I wonder if the prescient FBI agent would have gotten anyone's attention if he had told them that the suicidal murderer intended to crash a planeload of passengers and fuel into the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington.
Posted on 09/28/2002 3:13:13 AM PDT by Sandy
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An FBI agent said in August 2001 that accused Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui might take control of an airplane and crash it into the World Trade Center if he was released from custody, according to a court document made public on Friday.
The document relates communications between FBI headquarters and its office in Minneapolis involving Moussaoui, who was being held in Minnesota in August 2001 on immigration violations after arousing suspicion at a flight school.
The agent said Moussaoui "might take control of an airplane and crash it into the World Trade Center," prosecutors said in the document detailing what has been given to the congressional intelligence committees investigating the attacks.
Moussaoui, who was still in custody on Sept. 11 last year, later became the only person charged in the United States with conspiring in the attacks.
The prosecutors also described an FBI report concerning interviews with Moussaoui in mid-August 2001, in which FBI agents accused him of giving misleading and evasive answers.
The FBI report described how Moussaoui involved his right to a lawyer when confronted with information "that he was known to be an extremist intent on using his past and future aviation training in furtherance of a terrorist goal."
Questioning of Moussaoui then stopped.
Earlier in the questioning, Moussaoui discussed his suspicion of immigration authorities, his desire to fly a large jet aircraft, his reasons for not attending a flight school in Europe, his connections in Saudi Arabia and his recent travel to Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia, according to the FBI report dated Aug. 18, 2001.
When asked about his travel to Pakistan, Moussaoui, a French national of Moroccan descent, became "extremely agitated and he refused to discuss the matter further," according to the FBI report.
It says Moussaoui became angry when agents suggested to him that he did not have an adequate explanation for the large sums of money in his possession.
The FBI report said agents in Minneapolis had assessed Moussaoui as an "Islamic fundamentalist preparing for some future act in furtherance of radical fundamentalist goals" involving an aircraft.
The FBI report was turned over as part of the congressional investigation into whether the FBI and CIA had missed possible clues that could have prevented the hijacked plane attacks.
The 34-year-old Moussaoui has been charged with six counts of conspiracy in the Sept. 11 attacks. Four of them carry the death penalty. His trial is scheduled to begin in January.
He has denied being a part of the hijacking, but admitted to being a member of al Qaeda. The United States blames Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network for the attacks that killed about 3,000 people.
The judge in the Moussaoui case on Friday unsealed the document, which prosecutors filed on Sept. 19. Prosecutors had wanted clarification from the judge on what the FBI and Justice Department could disclose in the public congressional hearings.
As Freud once said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
Maybe this is no more than an authentic watermelon.
A large, fully ripe watermelon promising a sweet, crunchy snack on a hot day.
Until mohammed, who was on the rebound from a failed relationship with a goat, romanced the melon.
Spoiling it, as a food item, for at least half the group of sand goblins in the picnic bound al-queada cell.
I wonder if the prescient FBI agent would have gotten anyone's attention if he had told them that the suicidal murderer intended to crash a planeload of passengers and fuel into the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington.
I've wondered from time to time if he was supposed to follow the attack in NY or D.C. with a crop duster spreading the anthrax. IIRC, the FBI found info about crop dusting on his computer. Such a follow-up would be perfectly in keeping with their enjoyment of targeting rescue crews with a secondary explosion. If that scenario were correct, then the letters were a "plan B" that had to go into effect after he was arrested.
The only problem I see with that scenario is that I'd have expected them to hit both NY and DC, which probably would have required another pilot, and we've not heard of anyone else being preempted.
I was thinking airliner- do you know of any articles which say what Moussaoui had studied or asked to train on in flight school, or how far he got in his studies? Atta homed right in on the correct simulator.
I know of one famous 747. But he wouldn't stand a chance of getting near it. What other reason would there be for choosing a 747... those are used for really long flights, international flights more than flights in the US.
