Official: FAA Left Helpless On 9/11
A former top security official at the Federal Aviation Administration testified Wednesday that numerous security measures could have been implemented to protect against hijackings had officials known of Zacarias Moussaoui's terrorist plans.
Robert Cammaroto said the FAA could have redeployed federal air marshals, tightened security checkpoints and directed flight crews to resist hijackers if they had known that al Qaeda terrorists were training pilots to take over planes and fly them into buildings.
Cammaroto was responsible for issuing security directives to carriers in 2001 when officials became aware of various threats. Cammaroto was designated by prosecutors as a substitute witness to replace two other government aviation witnesses barred from the trial after they were improperly coached on their testimony by government lawyer Carla Martin.
Prosecutors wanted to show that the government might have been able to thwart or at least minimize the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks if Moussaoui had not lied about his terrorist plans when he was arrested in August 2001 on immigration violations. Moussaoui, who has confessed to being an al Qaeda conspirator, is the only person convicted in the United States in connection with the 9/11 attacks.
Cammaroto testified at Moussaoui's death-penalty trial that security directives could be implemented almost immediately once the FAA learned of a threat and that they could be kept in place indefinitely.
Earlier, a manager at an Arizona flight school that trained one of the Sept. 11 pilot-hijackers testified she called the FAA with concerns over his qualifications for a pilot license, but her concerns were dismissed by an agency official.
Margaret Chevrette, manager at the flight school, was testifying in the death-penalty trial of Moussaoui, who has confessed to being an al Qaeda terrorist.
It was the second time this week jurors heard witnesses testify that people in positions of authority in the federal government responded either slowly, negatively, or not at all, to warnings about a possible terrorist attack.
Chevrette said that the school's student, Hani Hanjour, lacked adequate English skills to gain his pilot's license. An FAA official responded to her concerns by suggesting that Hanjour could use an interpreter even though mastery of English is a requirement for a pilot.
Chevrette said that when the Sept. 11 attacks occurred, she knew Hanjour must have been involved.
"I remember crying all the way to work knowing our company helped to do this," she said.
Chevrette said that Hanjour's English was so bad that it took him eight hours to complete an oral exam that should've taken two hours.
Prosecutors in Moussaoui's trial were presenting testimony about the Sept. 11 pilot-hijackers' training in an apparent effort to show parallels between Moussaoui's flight training and that of other hijackers.
Two other pilot-hijackers from the Sept. 11 attacks abandoned a small airplane on a taxiway of Miami International Airport during their flight training, but their actions didn't attract serious scrutiny from federal officials, another witness said.
Daniel Pursell, a flight instructor at the school where hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi received commercial pilot training testified that instructors at the school breathed "a collective sigh of relief" when Atta and al-Shehhi completed their training and left the school.
Pursell said that the Dec. 26, 2000, incident at the Miami airport was one of several problems the school had with the pair.
Pursell said the tower chief at the airport called the Florida school to berate school officials after the plane was left on the runway. The FAA never questioned Atta and al-Shehhi, Pursell said.
During testimony Tuesday, a terrorism supervisor in FBI headquarters dismissed as "hunches and suppositions" a field agent's concerns about Moussaoui in the weeks before Sept. 11.
On Monday, Harry Samit, the FBI agent who arrested Moussaoui in Minnesota, said that FBI superiors ignored his repeated warnings that Moussaoui might be a terrorist interested in hijacking an airliner. The bureau's failures thwarted an opportunity to prevent the attacks, he said.
Under cross-examination by defense attorney Edward MacMahon, Samit acknowledged that he warned higher-ups and others in the government at least 70 times that Moussaoui was a terrorist, and detailed much of his information on Moussaoui in a 24-page document CBS News correspondent Jim Stewart reports.
On Tuesday, FBI terrorism supervisor Michael Rollince took the stand after the jury saw videotaped testimony that Moussaoui tried to enlist an Oklahoma roommate, Hussein al-Attas, in holy war even as he pressed ahead with his own terrorist training.Watch Stewart's report on Samit and the FBI.
The FBI's actions in the time between Moussaoui's Aug. 16, 2001, arrest on immigration violations and Sept. 11, 2001, are key issues at the trial.
Prosecutors allege that if Moussaoui had revealed his plans for a terrorist attack, the FBI could have thwarted or at least minimized the attacks. To obtain a death penalty, prosecutors must prove that Moussaoui's actions caused the death of at least one person on Sept. 11.
The defense argues that nothing Moussaoui said after his arrest would have made any difference to the FBI because its bureaucratic intransigence rendered it incapable of reacting swiftly to Moussaoui's arrest under any circumstances.