Jay Rockefeller: “The fault of these attacks clearly lies with those who perpetrated them, but the failures are all our shared…”

“The fault of these attacks clearly lies with those who perpetrated them, but the failures are all our shared responsibilities. There is no way to get away from that. On the other hand, they are also a shared opportunity. I have long argued and made many speeches that we have a habit in the Congress, and to some extent in our country, of taking aviation for granted, knowing very little about its details, complaining when we are delayed but not making the effort to understand what aviation entails, what happens when passenger traffic doubles--as everybody knew would happen before September 11, and which I believe will come to be true again. This is an opportunity, this horrible tragedy, to set a number of accounts straight in terms of the way we secure our airports. We have to develop, we have to fund, we have to implement a better and changed way of providing security--particularly true after September 11. Had it never happened, we still should have been doing it. Instead, we were concentrating on air traffic control, runways, matters of this sort that are tremendously important, but we were not focused on security. That has to change. The Aviation Security Act gives us the chance to do exactly that. First and foremost, the bill restores the basic responsibility for security to its rightful place. That is with Federal law enforcement rather than with the airlines and the airports, which can neither afford it nor do it properly.”