by Michael Dorman, Newsday
April 17, 2006
Former federal terrorism investi-
gators say a piece of luggage hastily checked in at the Portland, Maine, airport by a World Trade Center hijacker on the morning of Sept. 11 provided the Rosetta stone enabling
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FBI agents to swiftly unravel the mystery of who carried out the suicide attacks and what motivated them.
A mix-up in Boston prevented the luggage from connecting with the plane that hijackers crashed into the north tower of the trade center. Seized by FBI agents at Boston's Logan Airport, investigators said, it contained Arab-language papers revealing the identities of all 19 hijackers involved in the four hijackings, as well as information on their plans, backgrounds and motives.
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Commentary by SirJ:
Holy baggage, Batman! Mohammed now requires Proof of ID at all Pearly Gates checkpoints! Too many infidels are trying to sneak in. As the leader, Atta had to have a list of all hijackers & proof of their jihad with him to ensure their salvation. :-)
Heck, my explanation is no battier than the "official" one.
Cue the music!
SirJ
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The luggage saga represents what the former federal authorities describe as an untold story of 9/11 -- offering explanations for questions long unanswered about the investigation of the tragedy, such as how authorities were able to identify the hijackers so soon after the attacks.
The former federal investigators said information found in the bag was passed on to Justice Department lawyers, who prosecuted Zacarias Moussaoui on charges growing out of the suicide attacks. A Justice Department spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse, said: "Under the judge's order, we're not going to comment on anything relating to the case."
Mohamed Atta, a chief coordinator of the hijackings, and conspirator Abdulaziz AlAlomari spent the night before the attacks in room 232 of a Comfort Inn south of Portland. They checked out at 5:33 a.m. on Sept. 11. Portland Police Chief Michael Chitwood said they drove in a rented blue Nissan Altima -- eventually seized by the FBI -- to Portland International Jetport.
Records show the Altima was parked in an airport lot around 5:45, allowing Atta and Alomari only a few minutes to catch a 6 a.m. commuter flight to Boston's Logan Airport. Although they planned to hijack an American Airlines jet that would take off from Logan later that morning, investigators said they might have gone through Portland in the belief that airport security would be less stringent there.
Once the commuter flight landed at Logan, Atta and Alomari boarded American Airlines Flight 11 bound for Los Angeles -- which they would crash into the trade center.
A staff report to the 9/11 Commission later concluded: "The Portland detour almost prevented Atta and Alomari from making Flight 11 out of Boston. In fact, the luggage they checked in Portland failed to make it onto the plane. Seized after the Sept. 11 crashes, Atta and Alomari's luggage turned out to contain a number of telling items, including correspondence from the university Atta attended in Egypt; Alomari's international driver's license and passport; a videocassette for a Boeing 757 flight simulator; and folding knife and pepper spray, presumably extra weapons the conspirators decided they didn't need."
The report did not say how many bags were checked in Portland, nor did it differentiate them by their contents. But three commission staff members who helped prepare the report said there were two pieces. Two staff members, John Raidt and R. William Johnstone, said it was clear both bags belonged to Atta. "He plopped both of them down on the luggage rack," Raidt said. "Alomari just stood by."
An affidavit filed by FBI agent James K. Lechner in federal district court in Portland reported that two bags checked by Atta were recovered at Logan Airport Sept. 11. They were never placed on Flight 11 before it departed from Boston, Lechner said, but there was no explanation of why they had not been loaded. Lechner described them as "a green Travel Gear bag" and "a black Travelpro bag."
A former FBI agent and a former federal prosecutor who helped direct the New England investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks told Newsday that one bag found in Boston contained far more than what the commission report cited, including the names of the hijackers, their assignments and their al-Qaida connections.
"It had all these Arab-language papers that amounted to the Rosetta stone of the investigation," former FBI agent Warren Flagg said. The former federal prosecutor, who declined to be identified publicly, supported Flagg's account.
"How do you think the government was able to identify all 19 hijackers almost immediately after the attacks?" Flagg asked. "They were identified through those papers in the luggage. And that's how it was known so soon that al-Qaida was behind the hijackings.
The former prosecutor agreed that papers from the luggage helped identify suspects. "I can't speak on the record about that evidence," he said. "This evidence was gathered under grand jury subpoenas and I can't discuss grand jury matters."
The papers discovered in the hijackers' luggage were bolstered by other evidence gathered against the conspirators by the FBI, the former federal prosecutor said. "These guys left behind a paper trail," he said. "They had bank accounts. They rented cars. They had to show what they were doing in the United States. We investigated 9/11 from day one on the assumption that there might be a criminal prosecution."
