Posted on 09/14/2001 9:36:35 AM PDT by t-shirt
Hindsight is always 20/20.
As for FDR and Pearl Harbor, I think the latest info confirms the conspiracy theories, so that that was not really an intelligence failure.
By REUTERS
September 14, 2001
BRUSSELS/AMSTERDAM Sept 14 (Reuters) - Police in Belgium and the Netherlands arrested six suspected Islamic extremists in a joint swoop on a network thought to be planning attacks on U.S. targets in Europe, authorities said on Friday.
Two of the men were arrested on Thursday in Brussels and police found two Uzi machine pistols during a house search, a spokeswoman for the Brussels Public Prosecutor's Office said.
The other four were arrested in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam on Thursday night, Dutch prosecutor's spokesman Wim de Bruijn said.
He said there was no connection with Tuesday's terror attacks in the United States, in which intelligence officials have said fugitive Saudi-born Islamic guerrilla chieftain Osama bin Laden is the number one suspect.
Germany released on Friday an airport worker held for 24 hours in connection with the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. German investigators were continuing a probe into Hamburg-based extremists allegedly involved.
De Bruijn would not say whether the men held in the Netherlands were armed or whether they had anything suspicious in their possession. Asked whether the Dutch authorities were in contact with the Federal Bureau of Investigation or other U.S. agencies, he said: ``I am unable to answer that.''
The identities and nationalities of the suspects were not disclosed. Two other men were detained in Brussels with the two suspects but were later released.
``Those four persons (detained in Brussels) all belong to a radical Islamic movement,'' Belgian spokeswoman Beatrice Behets said. Police also seized documents which are now being analysed, she added.
The arrests followed a tipoff from the Belgian State Security Service that one of the suspects might be preparing attacks on U.S. targets in Europe, Behets said.
A spokesman for the Belgian State Security Service would only say that the information from the Public Prosecutor's Office ``was not wrong,'' but declined to give further details.
There were probably hundreds of rumors flying around about Japan, but I have yet to believe that the major elements of the conspiracy theory is there:
1. FDR knew that it was going to be Pearl Harbor.
2. FDR knew it was going to be at 0755 AM on December 7, 1941.
3. FDR deliberately ordered the information withheld from military commanders.
No, what happened at Pearl Harbor, and what probably happened here was probably this: An enemy whose cunning and ruthlessness we grossly underestimated launched a well-planned, well-executed sneak attack on our country. In the case of Pearl Harbor, it was planned by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. For these attacks, we have not discovered who yet, but when we do, we'll settle the account with him, just as we did with Yamamoto.
Suspect linked to Minnesota
By PATRICK HOWE
Associated Press Writer
ST. PAUL -- The investigation into this week's terrorist attacks reached Minnesota on Wednesday, with one person detained on an immigration issue. And Minnesota was among several states where flight schools were being contacted as FBI agents ran down reports that some of the hijackers trained in America.
Authorities wanted to question the person held in Minnesota about the plot, but the person refused and requested a lawyer, a law enforcement source speaking on condition of anonymity told The Associated Press.
U.S. officials confirmed that a few weeks ago the FBI detained the Arab man in Minnesota when he tried to seek flight simulator training for a large jetliner. Those who hijacked the four airliners received similar training.
Officials said the FBI had no reason to charge him at the time and instead began deportation proceedings. Those proceedings were ongoing when the attacks took place Tuesday, and he was re-detained.
The Associated Press learned a man who shared a Florida home searched by FBI agents Wednesday lived at a St. Paul house from the end of January through October 2000. Ali Alamri, believed to be 27, was placed in the home through a referral service, according to the owner of the house near Macalester College.
Sherry Sandey, president of International Home Stay Services Inc., the agency that placed Alamri, said she believed another man, Abdulrahman Saeed Alomari, and Alamri were brothers, and that Alomari stayed at a Days Inn in suburban Bloomington.
Alomari, 38, later moved to Vero Beach, where his house was among at least two searched by FBI agents for 12 hours on Wednesday; the agents left with several garbage bags of evidence.
FAA records list a pilot license for an Abdulrahman Saeed Alomari, though it wasn't certain if that was the same man who lived in both St. Paul and Vero Beach. The address on the pilot license was Jedda, Saudi Arabia.
online.ie
14 Sep 2001
The flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder have both been recovered from the Pentagon crash site and are now in federal authorities' hands.
"They are damaged but may still yield useful information," a Pentagon spokesman said.
September 14, 2001
New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:54 a.m. ET
MANILA, Philippines (AP) -- Three Middle Eastern men were engaged in ``suspicious'' videotaping of the American Embassy in Manila last week that may have been part of a bombing plot, officials said Friday.
The men, all carrying Omani passports with the family name Al-Shehhi, were questioned, allowed to go because they had committed no known crime and left the Philippines the next day.
