John Casaretti, an air travel safety whistleblower and president of the Air Marshal Association, called on President Donald Trump and Congress to act quickly to allow the Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS) to operate as its own agency without “bureaucracy” to better stop potential terrorist attacks in an exclusive Breitbart News Saturday interview with Matthew Boyle.
While the FAMS was launched in the 1960s under the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) at the order of President John F. Kennedy, it was moved to TSA in response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“Everything the air marshals did around 2007 onwards was all through the lens of the TSA bureaucracy. TSA only cares about screeners,” Casaretti said. “They don’t have any deep experience with law enforcement. Unfortunately, the air marshals were listening to them. All of the policies were made by them, and bad policy after bad policy ensued. When it came to intelligence, when it came to hiring, standards were lowered.”
He continued, “They made the Air Marshal Service a career path for TSA screeners, so incredibly, where we started out as these high-speed anti-terrorism agents … to be a career path for TSA airport screeners. It actually blows my mind to this day, and it really needs to be changed.”
The labor group leader expanded on his recent Breitbart News op-ed titled “It’s Time to Reset the Federal Air Marshal Service,” which gave background on TSA’s controversial Quiet Skies program that shut down in June after he blew the whistle on its disturbing surveillance practices.
Casaretti revealed details on the then-undisclosed program to the Boston Globe in 2018, which reported that federal air marshals had been “following ordinary U.S. citizens not suspected of a crime or on any terrorist watch list and collecting extensive information about their movements and behavior.”
“The Air Marshal Association believes that missions based on recognized intelligence, or in support of ongoing federal investigations, is the proper criteria for flight scheduling,” Casaretti told the outlet at the time. “Currently, the Quiet Skies program does not meet the criteria we find acceptable.”
“The American public would be better served if these [air marshals] were instead assigned to airport screening and check-in areas so that active shooter events can be swiftly ended, and violations of federal crimes can be properly and consistently addressed,” he argued.
Despite the publicity, Quiet Skies continued to surveil “thousands of unsuspecting Americans” with “small teams of armed, undercover air marshals,” records reviewed by the Globe revealed.
The teams documented when passengers exhibited behaviors like fidgeting, using a computer, or displaying a “cold penetrating stare,” according to the records.
Quiet Skies’ controversy reached a head in 2024 when “concerned whistleblowers” told Casaretti that one of the surveilled passengers was then-presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard.
“I briefed Congress, and the resulting fallout has finally killed the Quiet Skies mistake,” he wrote in his Breitbart News op-ed.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the end of the program in June, “which since its existence has failed to stop a single terrorist attack while costing US taxpayers $200 million a year.”
“The program, under the guise of ‘national security,’ was used to target political opponents and benefit political allies,” DHS stated in a press release.
Casaretti told Boyle, “One of the reasons that I highlight [in] the op-ed is that we just can’t keep going this way because we don’t have the best people in place to defeat a terrorist attack in the air right now.”
The risk of terrorism “is greater right now than it ever has been before, certainly greater than pre-9/11,” he argued. “Every intel analyst with eyes on this is saying, ‘Hey, we’re in trouble. Something’s going to happen.’ And I’m trying to sound the alarm here because we’ve been saying this, as far as something’s going to happen, and why the air marshals need to improve for years”:
TSA was causing innocent Americans to be followed based on CIA and NSA data. That’s crazy, crazy to do something like that. That kind of sounded the alarm in my head that we’re really not operating like all other agencies operate — something’s wrong … We went to [former] Rep. Jody Hice (R) from Georgia, and worked with him to pass a law to get the TSA to explain their intelligence methodology. In 2021, I [gave a] congressional testimony related to the violence in the air and COVID, explaining that the in-flight measures like crew member self defense training and the Federal Flight Deck Officer armed pilot program were not up to snuff. I sat last September of ’24 for another congressional hearing about how the air marshals have to be removed from the TSA for all the reasons of not properly developing our intelligence, not developing our investigations, downgrading our capabilities, [and] making us do TSA-style programs instead of launch enforcement programs. So we’ve been trying to get out of TSA and get into our own agency where we can do this kind of work for a long time.
While the House and the Senate both have language drafted to remove the FAMS from TSA, they are currently in legislative council review before they can be introduced to the floor.
“The president could issue an executive order. He could also direct one of the agency heads to make this happen,” Casaretti explained. “The fastest way to do this would be an executive order, especially since the president would be confident, since the bills are already at the legislative council review.”
He then revealed a disturbing piece of information: “We have this rumored December timeline right for the most recent warnings that an attack is going to happen. They’re saying, ‘Hey, mid-December, mid-December.'”
“This couldn’t happen fast enough,” he added, referring to the FAMS becoming its own agency free of TSA blunders. “So if we could get eyes on this, and have the administration just take a look at what we’re talking about and what’s at stake here, I think the easiest thing to do would be an executive order and then followed up by the legislative action to make it final.”
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.