But when it seemed clear that all 19 hijackers had been killed in the attacks, jurisdiction transferred from various federal prosecutors' offices around the country to Justice Department headquarters in Washington.
Flagg, an FBI agent for 22 years, worked on terrorism cases, among others. Now president of Flaggman Inc., a Manhattan-based investigative firm, he was retired by Sept. 11 but stayed in close touch with former FBI colleagues and prosecutors.
He said he first heard the account of the luggage's significance in the investigation on Sept. 28, 2001, after attending the funeral for John O'Neill, a former top FBI antiterrorism official who died helping others to safety Sept. 11 in his new job as director of security at the World Trade Center.
After the funeral, he said, he fell into conversation with a young FBI agent he had helped train in the New York office. The agent, working on the Sept. 11 investigation, told him about the luggage. The agent said the New England prosecutor helping direct the investigation -- whom Flagg also knew -- was familiar with the evidence. Flagg said he telephoned the prosecutor that same day and received confirmation of the agent's account.
"I was devastated because word had already leaked out of the hijackers' identities," Flagg said. "But I was also excited that the FBI had so much evidence so quickly."
The young FBI agent, who has since left the agency, works in private industry and is reportedly in Dubai. He could not be reached for comment.
News reports published in late September and early October 2001 described a piece of luggage apparently belonging to Atta that had been discovered at Logan Airport after the attacks.
That piece of luggage was said to contain Arab-language papers amounting to Atta's last will and testament, along with instructions to the other hijackers to prepare themselves physically and spiritually for death. The papers also admonished them: "Check all of your items -- your bag, your clothes, knives, your will, your IDs, your passport, your papers. ... Make sure that nobody is following you." Similar papers were also found in the wreckage of another crashed airliner.
Flagg and the former prosecutor, however, said it was the second bag that identified all 19 hijackers.
"That was the one that became the Rosetta stone," Flagg said.
As originally published
9/11 hijackers alive and well
BBC News
Sept. 23, 2001
Another of the men named by the FBI as a hijacker in the suicide attacks on Washington and New York has turned up alive and well.
The identities of four of the 19 suspects accused of having carried out the attacks are now in doubt.
Saudi Arabian pilot Waleed Al Shehri was one of five men that the FBI said had deliberately crashed American Airlines flight 11 into the World Trade Centre on 11 September.
His photograph was released, and has since appeared in newspapers and on television around the world.
Now he is protesting his innocence from Casablanca, Morocco.
He told journalists there that he had nothing to do with the attacks on New York and Washington, and had been in Morocco when they happened. He has contacted both the Saudi and American authorities, according to Saudi press reports.
He acknowledges that he attended flight training school at Daytona Beach in the United States, and is indeed the same Waleed Al Shehri to whom the FBI has been referring.
But, he says, he left the United States in September last year, became a pilot with Saudi Arabian airlines and is currently on a further training course in Morocco.
Abdulaziz Al Omari, another of the Flight 11 hijack suspects, has also been quoted in Arab news reports.
He says he is an engineer with Saudi Telecoms, and that he lost his passport while studying in Denver.
Another man with exactly the same name surfaced on the pages of the English-language Arab News.
The second Abdulaziz Al Omari is a pilot for Saudi Arabian Airlines, the report says.
Meanwhile, Asharq Al Awsat newspaper, a London-based Arabic daily, says it has interviewed Saeed Alghamdi.
He was listed by the FBI as a hijacker in the United flight that crashed in Pennsylvania.
And there are suggestions that another suspect, Khalid Al Midhar, may also be alive.
FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged on Thursday that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers is in doubt.
As originally published
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Commentary by Helen & Harry Highwater:
If you're going to lie to me, please, at least tell me a plausible lie. This lie is ludicrous.
So let me get this straight:
Mohamed Atta, "a chief coordinator of the hijackings," has spent months, years, plotting this perfect terrorist attack, with no interference from authorities no matter how many clues have been dropped.
As this dastardly plan finally comes to fruition on the morning of September 11, 2001, Mohamed Atta wonders, 'What shall I do with all these "Arab-language papers revealing the identities of all 19 hijackers involved in the four hijackings, as well as information on their plans, backgrounds and motives?"'
And of course, he does what any clever terrorist would do: He stuffs two suitcases full of this evidence that fingers him and all of his co-conspirators. And then he goes to the airport, strolls over to the baggage check station, and cooperatively surrenders these bags-o-evidence to airport employees.
