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Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2003

From now on, a Transportation Security Administration official said, the agency will automatically single out for response any threatening communication and will seek to better train its employees on how to recognize such messages.

"The system should have picked it up. If this highlights a flaw in the system, it could be relatively easily corrected," TSA spokesman Mark Hatfield acknowledged on ABC's "Good Morning America." His statement came a day after Nathaniel Heatwole of Damascus, Md., was charged in federal court in Baltimore with taking a dangerous weapon aboard an aircraft.

The case against Heatwole, 20, followed discovery of bags containing box cutters, bleach and other prohibited items aboard two Southwest Airlines planes. The government says Heatwole spirited box cutters onto two airplanes and then told the TSA what he did.

Hatfield conceded that the TSA must help its employees become more capable of recognizing the threatening messages among some 5,700 complaints, queries, compliments and other comments that flow daily into the agency's Contact Center.

Hatfield said layers of airline security had been added since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Even if a passenger got a forbidden item past a checkpoint, he said on NBC's "Today" show, there are other safeguards built in, such as strengthened cockpit doors and the presence in many instances of onboard air marshals.

"We have a security system built on layers, and the layer we call passenger screening, while it's vastly improved over the pre-9/11 era, it still has its limitations," Hatfield told NBC.

The incident has produced calls in Congress for hearings into the performance of the TSA.

After his court appearance Monday, Heatwole, a junior at Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C., was released without bail for a preliminary hearing Nov. 10. He faces up to 10 years in prison.

Heatwole sent an e-mail to federal authorities in mid-September saying he had put the items aboard two specific Southwest flights as an act of civil disobedience to expose weaknesses in the security system, an FBI affidavit said. The objects were not found until last week, more than a month later.

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, whose department includes TSA, said the agency gets a high volume of e-mails about possible threats and officials decided that Heatwole "wasn't an imminent threat."

Heatwole's e-mail provided details of where the plastic bags were hidden, right down to the dates and flight numbers, along with Heatwole's name and telephone number.

The TSA did not send the e-mail to the FBI until Friday. FBI agents then located Heatwole and interviewed him.

In response to the incident, Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, said Monday he told TSA chief James Loy that the panel would review the agency's operations, including airline passenger screening.

"Despite significant seizures of prohibited items from passengers going through TSA security checkpoints, this week's events highlight possible weaknesses in the system which need to be addressed," Davis said in a letter to Loy.

Rep. Peter DeFazio, the top Democrat on the House Transportation aviation subcommittee, said someone should be fired because of the incident. But he said Loy, a former Coast Guard commandant, should stay if he owned up to the agency's deficiencies.

"I'm still willing to give the admiral a chance to come clean with us," said DeFazio, D-Ore. "He's a political appointee under tremendous pressure by this administration to cut corners, make things look good, not upset the airlines and not upset the passengers."

The incidents followed reports that aviation security still has substantial gaps more than two years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Significant weaknesses in testing and training TSA screeners were cited in recent reports by the Homeland Security Department's inspector general and the General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative arm.

The inspector general's investigators recently carried knives, a bomb and a gun through Boston Logan International Airport's boarding procedures without being detected. Both hijacked airliners that crashed into the World Trade Center took off from Logan.

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