Still in the Shadows Norman Mineta: A Year to Remember The USA PATRIOT Act: Sowing Terror to Fight Terror? Patriotism Gone Wrong Teaching in the New World Order Sept. 11 Events Around the Nation
	9-11: Asian Pacific America Recounts a Year of Struggle and Healing (Feature) Who’s Getting the Message? (in National News) Putting Our Health Center Stage (in Bay Area News) Ultimate Diversions: Kingdom Hearts (in Business) Chinese American Volleyball Tournament Comes to San Francisco (in Sports) Collateral Damage: ‘Asian Americans On War & Peace’ (in A&E) Emil Amok: Chicken-hearted Patriotism in Fremont (in Opinion)

Norman Mineta. Photos by The Associated Press.

A Year to Remember

Norman Mineta on where he was, what decisions he made and where federal airline security is going

By Sam Chu Lin
Special to AsianWeek

If Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta thought he had it tough as a Democrat in a Republican administration, nothing could have prepared him for the challenges the Sept. 11 attacks would provide. Mineta had to helm a complete federal takeover of airline security, while dealing with racial and immigrant issues. He suffered his fair share of attacks from the left and the right, but came out confident. Veteran journalist Sam Chu Lin talked with him about what exactly the last year was like.

AsianWeek: On Sept. 11, 2001, you were meeting with your European counterpart when the terrorists struck the World Trade Center. Please recount what happened to you.

Norman Mineta: I was having breakfast that morning with the deputy prime minister of Belgium who also is the Transportation Minister, Isabelle Durant, and Jane Garvey, the administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration. My chief of staff, John Flaherty, came in and said, “Mr. Secretary, may I see you?” I excused myself, walked into my office, and saw on my TV screen what was obviously the World Trade Center building with black smoke billowing out of it. So I said, “What the heck is going on?” He said, “We really don’t know. We’ve heard that a general aviation aircraft flew into the building, but we don’t have anything specific.” So I said, “Keep me posted; I’ll go back into the breakfast meeting.”

So I went back into my conference room and explained to Mrs. Durant [and Jane] what was going on. Then in about five minutes, John came in again and said, “Mr. Secretary, may I see you?” I excused myself and went back into my office. He said, “It’s been confirmed, it was a commercial airliner that went into the World Trade Center.” I couldn’t believe it. As I was looking [at the TV screen], I saw this gray, flying object — an airplane coming from the right side of the screen and then disappearing. The next thing that I knew, a great big white, orangey, billowy cloud was coming out from the left side of the screen. I immediately ran into the conference room and said, “Mrs. Durant, there’s something going on in New York that has escalated. Jane, you’ve got to get back to FAA headquarters.” By the time I got back into my office, we had a call from the White House for me to get over there right away.

As we were driving on West Executive Avenue, people were pouring out of the White House, pouring out of the Executive Office building and running toward Lafayette Park. When I got inside, someone said, “You have to be briefed by Dick Clark from the National Security Counsel in the Situation Room.” So I went into the Situation Room, got briefed by Dick Clark, who said, “Mr. Secretary you have to be down in the PEOC,” which is the Presidential Emergency Operation Center.

Once I was down there, we were getting news from the vice president’s staff as well from the broadcast media — CNN, Fox News and NBC. Someone said, “There’s a plane that’s coming in about 50 miles out.” I said to Monte Belger, the deputy administrator of the FAA, “Monte, what do you have on the screen 50 miles out?” He said, “We have a bogey. We have a target. We’re following it but have no identification of the aircraft. The transponder has been turned off.” Usually on the radar screen when you look at it, it has identification. It will also show the departure airport, all of the navigation routes it is taking, and the destination point.

Well in this one, you had the dot but no identification, no flag showing what airplane that was. They knew where it was in terms of the radar, but they didn’t know what altitude it was flying at, or what plane or what speed. All they could do was follow the sweep of the radar and watch for the movement of the airplane on the screen.

Then the person [from before] came back and said, “The plane is 30 miles out.” So I said, “Monte, we’ve been told it’s 30 miles out. Where is it in relationship to the ground?” He said, “I can’t pinpoint it. But it’s probably somewhere between Great Falls and National Airport, following the Potomac River into National Airport.” Then the person came in again and said, “It’s 10 miles out.” So I said, “Where do you think it might be in relationship to the ground?” They couldn’t pinpoint it, but it was somewhere between the USA Today building and Ronald Reagan National Airport.

Then he said, “Uh-oh, we just lost the bogey.” Soon after that, someone ran in and said, “There has been an explosion at the Pentagon.” About that time, someone else said, “Mr. Secretary, it’s been confirmed: An Arlington County police officer called and said he saw an American Airlines go into the Pentagon.”

