton appointed the commission.
In September last year on the day that Mr Gore promised the airline lobby there would be no expensive new counter-terrorism measures, the Democratic National Committee received a $40,000 contribution from TWA headquarters.
In her suit, Mrs Cummock claims that the commission and the Department of Transportation intended to file the final report without her complete dissent. She says the body violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act which requires committees to publish full minority dissents.
And never mind that TW 800 spawned the White House Commission on Aviation Safety...or the "Gore commission." The very existence of this commission was predicated on the assumption that TW 800 was destroyed by faulty security -- i.e., a bomb.
I've always found this dichotomy curious...
This is Al Gore's Vice Presidential legacy
Meanwhile from today: El Al using anti-missile systems on aircraft (other airlines say it's just too darn expensive)
With the Clinton administration, I wouldn't discount this possibility...
"The classified reports used by the White House Commission on Aviation Safety, chaired by Vice President Al Gore and appointed by President Clinton in the wake of the TWA Flight 800 disaster, are still being withheld from a dissenting member of the panel despite a lawsuit to obtain copies, WorldNetDaily has learned...Cummock filed suit to gain access to files she and the public were denied. She won the case, but the material still has not been made available to her."
DITTO !!!!!
And Freepers have MORE bookmarked article we can forward to the press. :-)
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