REPORT OF THE

Recommendations

International Security

• The lead negotiating role in aviation security should be shifted from U.S. carriers to the Department of State.

• The United States should continue to press vigorously for security improvements through the Foreign Airport Security Act and the Foreign Airport Assessment Program.

• The United States should rely on bilateral agreements to achieve aviation security objectives with foreign governments.

• The State Department should create the position of Coordinator for International Aviation Security and the President should nominate that office holder for the rank of Ambassador.

• The U.S. should continue to work through ICAO to improve aviation security internationally.

The FAA should create an active formal technical assistance program to provide aviation security help to countries upon request and concentrate its efforts wherever the threat is greatest.

• The Summit Seven should amend the Bonn Declaration to extend sanctions for all terrorist acts, including attacks against airports and airline ticket offices.

Domestic Security

• The FAA should seek the assistance of the FBI in making a thorough assessment of

the current and potential threat to the domestic air transportation system.

• The FAA should initiate immediately the planning and analysis necessary to phase additional security measures into the domestic system over time.

• The FAA should take the necessary action to clearly define responsibilities under exclusive area agreements and contingency plans to ensure that existing problems are corrected and the contingent security system is capable of meeting the specified threat levels.

• The Congress should require criminal record checks for all airport employees. The legislation should identify certain criminal records that indicate a potential security risk and enable airport operators to deny employment on that basis.

• The FAA should determine the security features necessary for new airport facilities and ensure that such features are included in airport facility design and construction. • The Commission endorses the recommendations of the Office of the Secretary of Transportation Office of Safety Review Task Force and recommends full implementation expeditiously.

• The FAA should eliminate the discretion afforded private carriers for reporting bomb threats and searches of aircraft and facilities, and require the immediate reporting of all threats to FAA, airport and public safety authorities, and recognize

that public safety authorities have the responsibility for deciding whether and how searches should be conducted.

• The FAA should change the minimum training requirements for ground security coordinators so that minimum training periods are in line with the amount of material that has to be covered.

• The FAA should establish and apply standardized testing requirements for ground security coordinators and expedite the development of standards for actions to be taken prior to each flight.

• The FAA should require carriers to assure that all baggage associated with passengers who meet FAA's criteria as possibly having explosive devices in checked baggage, are subject to security controls and then are not carried unless the passenger is on board the aircraft.

Mail and Cargo

• The USPS should effect a regulatory change redefining the category of mail "sealed against inspection" to include written materials and those parcels below a specific weight.

• The air carriers must be initially responsible for any screening of air mail.

• Any screening of mail should be instituted first at "extraordinary security measures' airports and then phased in at other airports as the threat warrants.

• The FAA Part 109 program should be replaced. Instead, responsibility for screening of cargo should rest with the air carriers and procedures should correspond closely with those measures pertaining to checked baggage.

• The FAA should foster research and developinent of a technology designed to screen cargo for explosives; until this system is developed, interim screening measures must be instituted.

The FAA

• The FAA must begin to develop stronger security measures for controls over checked baggage, controls over persons with access to aircraft, testing of security

systems, the use of modern X-ray equipment, and the pre-screening of passengers. • The FAA must take the lead in stressing the role of human factors in the security equation; training must be improved.

• The FAA Administrator should establish an office of security reporting directly to him.

• The Secretary of Transportation should appoint, on an interim basis, a Secretarial Assistant Secretary for Aviation Security and Intelligence. The Secretary should obtain legislative authorization to appoint an Assistant Secretary of Transportation for Security and Intelligence and authorize this official to develop an aviation transportation security policy and long-term strategy for dealing with a potential increase in the threat.

• The Secretary of Transportation and the Administrator of FAA should ensure that the necessary resources are provided to fully staff the respective security offices, both at the headquarters and field levels.

• The FAA resources currently in place at the major domestic airports, as well as overseas, should become the accountable entity for security-the federal security managers.

Research and Development

• FAA should undertake a vigorous effort to marshal the necessary expertise to develop and test effective explosive-detection sys

tems.

• The FAA should establish an expert panel of persons from the national laboratories, other government agencies, academia and industry to oversee the design and development of this high priority initiative.

• The FAA should undertake an intensive program of research and experimentation with the structure of aircraft to determine the kind and the minimum weight of explosives which must be detected by any technology.

• In the interim, the requirement for widespread use of present TNA equipment

should be deferred while the technology is developed further.

• The FAA should conduct research to de

velop the means of minimizing airframe damage that may be caused by small amounts of explosives.

To avoid the undesirable reliance on any single commercial source for TNA equipment, the FAA must make every possible effort to encourage the development of additional sources.

• FAA must think ahead and anticipate how to counter the next generation of terrorist weapons before they are used to kill innocent people.

Intelligence

• Policies and procedures should be put in place to ensure that international terrorism reporting received by U.S. law enforcement officials abroad will be shared with other members of the U.S. intelligence community, as well as the FAA where appropriate.

• The FAA and the FBI should work together, as is now planned, to assess the vulnerability of U.S. airports to the threat of terrorist violence. Additionally, the level of terrorist threat in the United States must be analyzed and monitored on a continuing basis to ensure the proper level of security at domestic airports, and the FAA and FBI should work together to arrive at the most effective method for this to be done.

