The Air Marshal National Council (AMNC) expressed “grave concerns” in a December 16 letter to TSA administrator David Pekoske regarding the U.S.’s lack of preparedness in the event of a terrorist attack.  AMNC president David Londo and executive director Sonya LaBosco highlighted security risks in their letter, stating that there is a “lack of actionable intelligence” to protect “the traveling public” from a terrorist attack.  Additionally, they cited “strong evidence” that al-Qaeda “has developed an explosive vest” that is capable of evading detection from “the latest magnetometers and bomb-sniffing dogs at our airports.”

Londo and LaBosco based their letter on open-source information and a series of interviews by former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor Shawn Ryan on The Shawn Ryan Show with CIA targeting officer Sarah Adams.  Adams, who oversaw the investigation of the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attacks, has been integral in “mitigating future security risks to U.S. personnel serving overseas.” She is an expert on terrorist groups and their belief systems, training, and methodologies.

The December edition of Adams’s Benghazi: Know Thy Enemy newsletter discloses details about al-Qaeda’s arsenal, revealing the “staggering cost of ignorance” in the war against terrorism.  This newsletter makes public her group’s investigative file on Abdul Azim Ali Musa bin Ali, or “Musa,” who is al-Qaeda’s “Lord of War.”  Musa is responsible for “diverting U.S. funds” to al-Qaeda’s terrorist training camps and is the key orchestrator for “external operatives deploying from Afghanistan.”  He is well funded by the Ministry of Interior (MOI) in Kabul, Afghanistan.  According to Adams, al-Qaeda “makes a joke out of the fact that they move the money we give to the Taliban to the camps that train the homeland attackers.”

In a recent Shawn Ryan podcast, Adams warned that the U.S. homeland is highly vulnerable to terrorist attacks due to a combination of al-Qaeda’s evolving and advanced strategies, gaps in U.S. intelligence, and our own government’s funding of terrorists.  She detailed al-Qaeda’s sophisticated capabilities, sharing there are allegedly “approximately 1,000 agents on American soil who have been training for years to carry out an attack in 2025.”

Adams also criticized the TSA for ignoring vital information, including an al-Qaeda training video demonstrating “how to make a bomb go through a magnetometer.”  Al-Qaeda claims to have perfected a vest that not only will evade magnetometer detection, but is also made with components that trained dogs cannot detect.

Al-Qaeda has allegedly mastered information warfare, using U.S. conspiracy theories to manipulate public perception.  Adams stated that the group uses such conspiracies, including the theory about Building 7, to target those who may blame the U.S. government for terrorist attacks, potentially rallying them to support al-Qaeda’s cause.

Al-Qaeda has discussions about how [they] could do ruses, bringing the building seven people to make them blame their government more. So they are looking at our conspiracies and targeting those people for the homeland attack. Basically those people almost back Al-Qaeda as revolutionaries or rebels and heroes against our government.

The letter to Pekoske also mentions the TSA’s K-9 Program, as highlighted in an OIG report on TSA security.  The OIG-21-52 report, published in August 2021 by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG), focuses on the TSA and its oversight of the Security Training Program.

The report found that TSA “is not training canines to detect the most current explosive threats” and “had not evaluated the Explosives Detection Canine Team (EDCT) Program.”  Additionally, “law enforcement agency (LEA) participation in the EDCT program is voluntary.”  The K-9 program is integral to the security of airport and surface transportation (buses, trains, cars) and homeland security.

The OIG investigation also revealed the following:

• Training of officers and staff was inadequate, leading to gaps in security and inconsistent performance.
• Tracking of required training was either inconsistent or incomplete, and oversight of necessary training or certifications was poor.
• The lack of standardized training practices could impact security at U.S. airports and transportation hubs.

The AMNC is particularly concerned about the treatment of federal air marshals since they were placed under the TSA umbrella.  LaBosco argues that as trained law enforcement officers, FAMs should not be managed by the administrative and bureaucratic TSA.

Londo and LaBosco touch on this issue in their letter, stating that FAMs “have been deprived of a critical capability to develop actionable, mission-specific intelligence” since being managed by the TSA.  Before 2003, FAMs had access to “dedicated intelligence,” but under TSA oversight, their ability to “mitigate in-flight threats” has been severely limited.

In my  interview with LaBosco on Monday, she described FAMs as having become “political pawns of the administrative state.”  She noted that FAMs have effectively been relegated to “following innocent Americans around airports after J6.”  LaBosco also referenced  the 2020 OIG report on the Quiet Skies program, which revealed that no domestic terror threats have been thwarted by the program.  Quiet Skies is a secretive Big Brother–type TSA watchlist program that tracks suspected domestic terrorists.  TSA employs teams of FAMs to carry out the Quiet Skies mission.

LaBosco and AMNC president David Londo are working tirelessly with Congress to return FAMs to their “rightful place in law enforcement” under Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), where they belong.

Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

Image: Fletcher via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.