$5m Reward for Failed 9/11 Tip-Off(Flight Academy Pilot Rewarded, Other Instructors Dumbfounded)

flight instructor who raised the alarm about the so-called “20th hijacker” has been given a $5 million (£2.5 million) reward by the US government even though his tip failed to prevent the September 11 terror attacks.

Clarence “Clancy” Prevost, a former US Navy pilot who taught at the Pan Am International Flight Academy outside Minneapolis, became suspicious of Zacarias Moussaoui when he wanted to learn to fly a jumbo jet without showing any interest in take-off or landing.

The French national - the only person ever convicted in the United States for the September 11 attacks - was arrested on immigration charges but Minneapolis FBI agents were unable to persuade their superiors to seek a national security warrant to search his belongings and laptop computer.

He sat in jail for 3 and a half weeks saying nothing until 19 hijackers seized control of four airliners in the coordinated 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

Moussaoui later confessed to being the “20th hijacker” and told jurors he was to have piloted a fifth plane into the White House. After he was sentenced to life in prison, however, he recanted his testimony and denied any role in the attacks.

Mr Prevost, 69, a retired Northwest Airlines pilot, testified that he learned by the second day of teaching Moussaoui that he had paid the bulk of his $8,300 tuition for the flight simulator course in cash with $100 bills.

Although he described Moussaoui as a “pretty genial guy”, his concerns were heightened when the would-be pilot raised his voice when asked about Moslems’ Hajj pilgrimage. “Are you Muslim?” Mr Prevost asked. “I am nothing!” Moussaoui angrily replied.

Moussaoui’s stated goal was to learn to fly from London’s Heathrow airport to John F. Kennedy airport in New York. But he had no pilot’s licence and only about 50 hours flight time on a single-engine propeller plane - a fraction of the 600 hours of most students.

Mr Prevost testified that Moussaoui “had no frame of reference whatsoever with a commercial airliner. After 15 minutes I said, ’Let’s get lunch.’“

He told his managers: “We don’t know anything about this guy, and we’re teaching him how to throw the switches on a 747.” The managers initially responded that Moussaoui had paid his money and they did not care. Mr Prevost responded: “We’ll care when there’s a hijacking and the lawsuits come in.” Mr Prevost received a pay-out at a private ceremony yesterday under the US government’s “Rewards for Justice” programme after the award was secretly authorised last autumn - even though Moussaoui was never named as a wanted suspect by the programme.

The reward shocked two other Pan Am flight instructors - Tim Nelson and Hugh Sims - who have also been lauded for tipping off the FBI about Moussaoui.

“He was certainly there but he didn’t call the FBI. I have no idea why he received the reward,” Mr Sims said.

Mr Nelson’s wife Jodie said the reward “was given out to the wrong person” and described her husband as “dumbfounded”.

..."but Minneapolis FBI agents were unable to persuade their superiors to seek a national security warrant to search his belongings and laptop computer.... "He sat in jail for 3 and a half weeks saying nothing until 19 hijackers seized control of four airliners in the coordinated 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

Ex-FBI Agent Says Moussaoui Deception Prevented Probe, Global Security wrote: Former FBI agent and lawyer, Aaron Zebley, assigned to the FBI’s 9/11 case squad — the PENTTBOM team — in the New York office, testified that had Moussaoui confessed his links with al-Qaida before the 9/11 attacks, the authorities might have been able to trace money transfers and telephone calls to al-Qaida financiers who were in touch with some of those who hijacked airliners on September 11"...."it was possible that the FBI could have traced a $14,000 wire transfer to Moussaoui that came from Germany, which might have led to financial backers also in contact with at least five of the 19 hijackers".

..."The 2003 Senate Judiciary Committee report also noted, the FBI had sufficient information to get a FISA wiretap before 9/11 but failed to do so because “key FBI personnel responsible for protecting our country against terrorism did not understand the law.” FBI headquarters agents believed that before a FISA wiretap could be requested, Moussaoui had to be linked to an organization that the U.S. government formally labeled as terrorist...."

