Hijack suspect was wanted man (U.S. denied Israel's request for extradition)

Hijack suspect Mohamed Atta and his cousin Marwan Ashehri, two of the 19 hijackers named by the U.S. Justice Department, as perpetrators of the New York World Trade Center and Pentagon, Washington suicide attacks, have been variously described as Egyptian, United Arab Emirates and Saudi nationals.

Yet, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly, they were actually Arab-Americans.

Hamburg investigators said two of the terrorists were Mohamed Atta, 33, and Marwan Alshehhi, 23, whose training at a Florida flight school has been the focus of intense FBI probes this week. The German investigators said the two were from the United Arab Emirates.

Atta, 33, was implicated in a series of bus bombings that hit Jerusalem in 1996. He evaded Israeli capture by going to ground among his relatives in America. The U.S. authorities at the time turned down Israel’s request to extradite this U.S. national. He is reportedly the scion of a prominent, affluent family in El-Bireh, Ramallah, one of whose members is a former mayor and most of whom carry American citizenship, as do many elite Palestinian families in Ramallah and its environs.

The latest information coming out of the FBI investigation traces Atta, Ashehri and another of the seven suicide pilots, Ziad Jarrah, from the Lebanese Bekaa Valley, to Hamburg four years ago, where they established an Islamic terrorist cell.

Terrorist experts note that this cell based itself on a much older German-based terrorist group – the one involved in the 1988 Pan Am 103 terrorist disaster over Lockerbie, Scotland, in which 270 died. Atta, who set up an Islamic prayer room in the local university, was known in Hamburg as “Mohamed el-Amir.” Ashihri registered for studies, but never turned up. Jarrah, who flew aboard the plane that crashed near Pittsburgh, went from Germany to Afghanistan 18 months ago and from there to Miami, Florida.

It now appears that some of the seven suicide pilots may have trained not only in private flying schools in Florida, but at U.S. military schools. That is yet another pointer to how well Islamic jihadists were able to secretly place themselves in American society and its institutions.

The most recent penetration dates back 11 years at least, although its roots go back much earlier. In 1990, when the Afghan war ended with the Red Army’s defeat, Osama Bin Laden, who led the international Islamic brigade America raised to fight the Red Army, turned coat. “Afghan Arabs” -- as those volunteers came to be known -- were allowed to settle in the United States with their families. Some stayed loyal to their former commander and enlisted to the Al Qaeda, the militant movement Bin Laden created to fight the second surviving secular superpower, America.

Those Afghan Arabs form the American-based core of Al Qaeda. A second important branch that buried its operatives inside the United States was the fanatical and violent Egyptian Jihad Islami movement, Bin Laden’s foremost ally.

In the latter half of the 1990s, those two groups working hand in glove were joined by a younger generation of Arab Moslem militants from the Middle East, brought up in the tradition of suicide for the cause.

Those three branches, numbering no more than some 2,500 activists in all, form the engine powering contemporary international terrorism. They gained entry into the United States in the last 11 years with the help of moles and agents inside America’s governing institutions, including its intelligence machinery.

Those agencies emphatically deny such penetrations. This is only partly true, according to DEBKA sources. Whereas it is inconceivable that U.S. counterintelligence would directly hire Muslim terrorists, there are known cases of U.S. double agents, who by definition serve two services, knowingly aiding an alien agency, which is close to the Bin Laden network.

Furthermore, U.S. counterintelligence has strived for two decades at least to penetrate the militant Islamic fundamentalist world by planting its own moles and double agents – with very little success. In most cases, those plants remained faithful to their religious tenets, not their American handlers, using their covert American connections to spread the fundamentalist net inside U.S. intelligence itself.

Certainly agree about Secret Service but I'm not familiar enough with U.S. Marshals. USSS seems to have the highest quality personnel.

The FBI certainly needs it mission redefined. Seems that, in theory at least, domestic intel and counter-intel are its most legitimate funtions. They have the personnel and the budget, but they probably have the wrong kind of personnel. Do we dramatically reduce their manpower and confine them to bank robberies, kidnappings and interstate flight?

How would you use them if you were in charge?

Anyone happen to notice that the Muslim first CNN commentator Christine Ammanpour has her ugly mug on the screen again. She was one of those most responsible for the pro muslim bombing of Serbia. When will these scumbags be unmasked for what they are?

They had some very good personnel, but they don't always get assigned to the right cases. There was a guy in counterintel who knew languages and earlier served with the CIA, but they moved him to the HRT. He didn't like the paper pushing, I guess.

The FBI has mishandled the terrorist cells in this country, so that assignment should be removed from their jurisdiction. The Secret Service is more SECURITY oriented, so they are the most logical to take on the task of cleaning the cells out. The Marshals have taken over the fugitive program, so their skills in hunting down all kinds of wanted individuals could be of assistance in cleaning out the cells.The whole CI organization in the FBI is probably in disarray over the Hanssen matter, so until that is cleaned up the organization won't be ready for any reformation back to the days when spies were rooted out and arrested, rather than playing these games that are far too clever, and dangerous, for them to be playing. After Clinton, whose influence was felt greater in the FBI than many of the other agencies, it would take some time to right that ship. It may never get put back on course.

Since these people are members of protected minorities who have more rights than the rest of us it will be very hard to accuse let alone convict them of anything. Remember the nuclear lab spy Lee. It soon became not an issue of whether he was a spy but rather that he was being discriminated against. The left has made it virtually impossible to defend ourselves as long as our enemies are minorities. And this stupidity continues.

Drag a million dollars past Bill Clinton, and you could get him to do about anything. He would turn into Jesse Helms' long lost ideological brother if you paid him enough money. After the Murrah bombing, we had no more attacks on our soil for the remainder of his time in office. Bin Laden confined his atrocities to overseas targets, and Clinton responded by hitting any targets other than bin Laden. This pattern was consistent from 1995 until the barbarian left office. I suspect Clinton made a deal with the camel jockeys to leave the internal US alone until he was out of office, in exchange for not extraditing terrorist suspects to Israel, and not retaliating in a way that could hurt the terrorists. My only question is which one took the money? Both Clinton and bin Laden do almost everything for money, so it is a question whether Clinton paid the bin Laden, or if bin Laden paid Clinton.

"With millions of illegals walking across our border each year in addition to the H1B Visa participants who hide out and are never returned, just about anyone could be living here, including a disguised Bin Laden."

I never even thought of that. Wouldn't that be something? If he were here?

"It is past time for all of us to immeadiately STOP referring to anyone as a "***-American" We NEED to start calling each and every one of us simply "Americans" NO MORE HYPENATED AMERICANS EVER!!!"

So if we simply called these guys Americans instead of Arab-Americans they would have loved this country and it's people and wouldn't have carried out the attacks? Unfortunately it's not that simple, these people hate us, and there's not much we can do about it.

I think it is clear to all now that we were on the wrong side of that war.

"Anyone happen to notice that the Muslim first CNN commentator Christine Ammanpour has her ugly mug on the screen again. She was one of those most responsible for the pro muslim bombing of Serbia. When will these scumbags be unmasked for what they are?"

There's a lot of bashing of American policy in this thread concerning the effect of Clinton on our present situation. Remember that it was under Reagan that the CIA trained and financed bin Laden and his followers in order for them to defeat the Russians because at that time we feared communism more than anything else.

That said, it's not about how we got here. It's about what we do now.

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