Posted on 09/15/2001 8:36:15 AM PDT by t-shirt
On the story spread by Israel's press that EgyptAir runaway pilot Hamdi Hanafi, who has recently requested political asylum in Britain, has information that implicates ill-fated EgyptAir's Flight 990 co-pilot Gamil Al Batouti in the crash, which took place on October 31, 1999. According to Israeli newspaper Davar, Batouti is reported to have had crazy plans for the trip from New York, which leads Hanafi to believe that he deliberately felled the plane.
The facts of the incident are completely against the attempts made to turn Batouti into a scapegoat taking the blame for the crash, and eliminating other suspects.
Fact One: Batouti stayed in the US from ten to fifteen days before the ill-fated crash. He co-piloted the plane from Cairo to New York to Los Angles and then back to New York, he never exceeded the internationally authorized flying hours. After every stage, he, together with the rest of crew, relaxed for a few days. The chances that he had called Hanafi were thus minimal, if not entirely non-existent.
Fact Two: While Batouti flew Boeing 767s, Hanafi flies Airbuses; which means they never worked together.
Fact Three: Experts believe that if the story were true that Batouti had decided to crash the plane, why would he not do it on his way from Cairo? And why not in the Ocean, where the plane would fly for a whole 7 minutes, and where he would be sure all evidence of a deliberate crash would be lost, instead of just off the coast?
The only explanation of these stories carried by Israel's press is that they are just attempts at exploiting any incident, however insignificant or trivial, to shake Egypt's self-confidence. But, try as they will, they will never succeed!
By: Galal Dowidar
"Al Akhbar"
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On the incident of EgyptAir runaway pilot: Egypt's international standing is on the shooting line and has been for long. It is not only that the Boeing manufacturing company seeks to exonerate itself; to avoid having to pay compensations in the event that the EgyptAir plane did crash because of technical mal-functioning, or that America's Civil Aviation Authority wants to clear its name, but also that all this is used to disrepute Egypt, the state and regime; the people and the national carrier.
By: Abbas Al Tarabili
"Al Wafd"
The ashamed asylum-seeker pilot claimed that he had information about the Flight 990 crash. Although I'm sure he has nothing to say about the accident, they may fabricate his statements or even convince him to say exactly what they want.
After all, a man who sells his country and his nation will find it easy to sell himself to anyone who pays the price.
Israel's Maariv newspaper was the first to fish in the troubled waters to try to help Israel's 'dear' allies. It claimed that the disgraced pilot had heard his friend, late co-pilot Gamil al-Batouti, as planning a 'crazy act' during the flight.
What a baseless and senseless fabrication!
Late Batouti could never utter such words. Had he any intention to commit suicide, why didn't he commit it while the flight was en route from Cairo to the US? Why did he wait for the return flight? Did he want to enjoy his remaining days of life in the US?
And even if we accept that Batouti had decided to kill himself and the passengers in the return flight, why did he do it minutes after the takeoff? Why didn't he choose any other timing of the 12-hour-long flight? From a technical viewpoint, it is impossible for an aeroplane to dive in few seconds from an altitude of 33.000 feet into the ocean. The plane's design and machines could never allow such a step.
The disgraced pilot Hamdi Taha has lost his credibility and no one would believe his dirty game. To know that Hamdi's monthly salary is around LE 20,000, we can easily imagine the price he received to participate in this dirty plot.
By: Samir Ragab
"The Egyptian Gazette"
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The "reasoning" here is so lame that I think it is clear that Batouti was a murdering terrorist and any Egyptian who dares to tell the truth is considered a traitor to his country. That makes Egypt a terrorist harbor?
At the heart of the matter is a reserve EgyptAir co-pilot, Gamil Al-Batouti and a three-word prayer he uttered before turning off the Boeing 767's autopilot and putting the plane into a steep dive. The words were preserved on the flight voice recorder.
"Tawakilt ala Allah", Al-Batouti said. I put my faith in God. It is the sort of phrase normally mouthed on the brink of a weighty decision or difficult task. To US investigators, it immediately raised the spectre of an act of suicidal lunacy.
Egyptians were outraged. This rush to judgment, they believed, owed more to a prejudiced view of Islam as some cruelly fanatical creed than to solid detective work. The prayer could have been a prelude to some desperate attempt to avoid a disaster, such as a collision with another plane. Meanwhile, conspiracy theories began to circulate in the Middle Eastern press, suggesting the plane had been brought down accidentally by a US missile fired from a secret mid-Atlantic base.
