Politicians on Capitol Hill yesterday blasted the head of the TSA over a fake bomb slipped past Newark Airport screeners — and he defended the lapse by suggesting that other agencies “would have given us a heads-up” if the undercover agent carrying the device had been a real terrorist.
TSA Administrator John Pistole was called before the House Homeland Security Committee to explain his recent decision to allow travelers to carry small knives onto aircraft, but the conversation soon turned to the Feb. 25 breach.
“One of the planes that emanated on 9/11 came out of Newark, and the reason that this committee exists now is because of that tragic event,” said Rep. Donald Payne, (D-NJ), whose district includes the airport.
“Major security breaches continue to occur there.”
The Post last week revealed that an undercover TSA agent smuggled a phony bomb hidden in his pants past both a magnetometer and a pat-down.
The TSA downplayed the incident in a blog post Tuesday, writing, “It’s not like they’re using a cartoonish bundle of dynamite with an alarm clock strapped on it.”
Pistole yesterday doubled down on that argument.
He told the committee that while he was unhappy to read in The Post of the security lapse, the undercover agents are “super-terrorists” trained to hide devices.
“They know exactly what the protocols are,” he said.
Pistole said the failure to spot the bomb is being used “as a training tool for the rest of our workforce.”
He later told The Post a real terrorist would have been detected by screeners, or another agency would have thwarted the plot.
“They would’ve presumably had some type of suspicious behavior that a protection officer would have picked up on . . . a [sniffer] dog would have picked up on,” Pistole said.
“Hopefully, there would be some intelligence from the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, someone would have given us a heads-up.”
Earlier yesterday, New Jersey’s Sens. Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez wrote a letter to Pistole reading, “We have not made much progress since Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to ignite a bomb in his underwear” in 2009.
“While we were fortunate then [that the bomb did not go off], we cannot afford to rely on luck the next time.”