But was that the case?" The Senate report noted, “In the time leading up to the 9/11 attacks, the FBI and DOJ had not devoted sufficient resources to implementing the (Note:"Instructions on Separation of Certain Foreign Counterintelligence and Criminal Investigations Jamie_Gorelick Memo) FISA, so that long delays both crippled enforcement efforts and demoralized line agents.”

When the Constitution and National Security Interests Collide Link RE: Aaron Zebley, John Kavanaugh, and Geremy Kamens.

"Vote for change"..empty slogan from the Clintons.
American Conservative correspondent, KELLEY BEAUCAR VLAHOS: "Hillary Clinton’s—her foreign policy team can be best described as—and I hate to use this word so casually, but—“throwbacks” of her husband’s administration. We have, you know, Richard Holbrooke, Madeleine Albright, you have Sandy Berger as your sort of top-tier advisers..."

Wellstone Crash settlement: Snip

The estates of pilots Richard Conry and Micheal Guess are not beneficiaries of the settlement. Conry was the pilot, and Guess was second in command during the flight.

Attorney Mike Padden, who represents Guess’s family, says he plans to to file a wrongful death lawsuit against the estate of Capt. Richard Conry. Padden says that lawsuit will eventually seek damages from Aviation Charter.

Padden says all of the evidence released thus far indicates Conry was flying when the plane went down.

He says Robins, Kaplan, Miller and Ciresi unfairly and wrongly implicated Guess in its assessment of blame.

http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2003/08/28_zdechlikm_wellstonesettle/

Editor’s Note: In May 2005, The Rake ran a story by former KSTP-TV reporter Dean Staley about Clancy Prevost, the man whose suspicions about his flight student Zacharias Moussaui led to the apprehension of the “twentieth hijacker” behind the 9/11 attacks. Before our story hit the street in print, but after it was posted on our website, the StarTribune, in an attempt to discredit us and Prevost, (and to take credit themselves for the story of who caught Moussaui) ran a front page story the day before our story hit the streets crediting the tip that led to Moussaui to Tim Nelson and Hugh Sims, colleagues of Prevost at the Pan Am Flight Academy.

As noted in a Strib story today (January 25, 2008), the State and Justice Departments gave a $5 million reward for the Moussaui tip to Clancy Prevost, not to Nelson and Sims. It seems the State and Justice Departments thought The Rake story had it right, and the Strib had it wrong. Our story is below.

—Tom Bartel

His name is Clancy Prevost. He is sixty-eight years old, a retired pilot for Northwest Airlines, a lapsed Catholic, and a recovering alcoholic. He shakes his head as he recalls his story publicly for the first time.

The morning of August 13, 2001, was warm and humid, the Minnesota summer nearing its peak. Clancy Prevost left his room at the Spring Hill Suites, his local lodging when he commutes from the East Coast. He jumped on the hotel shuttle and headed for the nearby offices of the Pan-Am International Flight Academy. He wore a blue polo shirt, khakis, and red Converse sneakers.

Moussaoui’s demeanor may have helped him go unnoticed during the five and a half months leading up to his arrest. He arrived in Chicago from London on February 23 and declared at least thirty-five thousand dollars in cash on his customs form.

He traveled to Oklahoma City, and later to Minnesota.

Along the way, Moussaoui bought knives and flight-training videos and inquired about starting a crop-dusting company. Not once did he draw the attention of authorities. Not even when he walked into the Pan Am flight school, counted out sixty-eight one-hundred dollar bills, and signed up to learn how to fly a 747. His luck ended the day he met his flight instructor, Clancy Prevost.

