<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"> ... A suitable analogy for the FAA would be a cop who never makes an arrest, a district attorney who never prosecutes a case, a judge who never passes sentence. Ask the man on the street whose responsibility it is to keep air travel safe, and he'll tell you it's the FAA's. But the agency is really just a straw man, a puppet doing the bidding of Congress and the aviation industry. Although the FAA is supposed to protect the flying public, managers and administrators are told their primary focus is to keep planes in the air. "It's a sick organization and you survive in that environment by not making waves," says Billie Vincent, former FAA chief of security. "The mediocre survive. They go along to get along. Leadership is weak. You rise in that organization through the art of compromise, and compromise is not a salient feature for a safe system. We need to start dealing honestly with our aviation problems and make sure the influence peddlers in the airline industry have no say."</font>

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Former President George Bush called him "rude." Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich refused to be interviewed by him, saying, "I'd rather talk to anyone else." And syndicated columnist Carl Rowan once said of Brian Karem that he wished "...we had a hundred reporters with the guts and irreverence that (Karem) displayed."

Brian Karem, 40, is an award-winning investigative reporter, writer, producer, published author and former correspondent for Fox Television's America's Most Wanted. Karem has won major awards for two documentaries, "Texans at War" and "Good to Go" which chronicled the Persian Gulf War through the eyes of the members of a Combat Support Hospital. He was also one of the first reporters in the world to enter Kuwait City during the Gulf War, arriving just after that city's liberation from Iraq.</font>