Terrorists Keep U.S. Aviation Licenses

Terrorists Keep U.S. Aviation Licenses
Judicial Watch
At least half a dozen men suspected or convicted of terrorism have been allowed by the U.S. government to keep their federal aviation licenses, including two who appear on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List and a Libyan sentenced to nearly three decades in prison by a Scottish court for the 1980s bombing of an American airliner.
Reported by a major newspaper this week, the appalling story illustrates the government’s never ending incompetence when it comes to national security. This, despite strict antiterrorism measures enacted after the September 2001 terrorist attacks requiring the aviation license revocations of such individuals.
6 Considered Threats Kept Licenses for Aviation
The New York Times

At least six men suspected or convicted of crimes that threaten national security retained their federal aviation licenses, despite antiterrorism laws written after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that required license revocation. Among them was a Libyan sentenced to 27 years in prison by a Scottish court for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie.

In response to questions from The New York Times, the Transportation Security Administration, which is supposed to root out such individuals, announced that the Federal Aviation Administration suspended the licenses on Thursday.

The two agencies appeared to be unaware that the men were among the nearly one million people licensed as pilots, mechanics and flight dispatchers. They were identified by a tiny family-owned company in Mineola, N.Y., demonstrating software it developed to scrub lists of bank customers for terrorism links.

The list also includes an Iranian-American convicted of trying to send jet fighter parts to Iran and a Lebanese citizen living near Detroit who was convicted of trying to provide military equipment to Hezbollah.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) were unaware that the terrorists were actively licensed pilots, mechanics and flight dispatchers until the reporter who wrote the piece started snooping around. Incredibly, neither agency noticed that two of the individuals (Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhima) are wanted by the FBI for the 1988 Lockerbie airline bombing.
Others include an Iranian convicted of trying to ship jet fighter parts to Iran and a Lebanese living in Michigan who was convicted for trying to provide military equipment to the Muslim terrorist group Hezbollah. The FAA even reissued the commercial pilot license of a southern California man jailed for trying to send thousands of aircraft parts to Iran and a Maryland man convicted of manufacturing ricin, a powerful poison favored by terrorists.
A little family-owned company in a small New York town discovered the federally licensed terrorists by using software it developed to scour lists of bank customers who might have links to terrorism. The Department of Homeland Security, which supposedly preempts, detects and deters terrorism threats, claims it’s conducting a comprehensive review to see why its system failed to identify these people.

Wild Thing’s comment……
Gosh Ya want terrorists flying around without licenses? That might be dangerous!
For 8 years the left attacked Bush for wanting to keep us safe. They lied about the war saying it was all about oil, they lied about their not being WMD when last year many of us bloggers we posted about the yellow cake being shipped from Iraq quietly to Canada on our US Navy ships. The left oh yesss ole Harry Reid standing up and making the big ole announcement how HE stopped the Patriot Act that day.
Now we have people in power, in the majority and in Obama’s administraton that don’t have a clue how to perform their duties, have no respect for our Constitution and are no fans of our military at all.