Much of the public relations battle has surrounded Al-Batouti's state of mind. He was a veteran nearing retirement in the knowledge that he would never make the grade as a full pilot, but he seemed to have accepted his destiny. Much of his wages went towards medical treatment in the US for his daughter, who suffered from a serious skin condition.
In the immediate aftermath of the crash, Al-Batouti's sister-in-law, Amira Dahi, told reporters from the Al-Ahram newspaper that he had been acting out of character during his final stopover in the US, and that he hadn't been to see his relatives on this visit as he normally did.
Both the NTSB and the FBI have sent investigators to Cairo but have privately complained to US journalists that their Egyptian counterparts, while generally helpful, have been slow to respond to requests to look more closely into Al-Batouti's private life.
Meanwhile, the Egyptian government has hired two law firms to advise it on strategy, along with public relations consultants and independent aviation safety specialists. One of the latter, Kevin Darcy, a crash-investigation consultant for Safety Services International, said he believes the Egyptians were given a raw deal because they were foreigners.
"Imagine that the accident had occurred on a US-flag carrier," Mr Darcy said. "The airline and the pilots union would quite correctly be outraged at the flood of leaked information and the rush to judgment based on incomplete and circumstantial evidence."
Two weeks after the accident, just as the civilian National Transportation Safety Board was on the point of declaring the crash a criminal matter and passing the investigation to the FBI, Cairo stepped in to stop the transfer, flexing all the muscle it could muster.
The head of Egyptian intelligence, Omar Suleiman, flew to Washington to take part in the investigation. He was also there to remind his US counterparts that they depended on his agency to keep track of Middle Eastern terrorist movements.
Even more importantly, Egyptian support has been vital to the US administration's push to secure an Israeli-Arab peace accord before President Clinton leaves office. In late March, Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, came to see Clinton in Washington and discussed the EgyptAir crash and the stalled US attempt to forge an agreement between Israel and Syria. On emerging from the meeting, Mubarak reaffirmed his support and refused to characterise Clinton's diplomatic efforts as a failure. Neither he nor the US president said anything substantive about the EgyptAir crash.
Into the middle of this diplomatic impasse flew Hamdi Hanafi Taha, another EgyptAir pilot, who arrived in Heathrow with a plane-load of passengers in February demanding political asylum, declaring that he wanted "to stop all lies about the disaster", and heaping blame on his airline's management. FBI and NTSB investigators flew in to interview him, but he was reportedly of limited use to them. Taha had his own axe to grind with EgyptAir having clashed over his strict Islamic principles.
The Home Office refused to comment on Taha's status, but an Egyptian embassy spokesman in London said that his appeal for asylum had been turned down and that he would soon be returning to Cairo to face the music. Meanwhile, the crash investigators were told to keep looking. A new salvage operation was launched in March to find more wreckage on the sea-bed off Nantucket island. The jet's second engine was found as well as some of the cockpit controls. But the joint team of US and Egyptian investigators have yet to find any mechanical malfunction.
"Examination of engine data from the digital flight data recorder, and visual inspection of the engines indicate that the engines were operating properly," Jim Hall, the NTSB chairman, told a congressional committee last month. "Based on the evidence we have seen thus far," he added, "we have found no indication of a mechanical or weather-related event that could have caused this crash. We are not yet prepared, however, to state the cause of the crash and we are continuing the investigation with the assistance of the Egyptian government."
His remarks have been interpreted in Washington as a coded complaint about foot-dragging in Washington and Cairo, in the interests of stable bilateral relations. NTSB sources say the same basic facts have remained unchanged. There was no evidence of a fire, explosion or any sort of malfunction at the time the autopilot was turned off. No alarm had sounded in the cockpit before the plane was put into its steep dive. The alarms only went off as the plummeting plane approached the speed of sound, at which point the plane's pilot can be heard on the voice recorder re-entering the cockpit and demanding: "What's happening?"
A few second's later the pilot cries "Pull with me!", and at about the same time the elevator flaps move in opposite directions. An attempt is made to increase the engines' power but after a moment, they are switched off, and the flight recorders stop working.
For the Egyptians, the unusual elevator movement is evidence of a malfunction or sabotage in the plane's tail. For the US team, it show's a pilot and a co-pilot struggling at cross-purposes. If that is the case, a piece of metal called a "torque tube", which normally ensures that the flaps move together, should have been broken in two.
That tube, investigators hope, will finally provide the "smoking gun" for the fate of EgyptAir 990. But an NTSB spokesman on Friday said he could not confirm it had been found. Even if it is, it is hard to imagine it will be enough to convince everyone, especially in the Arab world, that a trusted pilot simply took the controls and pointed a plane full of people towards the ocean.