So it’s like anything else: When you see one of something occur, it’s an accident. When you see two of the same thing occur, it’s a trend. But when you see three of the same thing occur, it’s a program. So I said to Monte, “Bring all of the airplanes down. I don’t care where they are, bring them down as quickly as possible.”

There were something like, as I recall, 4,600 airplanes in the air at the time. We brought them down in about a little over two hours without incident. To me that was a great aviation feat.”

United Airlines Flight 175 crashes into the South World Trade Center nearly 15 minutes after the first tragic crash.

NM: Well, there’s no question that this was a surprise attack by a remorseless enemy who was set out to devastate our economy, our government, our military structure. That was their modus operandi. To me this should always be remembered in terms of the murder of over 3,000 civilians. This is greatest number of deaths that has ever occurred in U.S. history. So we should remember how to be prepared, and make sure that something like this never ever occurs again.

AW: A year has gone by since this happened. What do you feel you and your department have accomplished to attack this problem of terrorism?

NM: We’ve done a great deal. Congress for the first time made aviation security and security for all modes of transportation a federal responsibility. In the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, what Congress did was to tell us what to do, how to do it and when to do it. And we have met some one dozen of these dates that they mandated. We have two remaining dates: One is Nov. 19, in which all passenger screeners who are federal employees [must] be in place, and the other is Dec. 31, when all baggage going on an aircraft will be put through an explosive detection system. I’m confident we will meet both of these dates. We will have some 30 to 33,000 screeners on board. I think we will have 20,000 screeners doing the passenger, rather than the baggage, screening.

AW: Are you still insisting security screeners be American citizens?

NM: Well, it’s an insistence based on the law that Congress passed. Congress said that they had to be U.S. citizens and be proficient in English. They had to be high school graduates or have a GED or work experience equivalent to the work that they were employed to do. A number of these requirements are in the law, so we have no leeway in terms of deviating.

AW: You have opposed racial profiling in the past in tracking down potential terrorists. Is there any kind of profiling that can be used to narrow it down so old ladies in wheelchairs are not stopped and inspected, or a woman nursing her child?

NM: First of all, from a security perspective, racial profiling has never worked. It is not a sound basis for which security can be administered. There are other things that are much more important that we ought to be dealing with. In our screening or security process, we start with something called CAPS, the computer-assisted passenger prescreening system. Through this computerized system, there’s an objective analysis of every passenger. Then we couple the knowledge that we have about the passenger with behavior, because that’s what’s more important in terms of dealing with potential troublemakers.

Sure in the past, we’ve heard stories about grandmothers who get pulled out of the line, children who are wanded, but what we are doing now is coming up with a new CAPS system. We’ve dubbed it CAPS II. Nothing original about that, but CAPS II is a much more sophisticated approach on identifying potential selectees for further scrutiny. Hopefully by the end of this year, we will have it in place.

But our experience and the experience of security people is that knowledge about the passenger, citizenship, behavior, where have they been traveling — all of these things are much more important than straight racial profiling.

AW: What can the consumer expect or hope to have with the changes taking place in airport security to make it more convenient for them to fly, especially with some of the airlines declaring bankruptcy?

NM: First of all, the system of passenger security was the responsibility of the airline or the airport. But with the new legislation, it has become the direct responsibility of the federal government. Under the old system, screeners were given roughly six hours of classroom training and 40 hours of on-the-job training. Now our requirement for our new federal employee workforce is 44 hours classroom training and 60 hours on-the-job training. And on top of that, we’re rotating these employees to keep them more alert on their job, because if some of these screeners spend more than a half hour looking at that monitor, they’ll not be very attentive. So we have changed the procedure a great deal in terms of the training as well as the expectation of the passenger screening force.

AW: There is the possibility of moving the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard to the new Homeland Security Department. How do you feel about that?

NM:The legislation that passed the House does move the Coast Guard and Transportation Security Administration to the Homeland Security Department. The bill that the Senate is considering does the same thing. I have no problem with that. Even though I hate to lose both of those agencies, I think in the interest of homeland security, it’s the right approach.

AW: When you were nominated by President Bush as Secretary of Transportation, your friend and former congressman, Leon Panetta, advised you to take the job saying it would be a “piece of cake.” In retrospect, what do you think about Panetta’s prediction?

NM:Of course, the whole issue of the transformation of the Department of Transportation from, you might say, a back-bench agency to one that has been thrust in the forefront of what’s happening is something that no one predicted. And so from that perspective, it’s been an exciting challenge. We have good people here in the department. Both in terms of work with the Congress and with the stakeholders — the airlines, the airports, pilot groups, others — it’s been a magnificent experience.