The key questions are: are we really as safe as the government says we are, are we as safe we need to be, and, are we as safe as we can be. The answer to these questions, ominously, is no.

I am often asked whether, in my judgment, DHS has made America safer than we were on 9/11. My answer to that question is yes. But, whether we are safer today than we were on 9/11 is not the only question. The key questions are: are we really as safe as the government says we are, are we as safe we need to be, and, are we as safe as we can be. The answer to these questions, ominously, is no.

Aviation Security

Because we were attacked on 9/11 by and through this sector, it stands to reason that we have focused the lion’s share of our efforts since then on closing security gaps therein. In the past five years, cockpit doors have been hardened; some pilots are armed; the number of air marshals has increased significantly; and screeners are better trained and more sensitized to the critical role they play as the last line of defense before would-be terrorists board airplanes. Even in this sector, though, we are far more vulnerable to terrorism than we should be this many years after 9/11 and after the creation of a department created to prevent another such attack. One after another government investigation have shown that it is as easy as it was five years ago for terrorists to sneak deadly weapons past unsuspecting screeners.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the president asked the Transportation Department’s Inspector General, in whose jurisdiction oversight of aviation security lay at the time, to undertake a series of undercover investigations at airports around the country to test the then privatized screeners’ ability to detect concealed weapons. This was intended to set a baseline against which progress going forward could be assessed. The results were devastating, even at a time of heightened alert. The concern, of course, was that if government investigators could still easily sneak weapons past screeners, so could hardened Al Qaeda operatives, who are more than willing to die trying. When I was appointed the first DHS Inspector General, I sent my own teams of undercover investigators to the very same airports to see whether two years later the federalization of the screener workforce and the transfer of the Transportation Security Administration from DOT to DHS had made any difference in screeners’ ability to spot deadly weapons. When our results came in, we found exactly the same failure rates as in 2001, to the decimal point. I sent the very same teams of investigators to the same airports in late 2004 and early 2005 to see whether the recommendations that we had made in early 2004, based on the first investigation, had been implemented, and, if so, whether screener performance had improved. We found exactly the same results as two years earlier. There had been literally no improvement in screeners’ performance in four years. It is not as if things are any better now. This past April investigators working for Congress’ investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, were able to sneak bomb parts undetected through checkpoints at some 21 airports around the country. And, as recently as late October, screeners missed guns and bombs in 20 out of 22 tests at Newark International Airport, one of the airports transited by some of the 9/11 hijackers.

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