Posted on 05/30/2007 3:21:49 AM PDT by Sub-Driver
Report confirms terror dry run
By Audrey Hudson THE WASHINGTON TIMES Published May 30, 2007
Download the inspector general report (PDF)
A newly released inspector general report backs eyewitness accounts of suspicious behavior by 13 Middle Eastern men on a Northwest Airlines flight in 2004 and reveals several missteps by government officials, including failure to file an incident report until a month after the matter became public.
According to the Homeland Security report, the "suspicious passengers," 12 Syrians and their Lebanese-born promoter, were traveling on Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles on expired visas. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services extended the visas one week after the June 29, 2004, incident.
The report also says that a background check in the FBI's National Crime Information Center database, which was performed June 18 as part of a visa-extension application, produced "positive hits" for past criminal records or suspicious behavior for eight of the 12 Syrians, who were traveling in the U.S. as a musical group.
In addition, the band's promoter was listed in a separate FBI database on case investigations for acting suspiciously aboard a flight months earlier. He was detained a third time in September on a return trip to the U.S. from Istanbul, the details of which were redacted.
The inspector general criticized the Homeland Security officials for not reporting the incident to the Homeland Security Operations Center (HSOC), which serves as the nation's nerve center for information sharing and domestic incident management.
The report comes three years after the incident, which was not officially acknowledged until a month later, after The Washington Times reported passenger and marshal complaints that the incident resembled a dry run for a terrorist attack. After reviewing the report, air marshals say it confirms their earlier suspicions.
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
Fortunetly, we can read the report ourselves:
If they were covering up probes and concealing the incidents from their own flying air marshals they will soon be promoted. But hey, that's the way the Government is run. Undoubtedly, once amnesty is passed, these people will be put in charge of border security.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1390369/posts And this
Part I: Terror in the Skies, Again?
Part II: Terror in the Skies, Again?
I kept thinking what a smugly arrogant smile the TSA woman kept on her face...
..this, right after the woman who made the initial report to authorities...(she was a passenger on the plane)--had also been interviewed on Fox this AM.
I found the TSA agent disingenuous....
..and the woman passenger completely believable.
This is scary when you think that the marshals are not getting their reports heard or the equipment they need.
I recently had to make to make a business trip. (If work didn't make me fly on rare occasions, I'd never set foot in the Constitution-free zones known as airports)
You can be damned sure that I took a close look at everyone who was getting on the plane with me, and noted their behavior before we boarded.
And those guys on 9-11 were just students.. Just trying to learn to fly planes..
I’m a newbie....what does BTTT mean?
And the damndest part is that this time we'll have no one to blame but ourselves.
L
“And those guys on 9-11 were just students.. Just trying to learn to fly planes..”
Can you teach me more how to ‘fly’ plane? I don’t need to know how to land.
Here’s what Mike Cutler has to say about this incident.
Hi Gang:
Here is yet another disturbing news report. This one appeared in yesterday’s edition of the Washington Times and should serve as a reminder that there are individuals living among us who may well belong to terrorist cells who are hiding in plain sight by doing nondescript jobs that enable them to embed themselves in communities around the United States as they await instructions to initiate the next terrorist attack.
Two weeks ago a terror cell was uncovered in New Jersey that had targeted Fort Dix. This article details an event that took place roughly three years ago. The point is that in order to embed themselves in our country, terrorists seek to acquire lawful immigration status so as to not call attention to themselves. As I have noted on many occasions, including when I have testified before Congressional hearings, it has been said that an effective spy has been described as someone who would not attract the attention of a waitress at a greasy spoon diner. The same could be said of an effective terrorist and, in point of fact, it might just be that the waiter or waitress at that diner might be a terrorist. I am not attempting to create an environment of fear, I just want you to understand the reality of how terrorists operate. In law enforcement we have an expression, “Just because you are paranoid, it does not mean you are not being followed!”
If it can be shown that there are solid reasons to suspect that terrorist cells are operating around our country, poised to strike when ordered to do so, then it is absolutely incumbent on our nation’s leaders to do what is necessary to take the reasonable and prudent measures to enable law enforcement and the intelligence agencies to identify these pernicious individuals before they can harm us. We need to have strategies in place that would deprive terrorists those things that they need in order to embed themselves and to carry out attacks. Borders that offer scant challenges to illegal aliens who would work as dish washers offer even less of a challenge to sophisticated terrorists. Immigration bureaucracies that fail to identify fraud and prevent aliens from obtaining immigration benefits based on a fraud-laden application enable terrorists to achieve the goal of securing official immigration status especially resident alien status and United States citizenship. Yet, report after report issued by the OIG (Office of the Inspector General) and the GAO (General Accountability Office) have made it perfectly clear that there is little if an integrity to be found at USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) the agency that bears the burden of adjudicating applications for a wide variety of immigration benefits including the conferring of resident alien status upon aliens and even the naturalization process whereby aliens are accorded United States citizenship. These immigration benefits enable aliens to travel freely around our country and across our nation’s borders. United States citizenship even enables aliens to be granted high security clearances and, as we have seen on a number of occasions, such naturalized citizens have secured jobs in the defense industries where they easily engaged in espionage or worked on military bases where they compromised the security of our soldiers as we saw with a naturalized citizen of an Arab country who was arrested last year who secured a job with a private contractor as a translator on a military base in Iraq. That individual had access to highly sensitive documents and potentially to informants (he had a top secret clearance).
The Terrorism Assistance and Facilitation Act of 2007 as I have come to refer to the outrageous Senate immigration bill that was described as a “compromise” would, indeed, compromise our national security. That legislation and the Guest Worker Amnesty Program it calls for, would provide millions of undocumented aliens with official identity documents. There is no way of properly identifying the true identities of these millions of aliens who entered our country in violation of law, and would offer virtually no challenge to terrorists and criminals who would use that program to create new fictitious identities for themselves that they could use to embed themselves in our country even while their names appear on all sorts of terror watch lists and “No Fly” lists! Bin Laden himself could not have come up with a better piece of legislation to facilitate the malevolent schemes of his terrorist minions who would stop at nothing to slaughter as many of our citizens as possible and bring down our nation. This is what war is. Our enemy seeks the destruction of our nation and our way of life. They would exterminate anyone who would not accept their radical religious beliefs. The administration and just about all of the Presidential candidates concede that our nation is at war. What I want to know is why most of the candidates as well as the current occupant of the Oval Office would seek to create such a national security nightmare for this country and our citizens?
To my thinking, any member of the United States Senate who votes for this bill should have his patriotism openly challenged and should be sent packing the next time that he comes up for reelection! Why did members of the United States Senate attempt to ram this piece of legislative trash down the throats of their colleagues before they even had an opportunity to read it? Is this what they think democracy is about? Any Presidential candidate who supports this treacherous legislation should have to explain in detail how and why he would support this legislative disaster!
We the People have an absolute right to demand answers to these critical questions!
Lead, follow or get out of the way!
-michael cutler-
(tin foil hat and asbestos pajamas on!)
I know that President Bush would certainly disapprove of such "vigilante" behavior.
Back To The Top.
Welcome, newbie!
Read the links cindy has provided in post#2. There was an extensive multi-apart series run by the Wall Street Journal by Anne Jacobsen who later wrote a book Terror in the Skies.
It was worse than this article depicts.
It’s obvious that PC prevents the media from making a big issue of this. They would rather obsess over paris hilton going to jail or brittany’s panties.
My first thought as well. Vindication. Her story was posted several times here.
Link, please, Master-Search-Jedi? (I hate that I can't remember her name.)
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