• Consideration should be given to placing greater emphasis within the intelligence community on strategic (as opposed to operational) efforts, by developing a specific unit with limited day-to-day responsibility, whose principal function would be long-term strategic thinking concerning

terrorism.

• The function of the FAA's Intelligence Division, now located within the Office of Civil Aviation Security, should be moved to the Department of Transportation, where it will report directly to the Secretary through a newly created post of Assistant Secretary of Transportation for Security

and Intelligence. This move should accompany the move of the security function. • The Director of Central Intelligence should promptly designate one or more intelligence officers, from the Central Intelligence Agency or other appropriate intelligence agency, to serve in a senior capacity at the Office of the Secretary of the Department of Transportation. In doing so, the Director should consult closely with the Secretary of Transportation.

• All MOU's and written working agreements between FAA and the intelligence and law enforcement community members should be reviewed and updated where appropriate.

Threat Notification

• The intelligence and law enforcement communities, and those that receive information collected or analyzed by those communities, should review their procedures to reduce to the minimum the number of persons with access to information on civil aviation threats.

• The State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security should daily transfer a copy of the content of the OSAC EBB to the Bureau of Consular Affairs, and that Bureau should establish a system of public access to that information.

• The U.S. Government should, as a matter of course and policy, consciously consider the question of notification and carefully review the factors outlined. The Department of State, and the Department of Justice, in close cooperation with the Department of Transportation, should establish a process and a mechanism by which clearly identifiable officials will consider when and how to provide notification to the traveling public.

Treatment of the Families of
Victims of Terrorism

• The State Department must quickly obtain from the airline in an aviation disaster a manifest with sufficient detail to permit the prompt identification of passengers. A regulatory or legislative solution is likely to be

required. In the interim, the State Department should pursue agreements with individual carriers.

• The State Department should always contact the families of victims, even when the airline has made a prior notification of the deaths. In addition, it is essential for the Department promptly to provide a personal written notification.

• The State Department should, wherever possible, assign to each family one person, and an alternate, to act as designated liaison. Two separate 800 numbers should also be established, one just for the families.

• The State Department is encouraged to consult further with death and bereavement counselors to assure that the entire consular services corps is sensitized to the demands posed by tragedies such as Pan Am Flight 103. The Department should consider supplementing its training programs by either (1) providing specialized training to create a team of “disaster specialists" to deploy immediately in a crisis or (2) securing outside experts to be brought in during the initial phases to assist consular personnel.

• The State Department should dispatch at least one senior official from the Bureau of Consular Affairs to the scene of each and every terrorist disaster.

• The State Department should promulgate criteria for staffing disaster scenes that also define responsibility for these decisions. In the event of a disaster, the resources of individual posts must be monitored under these new criteria, and supplemented if

necessary.

• The State Department should require that in any disaster at least one person be assigned the sole function of providing onsite assistance to families who may visit, and be the ombudsman in matters involving local government authorities and social service agencies.

• The State Department should establish "crisis teams" to handle all aspects of a major disaster, to join in-country staff fa

miliar with the local language, laws, customs, and personalities.

• The State Department should share with its embassy and consular posts any assessment of the Flight 103 experience and new guidance on response to terrorist disasters. This action needs to be complemented with clear direction, training and equipment support.

• The State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs should assign personnel qualified in terrorism cases to assist families in the recovery and disposition of remains and personal effects, and to act as their ombudsman with foreign authorities and agencies.

• The State Department should provide some ceremony appropriate to recognize the families' sacrifice. The Department should have discretion, in consultation with our Armed Services, to adopt appropriate ceremonial procedures compatible with the families' own preferences. Whatever the procedures, the Department must institutionally recognize the special status of U.S. citizens who are victims of acts of terrorism against this Nation.

• The United States should ratify Montreal Protocol 3 together with a supplemental compensation plan that would provide all U.S. citizens and permanent residents, for any international flight, full recovery of all economic and non-economic damages. Following ratification, the United States should commence a diplomatic initiative to increase the $130,000 limit on carrier liability.

• The Congress should enact legislation to require the FAA to commence a civil penalty proceeding whenever there is reason to believe that a carrier's violation of FAA requirements may have contributed to loss of life or serious injury. If the FAA so finds, it should be required to levy fines.

• The President should seek legislation to authorize and permanently appropriate funds to provide monetary benefits and tax relief for any American victim of an act of terrorism. The President may wish to consider a board to develop criteria for com

pensation in terrorist cases. One question at the outset should be whether benefits should be made available retroactively for the victims of Flight 103.

National Will

• The United States must heighten emphasis on the second element of U.S. counterterrorism policy; that state sponsors should be made to pay a price for their actions.

• The United States must refuse to allow terrorist attacks to alter U.S. political and economic policies.

• The United States must improve human intelligence-gathering on terrorism, in cooperation with other nations.

• The United States should work with other nations to treat as outlaws state sponsors of terrorism, isolating them politically, economically, and militarily.

• The United States must develop a clear understanding that state sponsored terrorism threatens U.S. values and interests, and that active measures are needed to counter more effectively the terrorist threat.

• The United States should ensure that all government resources are prepared for active measures—preemptive or retaliatory, direct or covert—against a series of targets in countries well-known to have engaged in state-sponsored terrorism.