This, we're told, is how the 19 hijackers were so quickly identified... though the article doesn't make it clear why feds waited 4½ years to tell us about the tell-all luggage being checked and lost.
And the article doesn't explain why, if the papers in Atta's suitcase were the key to identifying all the hijackers, several of the names were clearly false, as several purported 9/11 hijackers either survived the crashes or were mis-identified.
And you might wonder, since those names were wrong, why we accept the rest of the names of the hijackers as accurate?
But the most obvious question with today's 'news' is, why would this bad guy, Mohamed Atta, hand over suitcases full of incriminating evidence to airport baggage handlers?
Apparantly, we're supposed to believe that he just wanted to make sure, in case the plan went awry or his luggage got lost, that federal agents would have a treasure trove of evidence to hang him and round up all his co-conspirators.
And if you believe that, you'll believe anything.
H&HH
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In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a "threat assessment" by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term.
"There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines," an FBI spokesman said. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department, however, would identify what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it.
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Is it luck that aberrant stock trades were not monitored? Is it luck when 15 visas are awarded based on incomplete forms? Is it luck when Airline Security screenings allow hijackers to board planes with box cutters and pepper spray? Is it luck when Emergency FAA and NORAD protocols are not followed? Is it luck when a national emergency is not reported to top government officials on a timely basis?
To me luck is something that happens once. When you have this repeated pattern of broken protocols, broken laws, broken communication, one cannot still call it luck.
If at some point we don't look to hold the individuals accountable for not doing their jobs properly then how can we ever expect for terrorists not to get lucky again?
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Amazingly, Air Force One took off [from Florida after the attacks of September 11] with no military protection. It remained unprotected in the sky for more than an hour, though Florida is filled with Air Force bases just minutes away with planes that are supposed to be on twenty-four-hour alert.
Bush's aides later offered, and retracted, the excuse that he spent the day flying around the country because of threats to Air Force One believed to have been received at the White House. What nobody has ever explained is this: If you think Air Force One is to be attacked, why go up in Air Force One?
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The fact that top officials, at a time of extraordinary crisis and public anxiety, lied to protect the president's image has immense implications. If, within 24 hours of the terror attacks, the White House was giving out disinformation to deceive the American public and world opinion, then none of the claims made by the government from September 11 to the present can be taken for good coin.
If Bush lied about his activities on the day of the attacks, why should anyone assume he has not lied about the government's investigation, the identity of the perpetrators, the motives and aims of US war preparations, and the intent and scope of expanded police powers demanded by his administration to wiretap, search and seize, and detain suspects?
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The 9/11 investigation was originally given a budget of $3-million, later increased to $12-million. Some reports say the budget is now $14-million.
By comparison, when the shuttle Columbia disintegrated during its descent in February 2003, $50-million was budgeted for an investigation, which began about an hour and a half after the disaster.
Another $305-million was spent by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), searching for shuttle debris.
The investigation into the shuttle accident began publicly releasing its findings within several weeks, and concluded its work with an exhaustive report about six months later.
Even the Warren Commission, the U.S. government's widely-disbelieved investigation of Pres. Kennedy's 1963 assassination, was budgeted at $5.5-million -- in 1963 funds.
Adjusted for inflation, that's more than $32-million in 2003 dollars.
You might think it would cost substantially more to thoroughly investigate a complicated event -- nineteen foreign hijackers commandeering four passenger jets and obliterating the World Trade Center, damaging the Pentagon, and killing thousands of Americans -- than to investigate the shooting of the president in a parade.
The Bush Administration seems to disagree. They think it should cost substantially less.
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CBS News has learned that barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq -- even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.
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"We've been fighting for nearly 21 months -- fighting the administration, the White House," says Monica Gabrielle.
Her husband, Richard, an insurance broker who worked for Aon Corp. on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center's Tower 2, died during the attacks. "As soon as we started looking for answers we were blocked, put off and ignored at every stop of the way. We were shocked. The White House is just blocking everything."
Another 9/11 family advocate -- a former Bush supporter who requested anonymity -- was more blunt: "Bush has done everything in his power to squelch this [9/11] commission and prevent it from happening."
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President Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle Tuesday to limit the congressional investigation into the events of September 11, congressional and White House sources told CNN.
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Why did the US military, with the most powerful arsenal in world history, fail to prevent or at least try to stop a series of hijackings and crashes that went on for nearly two hours?
Where was the Air Force?
If President Bush and his cabinet were not, at this very moment, still trying to censor, suppress and delay the publication of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, if there had been honest disclosure and straight stories from the beginning, perhaps all these "dark questions," as the Post puts it, would never have arisen.
