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."
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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)."
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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.
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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.