Julian Borger and Khaled Dawoud report
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Looks like two lying presidents with conflicting stories got in the way of the investigation - neither of them willing to risk letting the truth be discovered. Character counts.
What do you think? Perhaps I am jumping the gun?
Attacks Against America Are Not Over
Col. Stanislav Lunev
Friday, September 14, 2001
Col. Stanislav Lunev is the highest-ranking military spy ever to defect from Russia. He continues as a security consultant to the U.S. government. He filed this report from an undisclosed location in Europe.I was surprised to hear, Thursday, some politicians in Washington making statements that terrorist operations against America are over.
How can they make such claims?
International terrorists are still targeting the U.S. and the American people as never before. Osama bin Laden, Hamas and other well-known and currently unknown terrorist organizations consider America as their number one target.
After such an elaborate and coordinated attack was just conducted against the U.S., isn’t it reasonable to think that the terrorist groups, backed by powerful nations, might a) already have plans for an escalation of such attacks, or b) now, seeing the vulnerability of the U.S., become encouraged and launch additional attacks?
Since I defected to the U.S. from Russia, I have been always somewhat perplexed by the politically correct thinking in Washington and among the U.S. media.
The media are now openly criticizing the President for remaining in Air Force One and not returning immediately to New York or Washington.
The President acted very correctly and very smartly. As I recall, America has a Constitution. The President’s sole real responsibility is to preserve your Constitutional government – not to hold press conferences.
Obviously, the President and his advisors understood that there was a real possibility of a larger threat – perhaps nuclear – and one the media doesn’t want you to know about.
Let me explain. When I defected in the 1990s from Russia’s GRU – its military intelligence - I told the FBI, the CIA, the DIA, anyone that would listen – that the Russians already had elaborate war plans against the U.S.
I suggested that such a war might begin with a diversion, some sort of terrorist attack. With people’s attention focused elsewhere, special troops could storm Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, the White House – to kill American leaders.
I also warned the American government that I believe Russia has already smuggled small nuclear devices into the U.S.
I have no doubt that Russia has been behind many of these terrorist groups, financing and equipping them.
The President acted prudently. He continues to do so, by understanding the new, larger attacks may occur.
He also knows just how weak American intelligence agencies are after the Clinton-Gore administration.
Also, these terrorists are funded and sponsored by countries Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and by other rogue nations (all closely aligned with either Russia or China). These terrorist groups and nations want nothing less than war against Western civilization.
First of all they would like to destroy the U.S., the recognized leader of the civilized world.
On Sept. 11, terrorists used the so-called "cheapest" way for the destruction of symbols of American financial and military power. By doing it this way, the terrorists show just how vulnerable we are. It also allows them to have a place from which they can escalate the terror.
This suicidal attack could have been prevented, but that did not happen.
However, Tuesday's tragedy very clearly demonstrated the depths of terrorist penetration through the American nation - where they are operating, as if they were in their own backyard - and, for example, using American training facilities for the preparation of the attacks against American people.
I am continually amazed how easy the American government makes it for enemies to penetrate American society and institutions. I am also amazed how many American journalists dislike America, and openly work against this country.
From now on, we know for sure that there are hundreds if not thousands of terrorists who are living among us in America.
They are preparing to continue the war against countries, which provide them hospitality, including dozens of so-called "sleepers" or specially trained terrorists who pretend to be U.S. citizens and residents. 24 hours a day, every day, they are waiting for the wake-up call from their organization leaders for a new attack against American people.
The next attack may be more severe.
According to Western intelligence estimations, the most powerful international terrorists organizations already have access to weapons of mass destruction, including chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and materials.
There is no doubt that the leaders of terrorist organizations already have their own combat groups in America. Next time they could use, against the American people, weapons of mass destruction or so-called "expensive" weapons, which could be delivered to the U.S. very soon, if they aren't already deployed inside America.
It's very difficult to understand the logic of terrorists and impossible to predict their next targets.
The war against America declared by international terrorism is REAL, PRESENT and DANGEROUS.
We will win this war if, instead of words about defending America, we will do everything possible, practically, for the protection of our country and lives of the American people. There is no time for talking and promises any more. It's time for ACTION.
Find out what Col. Lunev told the CIA -- NewsMax has just released Col. Lunev's audiotapes "CIA Files: Defector Reveals Russia's Secrets" -- Click Here Now. Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics: Domestic Terrorism
Interesting that you should bring that up. I had just been wondering if there might not be some sort of link between that strange story and what happened Tuesday.
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