The hotel rooms where they were staying, across the street from the embassy, were searched Wednesday, a day after the name of Marwan Alshehhi emerged as a suspect in the fatal attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Philippine presidential spokesman Rigoberto Tiglao said a U.S. technician who participated in the search of the Bayview Hotel ran two tests for the presence of explosives: one was positive for TNT chemicals; the other was negative.
In other developments in a country with an ongoing hostage crisis involving Islamic extremists, Philippine immigration officials detained a Saudi Airlines pilot for questioning and turned back nine Malaysian men on suspicion they could have undergone terrorist training.
The U.S. Embassy issued a statement saying the three Omani men were engaged in ``suspicious activity'' on Sept. 7 and 8, with local police questioning them the second day after embassy security pointed them out. Police checked the men's videotapes, which showed tourist attractions, then let them go.
``They couldn't have foreseen that there would be a Sept. 11 attack,'' Tiglao said.
The three men, ages 26 to 29, took a flight to Bangkok, Thailand, on Sept. 9, even though they had booked their rooms for another day. Tiglao said their early departure led to speculation ``they might have had ideas of conducting a bombing.''
The detained Saudi Airlines pilot, Mohammad Omar Al-Bokhari, was a last-minute substitution in the crew for flight SV862 from Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, to Manila on Thursday, Immigration Commissioner Andrea Domingo said.
Philippine officials said they believed he might be the brother of a man who has been questioned about the U.S. attacks: Saudi flight engineer Adnan Bukhari, 41, a student at Flightsafety International in Florida, which trains commercial jet crews. An apparent relative, Ameer Bukhari, was a student pilot there when he was killed in an in-flight collision exactly a year before Tuesday's attack, and Philippine officials said they believed Al-Bokhari attended the same school.
Al-Bokhari denied he was related to Adnan Bukhari.
``I have no brother over there,'' he insisted as he was led out of the first session of questioning.
He had been scheduled to fly to Riyadh on Friday afternoon, but the flight left without him as he was questioned and fingerprinted at Manila's international airport, then taken to national police headquarters for further questioning.
The nine Malaysian men were turned back after flying into Cebu from Kuala Lumpur.
Casimiro Madarang, chief of the immigration bureau at Cebu airport, said all had recently been in Pakistan an average of five months, which he considered to be enough time for terrorism training, so they were barred as potential security threats.
I'm normally a tin foil kind of guy, but the enormity of this tragedy makes it impossible for me to seriously believe that our government actually may have known about it in advance. 20,000 deaths is just so monstrous, so horrible, that I just can't believe anyone would let it happen.
But there are so many questions that I don't see how a rational person could let them go unasked. Some straightforward ones are:
How could this have been planned for five years without _some_ intelligence agency knowing about it?
How could this have involved 50+ people without _some_ intelligence agency knowing about it?
How could this have involved people traveling between -- at least -- three or four different countries without _some_ intelligence agency knowing about it?
There is one final thing that has been bugging me lately.
During the last election, during all the fighting and legal squabbles, tin foil people at www.enterprisemission.com put forward a complicated theory which was built around the belief that people in power knew that something horrendous was going to happen, something which would enable the governing party to make vastly important decisions and vastly change/shape the future of the globe. That was why, they suggested months ago, that the republicans and democrats were slugging it out it a way unheard of in modern politics. Because they both knew that _something_ big was coming down... EnterpriseMission.com has put up crazy theories and such. But they wrote about this months ago, while the election was still undetermined. (They've since removed old files from their site so I can't link to their wild theory.)
Emotionally, I can't even start to believe that our politicians are _so_ bad that they would let something like this happen.
But I can't stop asking myself the questions, either... Mark W.
September 14, 2001
New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:54 a.m. ET
MANILA, Philippines (AP) -- Three Middle Eastern men were engaged in ``suspicious'' videotaping of the American Embassy in Manila last week that may have been part of a bombing plot, officials said Friday.
The men, all carrying Omani passports with the family name Al-Shehhi, were questioned, allowed to go because they had committed no known crime and left the Philippines the next day.
The hotel rooms where they were staying, across the street from the embassy, were searched Wednesday, a day after the name of Marwan Alshehhi emerged as a suspect in the fatal attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Philippine presidential spokesman Rigoberto Tiglao said a U.S. technician who participated in the search of the Bayview Hotel ran two tests for the presence of explosives: one was positive for TNT chemicals; the other was negative.
In other developments in a country with an ongoing hostage crisis involving Islamic extremists, Philippine immigration officials detained a Saudi Airlines pilot for questioning and turned back nine Malaysian men on suspicion they could have undergone terrorist training.
The U.S. Embassy issued a statement saying the three Omani men were engaged in ``suspicious activity'' on Sept. 7 and 8, with local police questioning them the second day after embassy security pointed them out. Police checked the men's videotapes, which showed tourist attractions, then let them go.
``They couldn't have foreseen that there would be a Sept. 11 attack,'' Tiglao said.