At first glance, Moussaoui was the kind of client Prevost had seen before: a wealthy civilian with no ties to the airline industry who wanted to learn how to fly a commercial jetliner. One might be surprised to learn how many “vanity clients” come to flight school, men of means with lots of free time, whose ultimate hope is apparently to impress women with a 747-type rating—bragging rights worth thousands of dollars. (Normally, most of Pan Am’s students are working, commercial pilots who are training to upgrade their ratings from smaller passenger jets. Maybe two or three vanity students turn up each year.) But that first day, Moussaoui would prove unlike any other student Prevost had known.

snip

Prevost had Wednesday off. Having finished two days of what passed for ground school, his time with Moussaoui was effectively over. That morning he got a call from his office. The FBI wanted to talk with him.

At 1:00 p.m. Prevost met with an FBI agent and an Immigration and Naturalization Service agent in the commons room of his hotel. Prevost had done all the footwork for them.

“Where does Moussaoui stay?” they asked.

“At the Residence Inn.”

“How does he get over to NATCO?”

“He comes in a Subaru with a silver paint job, four-door sedan, and the license plate is green and white and the last three numbers are 686.”

“Who drives him?”

“A guy with black hair. He looks Oriental from the back but he’s dark complected and has black hair.”

The interview lasted less than twenty minutes. Prevost felt enormous relief. “OK, now we’ve told the FBI,” he remembers thinking. “It’s out of my hands. I’ve done as much as I can.”

Snip
Prevost’s next day at work was Thursday. He had a four-hour LOFT scheduled overnight from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. (Pan Am often used the simulators during off hours.) Another instructor, Rich Lamb, was scheduled to give Moussaoui LOFT training at 6 p.m. (Prevost had been charged only with Moussaoui’s ground school course work.)

Prevost left a message for another new student to show up at 5 p.m. On the chance that someone canceled, they could fill the 6 p.m. slot, be done by 10 p.m., and avoid the overnight shift. Prevost and Lamb waited in the lobby for Moussaoui and the other student.

Dana Wilson, one of the schedulers, came up and told Lamb, “Your sim’s canceled.”

Prevost asked, “What happened to Zach?” Two days of intrigue ended with a matter-of-fact statement.

“They led him away,” she said

snip

For the next twenty-eight days, Prevost entertained his AA buddies with the anecdote of the odd Middle Easterner who disappeared into the hands of government agents. It made a good story. Over coffee, someone would prod him to repeat the account, the story that always ended with the same deliberate punch line, “They led him away.”

On the morning of September 11th, Prevost was sitting at home. The phone rang. It was his daughter Annie. In a scene that was being repeated across the country, she said, “Dad, they’re crashing airplanes into the Trade Center.”

snip

In 1998, Moussaoui trained at an al-Qaida-affiliated camp in Afghanistan. In the months before his arrest, Moussaoui pursued training at the same Norman, Oklahoma, flight school attended by Mohammed Atta ...(I add: Oklahoma hotel manager sees Atta with McVey)

Snip

Moussaoui spent twenty-five weeks in the U.S.; he spent only two days with Prevost. So why did Clancy Prevost see so clearly what no one else seemed able to?

Al Johnson, a program manager at Pan Am and the man who introduced Prevost to Moussaoui, says, “Clancy is just the type of a guy who would be curious about what this guy wants to do with an airplane. He isn’t there just to walk in and start training a guy in the morning because the guy wants to see if he can fly a 747. I’m not sure that anybody else would have been as curious as Clancy, or asked the right questions.”

After September 11th, Alan McHale (I add: who prior wanted to let the issue go in regard to suspicions Prevost had) personally thanked Prevost for his actions.

snip

Prevost is an atheist with the intellectual energy of a college freshman, the moral clarity of a monk, and the wonder of a man awakened for the first time at the age of fifty-six from a life of drinking.

“Live your life according to principles, not people,” he says, head shaking slightly, eyes wide, grinning at the beauty of the statement. Prevost can smell B.S. a mile away. He smelled it all over Zacarias Moussaoui a month before September 11th

http://www.rakemag.com/issues/2005/05

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