The Fourth Mystery

he case of Hesham Mohamed Hadayat, my dear Watson, is one of those detective stories whose solution is obvious to any newspaper reader but which baffles the authorities by its mysterious complexity.

1. He attacked the El Al line at Los Angeles airport and killed two Jews. There are at least 20 airlines using LAX. So if this was a random attack — an enraged response, say, to bad airline food over the years — the odds were at least 20 to 1 against his targeting El Al. If, however, he consciously selected El Al for attack — which seems much more likely — then is reasonable to conclude that he did so because El Al is the Israeli national airline and its officials and passengers were likely to be Israelis and/or Jews.

2. He was heavily armed but had no airline ticket or passenger pick-up that day. In other words, he went to LAX to murder people and not for some legitimate purpose.

3. He was an educated middle-class Egyptian citizen with family connections to people in the national establishment. If the FBI were still allowed to profile, it would have noticed that he fit the profile of the September 11 hijackers with almost embarrassing exactitude..

4. His car bore the bumper-sticker "Read the Koran." Nothing wrong with that, of course. In the absence of other evidence it would suggest merely that he was a pious Muslim. But since ordinarily pious Muslims do not think it right to murder complete strangers, we may legitimately infer that he was one of that extreme "Islamist" faction known as al Qaeda that believes it entirely permissible, even mandatory, to kill Israelis, Jews and their friends and supporters such as Americans.

5. His neighbors and employees testify that he frequently denounced Israel, U.S. support for Israel, and — despite his own relative rise to prosperity as a limousine business owner (the first limousine terrorist? Alas no) — American discrimination against Arabs and Muslims.

6. And the final conclusive piece of evidence that he was a terrorist — he had once been slated for deportation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service but the INS changed his mind and allowed him to stay in the U.S.

What these clues establish, of course, is merely that Hadayat was a terrorist who set out to murder innocent bystanders from political motives. There is less evidence as yet that he was acting on the actual instructions of al Qaeda, or Egyptian Jihad, or any other organized terrorist group.

Some Middle Eastern sources, both Arab and Israeli, claiming counterintelligence sources, suggest that he was a "sleeper" for Egyptian Jihad and that he had twice met Osama bin Laden's deputy in California in 1995 and 1998. According to this theory, he set off to LAX on July 4 because his terrorist godfathers wanted a terrorist outrage on America's national day.

That is perfectly plausible. It is also possible, however, that he was a terrorist sympathizer who quietly seethed with hatred for Israel and the U.S. and sympathy for Osama bin Laden until he decided one day to strike a blow on his own. After all, it required no great ingenuity to guess that an attack on July 4 would be especially unsettling to Americans.

We shall discover which version is correct in due course. In either event Hadayat was a terrorist.

Why then have the authorities, beginning with the FBI but also including the White House, wriggled and maneuvered to avoid reaching this obvious conclusion. That is the only mystery attached to this particular crime.

What seems to be the explanation is that the U.S. government is less afraid of terrorists than of the American public. For the authorities the terrorists are a known factor. Their habits and "M.O.s" can be categorized and studied; their actions predicted; and precautions against their attacks mounted.

But the American public is an unknown beast which the political and media elites long ago decided was racist, sexist and homophobic. Our betters fear us. If not guided and controlled, they believe, we will hit out in dangerous spasms of violence at minorities, immigrants and anyone who looks like "The Other." We cannot be trusted with inconvenient truths. In particular, we have to be prevented from launching discrimination and attacks on Muslims and Arabs in bigoted response to terrorist outrages.

Hence they seek to calm our latent hysteria by keeping the words "Muslim" or "Arab" as far as possible from the word "terrorist" lest we leap illegitimately to the conclusion that Muslims and Arabs in general are terrorists. Hence Hadayat (who is undeniably Muslim) is shrouded in ambiguity by the FBI as a lone wolf figure whose motives are unknown and unknowable

As I pointed out a few weeks ago, these establishment fears are grossly exaggerated. Since September 11 only 51 cases of civil discrimination and 65 cases of criminal threats and violence against Muslims were found to have merit. In a nation of 270 million people, these statistics amount to a very small backlash indeed — one greatly outweighed by the many attempts of ordinary Americans to assure their Muslim neighbors of their goodwill and acceptance.

In fact only one thing is likely to provoke the unfair suspicion and hatred of Muslims and Arabs that gives nightmares to Uncle Sam — namely, the fear of ordinary Americans that their government is not taking commonsense measures to protect them against terrorism because it is afraid of offending groups from which the current crop of terrorists comes.

— John O'Sullivan is editor-at-large of National Review. This first appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times and is reprinted with the author's permission.

Another case like this in the war on terror is the USGov's insistence that Mohammed Atta did NOT meet with Al-Ani, a top Iraqi intelligence officer. The Czech Government insists on this truth of this story. What is up with the FBI?

The FBI has been lying to us for decades. I say we need to scrap it and try again and not with the same old crowd.

Exactly what I've been thinking lately.

The same reasoning -- we cannot be trusted with inconvenient truths -- applies to the government's inability thus far to make a decision about smallpox vacinations for the general public, under the guise that some might die from the vaccine. Never mind that this was a decision routinely faced by parents before smallpox was phased out as a childhood vaccination in the early 70's. The public now can't be trusted to make their own decisions, so the government may decide to endanger an entire population, and enact forced quarantines in the event of an outbreak, as a result. The reasoning seems to be that it's better to control people than to protect them.

And, of course, the welfare of the economy trumps the truth every time.

Well, I also hesitate to apply the word "terrorist" to a run-of-the-mill, Jew-hating fanatical Muslim who one day decides to violently indulge his insanity. To me, "terrorist" implies someone who has a specific political outcome that they are trying to achieve by their actions. I don't think this guy had any expectation that his murder spree would result in the destruction of Israel or the withdrawal of U.S. support for the Jewish state, so I consider him to be no more than a bigoted killer. I don't want to give him more credit than he deserves.

There are two options first he waqs a disgruntled Islamic extermeist who had no real connection to Al Qaeda and just suddenly decides on July 4, 2002 that it was time to die with his family in Egypt. Now his history of working at LAX and being a limo driver does tend to make that option not my first choice.

So if we presume that he was Al Qaeda directed then there are some things we may infer. Firts, he was directed to perform this attack at the time and place specified. Second, any other attacks to be coordinated with this attack somehow got derailed or were not scheduled. The mass raid of a bunch of Saudi citizens on Marco Island, FL may have disrupted a coordinated strike but we shall never know. If he was lone attacker for symbolic purposes then we may presume that he was just a show the flag option for Al Qaeda while other attacks are prepared or we may presume a change of plan to go with lone attacks at some target that will psread disruption in our nation.

We shall see what develops.

Stay well - Stay safe = Stay armed - Yorktown

How does labeling someone a terrorist give him more credit than labeling him a bigoted killer? I don't believe the prospect of success for ones agenda is a factor in deciding whether something is terror or not.

For me, this is another wake up call, that we got off lightly on with only two dead. We need to make sure that people at ticket counters everywhere are armed. The US Gov is not serious about homeland security. Why isn't every fuel tank truck driver armed and trained? Why isn't every truck driver and every citizen who chooses to be armed armed?

If this terrorist had attacked any other airline, he could have easily murdered 20 to 30 people.

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