The three men, ages 26 to 29, took a flight to Bangkok, Thailand, on Sept. 9, even though they had booked their rooms for another day. Tiglao said their early departure led to speculation ``they might have had ideas of conducting a bombing.''
The detained Saudi Airlines pilot, Mohammad Omar Al-Bokhari, was a last-minute substitution in the crew for flight SV862 from Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, to Manila on Thursday, Immigration Commissioner Andrea Domingo said.
Philippine officials said they believed he might be the brother of a man who has been questioned about the U.S. attacks: Saudi flight engineer Adnan Bukhari, 41, a student at Flightsafety International in Florida, which trains commercial jet crews. An apparent relative, Ameer Bukhari, was a student pilot there when he was killed in an in-flight collision exactly a year before Tuesday's attack, and Philippine officials said they believed Al-Bokhari attended the same school.
Al-Bokhari denied he was related to Adnan Bukhari.
``I have no brother over there,'' he insisted as he was led out of the first session of questioning.
He had been scheduled to fly to Riyadh on Friday afternoon, but the flight left without him as he was questioned and fingerprinted at Manila's international airport, then taken to national police headquarters for further questioning.
The nine Malaysian men were turned back after flying into Cebu from Kuala Lumpur.
Casimiro Madarang, chief of the immigration bureau at Cebu airport, said all had recently been in Pakistan an average of five months, which he considered to be enough time for terrorism training, so they were barred as potential security threats.
I don't buy the conspiracy crap. In order for a conspiracy to make sense, Roosevelt would have had to know ahead of time that the attack would cause the American people to rally behind the war effort, rather than become demoralized and defeatist. This was by no means assured.
He also would have had to know ahead of time that we would (almost miraculously) win the Battle of Midway. If we had lost at Midway, the Japanese would have been free to invade the West Coast.
September 13, 2001 Posted: 6:00 PM EDT (2200 GMT)
Emergency workers look at the crater created when Flight 93 crashed.
SHANKSVILLE, Pennsylvania (CNN) -- Searchers Thursday found one of the so-called black boxes from United Airlines Flight 93, the hijacked airliner that crashed Tuesday in western Pennsylvania.
The flight data recorder was found in the crater the plane created when it slammed into the ground Tuesday morning, according to FBI spokesman Bill Crowley.
"We are hoping that it will have some information that is pertinent to what occurred in the plane prior to its crashing," Crowley said.
The recorder is being sent to the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington for analysis, Crowley said.
They are still searching for the voice data recorder.
Meanwhile, investigators say they've found debris from the crash at least eight miles away from the crash site.
A second debris field was around Indian Lake about 3 miles from the crash scene. Some debris was in the lake and some was adjacent to the lake.
More debris from the plane was found in New Baltimore, some 8 miles away from the crash.
State police and the FBI initially said they didn't want to speculate whether the debris was from the crash, or if the plane could have broken up in midair.
Investigators later said the debris was all very light material, such as paper and thin nylon the wind would easily blow. The wind was blowing towards Indian Lake and New Baltimore at 9 knots. "According to the NTSB, it is not only possible that the debris is from the crash, it is probable," Crowley said.
The Boeing 757, which was bound for San Francisco from Newark, was among four planes hijacked Tuesday in the worst terror attack in U.S. history. It crashed in Shanksville in Somerset County, 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
Officials said an engine part has been recovered. Much of the debris is tiny.
Also Thursday, the National Transportation Safety Board confirmed that the flight had been headed east. The plane, which took off from Newark bound for San Francisco, was diverted somewhere around Cleveland.
Information from a telephone call made by a passenger indicated that passengers on Flight 93 tried to wrest control from the hijackers, which may have caused the plane to crash before it reached whatever target the hijackers were aiming for. All 45 people aboard were killed.
Officials have speculated the hijackers may have been planning to ram the plane into the Capitol, the White House or Camp David. The other planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
As the recovery process at the crash scene in western Pennsylvania continues, emergency workers are painstakingly looking for human remains, airplane parts and personal effects.
FBI officials leading the investigation say it could take weeks to recover everything from the site. Forensic anthropologists and hazardous material inspectors are among those at the scene.
Families of the victims are expected to arrive in the area Thursday. United Airlines is hosting them at a nearby resort.
-Correspondent Brian Cabell contributed to this report
You might want to give Oscar Meyer a call about purchasing that tonnage of bologna.
I was watching FOX last night and was hearing them discuss that. I was half asleep so can't give you the names. But the gist of what I remember is that this plot HAD to have been in the making for years, that the code words used were known to the CIA, and that the terrorists just knew too much that couldn't be chalked up to 'common knowledge'.
All of that may have ALREADY been discussed here on FR, but I haven't seen it yet. But it certainly does re-inforce the theory that this is a direct result of klintler's actions while he was raping the country. (they mentioned a 5 year planning this)
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