I was just curious. The officer had no right to do that though, did he?"
No, the officer had no reason nor right to do that.
Now, Mr. "Joe Hadenuf" would you please either be realistic, or crawl back in your hole
I wonder if all the thousands of dead from the WTC and all the hundreds of others on the other aircraft, would agree with you, if they could only speak.
Well now, it looks like maybe the officer did have, or possibly *should have* had reason to detain this individual!
Source: Hijacker Detained December 13, 2001 By JOHN CREWDSON, Special To The Courant DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- More than seven months before the Sept. 11 hijackings, authorities in the United Arab Emirates detained and questioned one of the key hijackers at the request of the U.S. government before allowing him to continue his journey from Afghanistan to Florida, according to a United Arab Emirates official.
The source, who spoke on condition that neither he nor his agency be identified, said Ziad Samir Jarrah, who the FBI believes piloted the United Airlines 757 that crashed in rural Pennsylvania, arrived at the Dubai International Airport from Pakistan on Jan. 30 of this year.
Jarrah, who with Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi is considered one of the hijacking plot's three main instigators, was detained, the source said, because his name previously had been placed on an Emerati "watch list" of terrorist suspects at the request of the United States.
"The Americans told us that he was a supporter of terrorist organizations, that he had connections with terrorist organizations," the source said. "His name was given to us as someone to check. The U.S. said he should be questioned."
During questioning by Emeratis, Jarrah, 26, divulged that he had spent the previous "two months and five days" in Pakistan and Afghanistan - the only known acknowledgment of an Afghan visit by any of the hijackers - and that he was returning to Florida, where he had been living and taking flying lessons for more than six months.
"He had a visa to the U.S., so he was allowed to proceed," the source said. The following day, Jan. 31, Jarrah boarded a KLM flight for Amsterdam, where he changed planes for Hamburg. "Where he went from there, we don't know," the source said.
Asked which U.S. agency had requested that Jarrah's name be placed on the Emerati watch list as a terrorist suspect and which agency asked that he be detained and questioned, Katherine Van de Vate, a spokeswoman for the American Embassy in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, responded with what she called "a carefully considered no comment."
After Sept. 11, some American Embassy officials were told by people in the United Arab Emirates government that Jarrah had been detained at the airport, according to Western diplomatic sources.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation does not maintain an office in the U.S. Embassy in Abu Dhabi, and a federal law-enforcement official in Washington said the FBI had never been made aware before Sept. 11 that another U.S. agency believed Jarrah was linked to terrorist organizations or that he had visited Afghanistan, then the base of the al Qaeda terrorist organization that U.S. investigators say organized and financed the hijackings.
"It's news to us," the official said, "with regard to this individual being on any watch list whatsoever."
The only hijackers to have come to the FBI's attention before Sept. 11, according to a well-placed source, were Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, whom the Central Intelligence Agency learned had met in Malaysia with two al Qaeda operatives later involved in the suicide bombing of the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen.
The FBI began looking for Almihdhar and Alhazmi less than three weeks before the hijackings. It never found them, but the source emphasized that the bureau had been given only hotel addresses in New York and Los Angeles as leads, and had no clue the two men were participants in a suicide hijacking plot or any other terrorist activity. Almihdhar and Alhazmi helped hijack American Flight 77, which hit the Pentagon, killing 189 people.
Even if they had been found, Almihdhar and Alhazmi might never have led the FBI to the principal Sept. 11 plotters because they spent most of their 21-month U.S. residence in and around San Diego, far from Florida.
John Crewdson is a Chicago Tribune reporter.