The special court that reviews FISA requests -- a federal panel that since 1999 has included U.S. District Judge Michael Davis of Minnesota -- has approved more than 12,000 Justice Department applications for covert search warrants and wiretaps and rejected only one since the act was passed in 1978, according to government reports.
Mary Schiavo, a former Transportation Department inspector general who handled FISA cases as a Justice Department attorney in the 1980s, said FBI officials in Washington may have had a regional bias in the Moussaoui case: "They probably assumed there's nothing going on in Minnesota."
(snip)
The FBI was alerted to Moussaoui on Aug. 15 by two program managers at the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, who called the bureau's Minneapolis office and spoke to Special Agent Dave Rapp. They were concerned about Moussaoui's odd behavior -- he lacked a pilot's license, and they said he paid nearly $10,000 for a few lessons in a Boeing 747 flight simulator as an "ego thing."
(snip)
Then, on about Sept. 14, an agent phoned a Pan Am official and asked about a computer disk that had been found next to Moussaoui's laptop and which contained a 747 flight manual, several people familiar with the case said. The Pan Am official said it must be "proprietary information" that belonged to the school.
These folks were tightwads, too- why give Moussaoui ten grand to get into a 747 simulator if he was just a loon, as the lib press would like us to believe based on his act? ten grand is a lot of money to these folks for just a joy ride in a simulator; if he was jsut a thug it would be cheaper just to get him an airline ticket and let him scout out some 747 flights to get the feel of the aircraft.
Why a 747? Larger fuel tanks, what would be needed for a hardened target, a very large target, or perhaps just a target further away? Or did they have a totally different sort of idea such as a hijacking of a specific flight for some other purpose? It is a curiousity that Moussaoui had a totally different aircraft in mind than all the other hijackers.
Congressional Investigations...where Intelligence goes to die.
104th floor of the Sears Tower workd for me.
(snip)
Mr. Moussaoui wanted technical classroom training to familiarize himself with airliners. He asked questions about protocols for communicating with flight towers. He wanted to learn fast. He paid by pulling a wad of cash — roughly $6,800 — out of a small satchel. Soon, employees began whispering that he could be a hijacker.
"The cash, the Middle Eastern accent, the fact that he had very little pilot training and wanted a significant amount of training in ground school and on the simulator — all of these things together pointed to the fact that this was a significant concern," Mr. Rosengren said.
(snip)
He was vague about which of the "big airliners" interested him the most, ticking off a list that ranged from a Boeing 747 to an Airbus A-300 and saying that his choice for training would "depend on the cost and which one is easiest to learn." But he was specific in the skills he hoped to master.
"The level I would like to achieve is to be able to takeoff and land, to handle communication with ATC," he wrote, referring to air traffic control, "to be able to successfully navigate from A to B (JFK to Heathrow for example)."
(snip)
The price was $8,300, and Mr. Moussaoui used a Visa credit card to make a $1,000 payment on July 11, followed by a $500 payment the next day. On July 31, Pan Am officials sent him, via e-mail, his schedule: classroom instruction on Aug. 13 and Aug. 14, then 12 hours of training over four days on a 747-400 flight simulator.
(snip)
The next morning, on Aug. 14, the office held its monthly meeting of instructors and administrators, and Mr. Moussaoui's name quickly came up. Instructors wondered why he was so interested in learning the protocol for communicating with the flight tower when "it was very obvious that he did not know how to fly an airplane, especially something as big as that."
(snip) "There was discussion about how much fuel was on board a 747-400 and how much damage that could cause if it hit anything," he added.
One thing I noticed here that didn't sink in originally was that he had NO pilots license. I guess I just assumed that he could fly a little cessna if he was studying at a commercial liner school.
The point that I'm trying to make here is that even the greatest optimist in the world couldn't expect him to learn enough in 2 days in the classroom and 12 hours on the simulator to be able to fly the plane, much less hit any kind of target. Did they expect him to be able to force a real pilot to fly into their target?
Were they getting worried that the authorities were getting too close, so they sent him in as a decoy?
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