The great majority of people, sickened and overwhelmed by the horror of the attacks, unquestioningly accepts the White House version.
Many thousands, however, are patiently stitching together the documented evidence and noting the huge holes in the fabric of that official story.
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On Sept. 10, Newsweek has learned, a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns.
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Do we know the answers to these questions about September 11?
Of course not. Nobody will know the answers until there's an open and honest investigation.
But anyone courageous enough to think can see that the pertinent questions for any serious "investigation" were never asked, let alone answered.
--Helen & Harry, Unknown News
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You know, in a courtroom, when a witness is shown to be clearly lying about one detail, it calls that witness's entire testimony into doubt.
If it worked that way with presidents, we'd have ample grounds to doubt everything the Bush administration has told us about September 11, 2001.
After all; every newspaper and television account is directly or indirectly based in large part upon what the Bush administration has announced -- that they had no prior warning, that they knew immediately Osama bin Laden was to blame, that exactly 19 hijackers were aboard those four planes, that each hijacker has been posthumously identified, etc.
So our shared public perception of what happened on September 11, and why it happened, is really built on just one assumption, universally agreed: That the Bush administration is comprised of honest people, telling the truth.
But I don't see any evidence to support such an allegation.
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At his press conference yesterday, President Bush was asked about charges that he had received warnings prior to the September 11th attacks that a terrorist incident was imminent.
He answered that even asking such a question was "an absurd insinuation."
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The United States allowed members of Osama bin Laden's family to jet out of the US in the immediate aftermath of September 11, even as American airspace was closed.
Former White House counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke said the Bush administration sanctioned the repatriation of about 140 high-ranking Saudi Arabians, including relatives of the al-Qaida chief.
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A former translator for the FBI with top-secret security clearance says she has provided information to the panel investigating the 11 September attacks which proves senior officials knew of al-Qaida's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened.
She said the claim by the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no such information was "an outrageous lie".
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Yet one week, one week after 9/11, in response to initial reports that the military failed to defend our domestic airspace during the hijacks NORAD issued an official chronology that stated that the FAA notified NORAD of the second hijacking at 8:43 -- wrong. FAA notified NORAD of the third hijacking at 9:24, according to your report, wrong, FAA notified NORAD of the fourth hijacking at an unspecified time and that prior to the crash in Pennsylvania Langley F-16 combat air patrol planes were in place, remaining in place, to protect Washington, D.C..
All untrue.
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At least six air traffic controllers who dealt with two of the hijacked airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, made a tape recording that same day describing the events, but the tape was destroyed by a supervisor without anyone making a transcript or even listening to it, the Transportation Department said in a report today.
That manager crushed the cassette in his hand, shredded the tape and dropped the pieces into different trash cans around the building, according to a report made public today by the inspector general of the Transportation Department.
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Although American and British officials say they have "no doubt" that Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda terrorist organization were behind the crimes of Sept. 11, so far no actual evidence has been made public.
... During the Cuban missile crisis, the United States publicly released photographs that made a convincing case that the Soviets were lying about the missiles in Cuba. This tangible evidence helped retain support from allies and isolated the Russians diplomatically. Our situation today calls for similar action. President Bush should not let a blanket concern about protecting intelligence sources dissuade him from releasing enough intelligence to make our case.
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"The report is incomplete at best," said Breitweiser.
"Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi. We have clear and convincing money trails linking the Saudi princes to the terrorists. Why that's not finding its way into the report, I don't know."
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One day before two American Airlines jets were hijacked and crashed, for example, 1,535 contracts changed hands on options that let investors profit if AMR stock falls below $30 per share before Oct. 20. That was almost five times the total number of those October $30 put options traded before Sept. 10, according to Bloomberg data. AMR shares fell $11.70 today to $18.
Those 1,535 contracts were worth $1.6 million at today's closing price compared with $337,700 at the end of trading on Sept. 10, according to Bloomberg data. A contract represents options for 100 shares.
Similarly, October $30 put options for UAL soared, with 2,000 contracts traded on Sept. 6, three trading days before the attack. A total of 27 contracts had traded previously.
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A Saudi citizen who provided help to two of the September 11 hijackers may have been an agent for the Riyadh government, a congressional report will highlight this week.
The explosive allegation in the report, which is understood to be highly critical of the FBI, is likely to reignite the controversy over Saudi Arabia's links with al-Qa'eda and has already led to accusations that the Bush administration is covering up for the House of Saud.
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There's much more than this at Unknown News.
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