Pic of the Moment: Welcome to the Surveillance State

[Kurovski]

105. intel gathering can be done with proper oversite and accountability.

Bush/Cheney had plenty of intel/info and the attack on 9/11happened anyway.

Lack of info is not the problem in the US.



http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/disinfo/deceptions/bostonglobe091801.html


by Kevin Cullen and Ralph Ranalli
The Boston Globe
September 18, 2001



FBI Director Robert Mueller continued to insist yesterday that federal authorities had no reason to suspect Islamic extremists were training at US flight schools before last week's suicide hijackings, even as more evidence surfaced raising questions about those assertions.

The vice president of a flight school in Oklahoma told The Boston Globe yesterday that three weeks before Tuesday's suicide hijackings, FBI agents interviewed him about a suspected terrorist who had trained at the school.

Dale Davis, the vice president of Airman Flight School in Norman, Okla., said FBI agents showed up at the facility asking questions about Zacarias Moussaoui, who was arrested in Minnesota last month after he tried to get flight simulator lessons on flying a commercial-size jet.

In addition, Davis said that FBI agents visited his flight school two years ago to ask questions about a former student who had been identified by federal authorities as an associate of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born dissident who is the prime suspect in organizing last week's hijackings.

Davis also said that two of the men who hijacked two flights out of Boston's Logan Airport last week, including Mohamed Atta, who investigators believe was the ringleader of the Boston hijackings, had visited the Norman flight school last year before deciding to attend one in Florida.

At a Washington briefing yesterday, Mueller repeated his assertion, first made Friday, that federal authorities had no inkling that terrorists were using US flight schools to acquire the training they needed to take the controls of commercial airline rs as they did on Tuesday.

''There were no warning signs that I'm aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country,'' he said.

But the Globe reported Saturday that federal authorities have known for at least three years that two associates of bin Laden had trained in the United States as airline pilots.

The link between the Al-Qaeda terror group, allegedly led by bin Laden, and US flight schools emerged earlier this year at the trial of four men charged with the 1998 bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. At that trial, during which FBI agents were called as witnesses, an associate of bin Laden testified that he went to a flight school in Texas.

Prosecutors introduced evidence that a second associate of bin Laden, Ihab Ali Nawawi, had trained at Airman Flight School, as did Moussaoui, who is now being held in New York for questioning on suspicion that he is an associate of the hijackers.

In a telephone interview, Davis confirmed that the FBI had suspicions about Moussaoui at least three weeks before last week's disaster.

The questions FBI agents posed to him appeared to be about whether Moussaoui could have been a terrorist, Davis said, including whether the alleged Algerian militant had ever made any ''extreme comments'' about the United States.

When asked why they were inquiring about Moussaoui, Davis said, the agents replied that ''he had done something very bad.''

Davis said FBI agents had visited his school just two years earlier to inquire about Ihab Ali Nawawi, who took flight training there in 1993 and was later charged in connection with the 1998 US Embassy bombings in Africa, which were blamed on bin Laden's group.

Davis also confirmed that Atta and another suspected hijacker, Marwan al-Shehhi, visited Airman Flight School, staying overnight at the school's dormitory in the nearby Sooner Inn, before deciding to train at another facility.

''They did a school visit in July of 2000 but went elsewhere for whatever reason,'' Davis said.

The Los Angeles Times yesterday quoted an unidentified federal official saying that Moussaoui asked only for lessons on ''steering, not landing'' and cheered when he watched a news account of the suicide hijackings at the jail in Minnesota where he h as been held since last month.