NEW YORK, April 1 (UPI) -- The blue ribbon commission set up to investigate the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks was told Tuesday of what one member called "urgent and glaring" gaps in the nation's transportation security.
Gerald Dillingham, from the General Accounting Office, Congress' investigative arm, told the 10-member panel at its first public hearing in New York that -- despite a series of warnings from the GAO -- both container shipping and charter aircraft remain vulnerable to terrorists seeking to stage attacks against the United States.
"They have to be addressed," he said of what he called these "significant gaps" in the nation's security. "We keep pointing it out, but we can't make 'em do it," he told the panel of the GAO's interaction with the new Transportation Security Agency. "Hopefully," he concluded, "the commission will point it out as well."
He said the agency's greatest concern -- more than 18 months after terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people by crashing hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon -- remained aviation, especially charter aircraft, air cargo and general aviation, or privately-owned planes.
Commission member John F. Lehman said small charter planes were of particular concern. "While little old ladies are being frisked," at airports he said, "it's possible for an Arab businessman to pick up the phone and charter a Gulfstream jet ... which has no reinforced doors, no armed pilots and no screening for he and his party to go through."
"This is so obvious. What's taking so long?" he continued, "Nothing's been done, I can assure you because I use these planes fairly frequently, and I've never seen even a touch of security."
Lehman, who was secretary of the Navy under President Ronald Reagan, called the small plane charter sector an "urgent and glaring (gap) especially considering the urgency that's been applied to some other sectors."
Last year, anti-terror experts staged a war game called Silent Vector in which terrorists chartered three small planes from a small airport in an effort to crash them simultaneously into chemical plants up and down the East Coast.
"We developed the scenario and vetted it with experts from the government and the (charter aircraft) industry. Everybody agreed it was well within the realm of the possible," Phil Anderson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who ran the war game, told United Press International recently.
"Flying out of many small uncontrolled airfields," Anderson said, "passengers can carry anything they want on board, including multiple concealed weapons."
And, added Randy Larsen of the Homeland Security Institute, another of the war game planners, a large bomb.
Larsen -- who also gave evidence to the commission Tuesday -- said that high-end charter jets, designed to carry up to 20 people and their luggage, were the biggest worry. "You can put an explosive device in one as powerful as the bomb Timothy McViegh used on the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, and turn it into a 500-mile-an-hour cruise missile."
On container shipping, Dillingham said that customs officials physically inspected only 2 percent of containers entering the United States. There are 361 seaports where goods may enter the country, and millions of containers pass through them every year.
He said that ports were "inherently vulnerable to terrorist attacks" and made "desirable targets" especially because they were so often found in large cities.
Responding to questions from commission chairman, former GOP New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, Dillingham said that ports were a high priority for the TSA, but that it would nonetheless take "a few years" to close this loophole.
"We are going to have to live with it for a while," he said, adding that there was a balance to be struck between screening and keeping moving the billions of dollars worth of cargo on which the nation's economic well-being depended.
Citing the recent longshoreman's strike, he said it had provided a glimpse of how, when ports were closed for even a short time, the effects cascaded through the national economy.
