The gun on the left is shooting at the plane, writing "Our Message to the White House" in bullet holes. The sign at the upper left says "Los Angeles."
And this was in a Qatari paper... Supposedly they are "moderates..."
Posted on 09/03/2002 6:20:18 PM PDT by freeperfromnj
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The FBI is investigating the July 4 double killing at Los Angeles International Airport as possible terrorism even though there's no evidence linking the alleged shooter to any terrorist group, a spokesman said Tuesday.
Justice Department officials have said all along that terrorism was among several possible motives for the attack at an Israeli airline counter, and investigators were looking for evidence the shooter, Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, had terror group connections. But until now the FBI had not publicly characterized the probe as a terrorism investigation.
The Israeli government has called the event a terror attack since it occurred, and Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., and other members of Congress had complained about the FBI's reluctance to characterize it that way.
According to witnesses, Hadayet yelled racial slurs before opening fire at the ticket counter of El Al, Israel's airline. El Al employees Yaakov Aminov, 46, and Victoria Hen, 25, were killed. An El Al Security Guard then shot Hadayet dead.
"The shooting is being classified as a terrorism investigation," Matt McLaughlin, spokesman for the FBI's Los Angeles field office, said Tuesday. "If there is the slightest chance it could be terrorism, you open it up as a terrorism investigation. It's the only prudent course of action."
FBI agents had refused to describe the attack as terror because its legal definition of terrorism was work of "subnational groups or clandestine agents." No evidence has been found to link Hadayet with one.
Because of the attack, however, the Bush administration reconsidered the definition, and President Bush's domestic security plan now says criminal acts can qualify as terror without participation of a group. "Terrorism is not so much a system of belief ... as it is a strategy and a tactic -- a means of attack," the plan says.
Well, that sure makes me feel better.
It's only been 60 days since this incident, this murder. What could possibly be taking so long?
I know it takes a long time to get a word redefined, but redefining "terrorism" shouldn't take 60 days, should it?
LOL!! The FBI called OKC a terrorist attack from day one, despite the fact that they bent over backwards trying to prove that McVeigh did everything very much in isolation and without any connection whatsoever to "others unknown." They didn't try to prove that he had culpability for the bombing, they tried to prove that he was "the lone bomber." Gone were witnesses who would testify seeing him with John Doe #2, for example.
The gun on the left is shooting at the plane, writing "Our Message to the White House" in bullet holes. The sign at the upper left says "Los Angeles."
And this was in a Qatari paper... Supposedly they are "moderates..."
FOX NEWS.com (AP): "FBI LABELS INQUIRY INTO LAX SHOOTING A TERROR PROBE WASHINGTON - The FBI is investigating the July 4 double killing at Los Angeles International Airport as possible terrorism even though there's no evidence linking the alleged shooter to any terrorist group, a spokesman said Tuesday. " (INFO NOTE: The LAX shooting occurred on July 4, 2002 and the suspect was identified as Hesham Mohamed Hadayet.) (090302)
HELP! Somebody post a link to that idiot FBI spokesman that immediately ran out ON 7/4 and said "THIS IS NOT A TERRORIST INCIDENT!"
If the OKC bombing were a Reichstag fire, then government involvement would of course have to be suppressed. (Note that there were many stories of government prior knowledge, such as the ATF agents getting a page to not show up at work that morning). By way of a motive, note that the anti-terrorism legislation that sailed through Congress after the bombing had failed to get through before it.
Less sinister, but still pretty sinister, is that the bombing may have been a sting that went sour ... again government involvement would be better suppressed. This too would explain the work-optional page for the ATF agents. There is precedent for this, namely, that the original WTC bombing, with the truck bomb, was indeed a sting gone sour.
From another angle, if there were political expediency to have going after white militia types, rather than Arab terrorists, then participation by others, and especially Arabs, would have to be suppressed. In this case, note that the shootdown of TWA 800 was effectively covered up by the combined efforts of a variety of government agencies. Interestingly, several Clinton operatives in the days after 9-11 cited TWA 800 as one of the many terrorist attacks that had happened in the years before, contradicting the NTSB's own decision that the crash was due to mechanical failure (and that the witnesses who thought they saw missiles must have been drunk).
Yet another is that the government really wanted to convict McVeigh, for whatever reason, so they wanted to convince the jury that he and he alone did it, such that they would be more likely to convict and sentence to death, than if others were also involved.
Then again, far be it from me to discern the depths to which the federal government operates. There may be yet other reasons why suppressing evidence of others was undertaken.
But in any case, and whether the reasons I have given are satisfying or not, the fact remains that at the trial the point was the McVeigh was the "lone" bomber, and that interest in John Doe #2 vanished, such that those who saw him with McVeigh weren't even called to testify. If you reject my reasons, then feel free to yourself come up with why it was so important for the government to make the case that it did.
Many people did blow the whistle. Terry Stacey, for example, an investigation insider, gave up faith in its integrity and pulled out fabric for testing of the "red residue." He was criminally charged and let walk by testifying against James Sanders, who was convicted of felony wreckage-scavenging charges. Then there was Charles Wetli, the medical examiner, who stated that "virtually all the bodies had shrapnel" - and that the FBI agents confiscated each piece of it, and now can't find any of it. You are welcome to posit another explanation for these facts ... what is this explanation? Mine is the unimaginably corrupt Clinton administration infecting everything it touched, to the point of criminal conspiracies. (And there are other examples of people who sang as well.)
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