Washington – American aviation officials were warned as early as 1998 that al-Qaeda could “seek to hijack a commercial jet and slam it into a U.S. landmark,” according to previously secret portions of a report prepared last year by the Sept. 11 commission.
The officials also realized months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that two of the three airports ultimately used in the hijackings had suffered repeated security lapses.
Federal Aviation Administration officials were also warned in 2001 in a report prepared for the agency that airport screeners’ ability to detect possible weapons had “declined significantly” in recent years, but little was done to remedy the problem, the Sept. 11 commission found.
The White House and many members of the commission, which has completed its official work, have been battling for more than a year over the release of the commission’s report on aviation failures, which was completed in August 2004.
A heavily redacted version was released by the Bush administration in January, but commission members complained that the deleted material contained information critical to the public’s understanding of what went wrong on Sept. 11.
In response, the administration prepared a new public version of the report, which was posted on Tuesday on the National Archives website.
While the new version still blacks out numerous references to particular shortcomings in aviation security, it restores several dozen other portions of the report that the administration had previously considered too secret for public release.
Commission officials said they were perplexed by the administration’s original attempts to black out material that they said struck them as trivial or mundane.
One previously deleted section showed, for instance, that flights carrying the author Salman Rushdie were subjected to heightened security in the summer of 2001 because of a fatwa, or edict, of violence against him.
In another of the previously deleted footnotes, it was stated that “sewing scissors” would be allowed on a plane in the hands of a woman who was carrying sewing equipment but prohibited “in the possession of a man who possessed no other sewing equipment.”
Richard Ben-Veniste, a former member of the Sept. 11 commission, said that the release of the material more than a year after it was completed underscored the over-classification of federal material.