Posted on 09/23/2001 8:19:32 AM PDT by enrg
Another of the men named by the FBI as a hijacker in the suicide attacks on Washington and New York has turned up alive and well.
The identities of four of the 19 suspects accused of having carried out the attacks are now in doubt. Saudi Arabian pilot Waleed Al Shehri was one of five men that the FBI said had deliberately crashed American Airlines flight 11 into the World Trade Centre on 11 September.
His photograph was released, and has since appeared in newspapers and on television around the world.
Now he is protesting his innocence from Casablanca, Morocco. He told journalists there that he had nothing to do with the attacks on New York and Washington, and had been in Morocco when they happened. He has contacted both the Saudi and American authorities, according to Saudi press reports.
He acknowledges that he attended flight training school at Dayton Beach in the United States, and is indeed the same Waleed Al Shehri to whom the FBI has been referring. But, he says, he left the United States in September last year, became a pilot with Saudi Arabian airlines and is currently on a further training course in Morocco.
Mistaken identity Abdulaziz Al Omari, another of the Flight 11 hijack suspects, has also been quoted in Arab news reports.
He says he is an engineer with Saudi Telecoms, and that he lost his passport while studying in Denver. Another man with exactly the same name surfaced on the pages of the English-language Arab News.
The second Abdulaziz Al Omari is a pilot for Saudi Arabian Airlines, the report says. Meanwhile, Asharq Al Awsat newspaper, a London-based Arabic daily, says it has interviewed Saeed Alghamdi.
He was listed by the FBI as a hijacker in the United flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. And there are suggestions that another suspect, Khalid Al Midhar, may also be alive.
FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged on Thursday that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers is in doubt.
Golly gee, you're probably right. I suspect that they were a team of little old lady lawn bowlers from New Zealand. (apologies to Ladies of all age, size, nationality and sports preference all over the world).
They really hate us for the US hegemony over lawn bowlers the world over. To say nothing of our deadly and imperialistic croquet skills.
Perhaps they were a radical offshoot of Presbyterian nudists or insane Church of England cucumber sandwich lovers willing to die for mayonaise over butter.
I didn't say they weren't middle eastern. I said that they weren't necessarily Muslim. I should have also said they may have nothing to do with bin Laden. It's a fact that we don't know who they were. So if we don't know who they were, how can anybody legitimately say who put them up to it? Obviously bin Laden has been involved with past terrorist attacks, so I'm not saying that they weren't tied to bin Laden. It's just that something about this doesn't seem to add up...
I understand that bin Laden and his followers hate "Westernized" Muslims; one of their goals is to overthrow "corrupt" Middle Eastern regimes.
They probably figure that airline pilots and people who worked at the World Trade Center were not pure enough to worry about.
Sure, there are excellent reasons to take out bin Laden and his network, so let's do it: but for the excellent reasons, not for the rotten ones.
The absolute worst case is we blame bin Laden, take him out, go back to sleep, and be wrong. What's the message there? First, if you plant a good enough false paper trail, you can mastermind a terrorist attack at minimal risk. The rank and file will die for Allah (or whomever), but the big guys are very anxious not to join them. So we've provided them with massive encouragement to go ahead, by showing them exactly how to get away with it.
And secondly, if you can plant a false trail pointing at your own bad guy, you can get the US to do your dirty work for you. So every pissed-off tyrant on the planet, from Albania to Zimbabwe, now has a task force planning to bomb the US and get the US to bomb their enemies in retaliation.
Call me an alarmist, but this really, really worries me. And I see a lot of people with axes to grind busy spinning disinformation to keep us distracted from what should be our number one priority: identify the bastards, hunt them down, and kill them. But in that order, please.
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