Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 16, 1990 TAG: 9005160451
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
While the panel sidestepped the question of whether such action ought now be directed at Iran and Syria, the suspected sponsors of the 1988 attack, commission chairman Ann McLaughlin declared: "When the perpetrators are found, they should be punished."
The recommendations came as the commission concluded that a deeply flawed aviation security system left the nation vulnerable to terrorist attack. The panel blamed Pan Am and the Federal Aviation Administration for failing to enforce requirements it said could have prevented the catastrophic bombing.
And in a blow to what had been touted as a promising new safeguard, the panel urged the government to halt deployment of hundreds of bomb detectors in airports around the world, concluding that the costly devices are incapable of detecting sophisticated plastic explosives in the quantity that blew Pan Am 103 and its 259 passengers from the sky.
The 182-page document, drafted by a highly respected team that included four members of Congress, offered a sweeping menu of reforms it said could help the nation better fend off such terrorist attacks in the future.
But in a grim conclusion, the commission warned that such attacks will end only if the United States takes aggressive new steps to strike back against terrorists and their sponsors - even if available evidence falls short of criminal standards of proof.
To that end, it recommended that the Bush administration prepare to launch direct military strikes against terrorist hide-outs abroad. When such action appears inappropriate, it urged that the government authorize covert operations against terrorist targets.
"State-sponsored terrorism must be faced and must be deterred - with methods that are consistent with the nature of the threat and the U.S. system," said the commission report, presented to President Bush by panel chairman McLaughlin, the former secretary of labor.
McLaughlin disclosed that the commission delivered to the president a separate memorandum outlining more specific recommendations about an appropriate U.S. response for the Pan Am attack. But the chairman declined further comment, saying the panel's advice would remain confidential.
The public call for retaliation won praise from most American family members of those killed in the Pan Am 103 attack, but was criticized by some British relatives of those who died when the New York-bound jet crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988, killing 270.
At the White House, spokesman Marlin Fitzwater declined to comment on specific recommendations, but said: "We certainly agree that we need to be as aggressive as necessary to fight terrorism."
U.S. intelligence officials believe that the Pan Am bombing was carried out by a Palestinian guerrilla leader with the support of Iran and, to a lesser extent, Syria. But the seven-member President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism drew no public conclusions about responsibility for the attack.
Instead, with a focus on how the bombing occurred, it found fault at nearly every level with the system designed to protect American air passengers from terror in the sky. Among other conclusions, the panel found:
Pan Am, in violation of FAA regulations, routinely neglected at its high-risk airport in Frankfurt, West Germany, to hand-search luggage not accompanied by a passenger on the plane.
The FAA appeared to have condoned the security violation and never disciplined Pan Am for it, even though its investigators warned before the Pan Am attack that the airline's security system in Frankfurt was "held together only by . . . the tenuous threads of bad luck."
Luggage from Pan Am 103 was left unguarded on a Heathrow Airport tarmac for more than half an hour before being loaded aboard a Boeing 747 for the London-to-New York leg of the flight, which originated in Frankfurt.
In contending that the disaster could have been prevented, the McLaughlin Commission said that more aggressive measures might have intercepted the bomb, hidden inside a Toshiba radio-cassette player, before it was loaded onto the plane.
The commission found that at least one piece of unaccompanied luggage was loaded onto the flight in Frankfurt after only an X-ray search - a technique incapable of detecting the deadly Semtex plastic explosive hidden inside the Toshiba device. Investigators in the case have focused their suspicions on one such piece of baggage that was transferred from Air Malta to Pan Am in Frankfurt.
The commission reported that the Pan Am security breach in Frankfurt "incredibly" persisted for nearly nine months after the bombing, with investigators flatly declaring five months after the accident that the operations were "unsafe [for] all passengers."
But the panel aimed most of its criticism more broadly. "Terrorists were able to place a bomb on Pan Am 103 not because some one thing failed," but because the aviation security system failed," McLaughlin said. "The system was flawed and did not provide an effective defense against sabotage."
"Without doubt, the FAA's performance was nothing short of dismal," added Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, R-N.Y., a commission member.
FAA Administrator James Busey said he welcomed the report, although he objected to some of the adjectives used to descibe the agency.
"The system was flawed," said Busey, who took over the FAA several months after the bombing. "Mistakes were made. I want to won up to those mistakes."
Pan Am Chariman Thomas Plaskett noted that he disagreed with some of the commission's criticisms of the airline but said the report made several positive recommendations. He said the report now describes Pan Am's operations in Frankfurt as a "model for the industry."
by CNB