Four years ago today
Posted: Sun Sep 11, 2005 8:39 am
Our world turned upside down - - - another day that will live in infamy.
9/11/01 Never Forget!!!!
9/11/01 Never Forget!!!!
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Four years ago today
Page 1 of 1
Posted: Sun Sep 11, 2005 8:47 am
Never Forget
Posted: Sun Sep 11, 2005 9:35 am
9/11 was our wake up call.
America has always taken the stand that no one would dare attack this great nation for fear of retaliation. It's amazing that we had become so complacent, that a group of radical muslum extremist could inflict such a wound, on the body of our great nation. This wound, like Pearl Harbor will never completely heal since it happened on our soil. Generations to come will experience the effects of this haneous act and lets pray that they never forget why and how it happened.
WE MUST NEVER FORGET!!!
Heavenly Father, bless those who lost their lives in the 9/11 tragedy, but I pray that You comfort those, who lost someone in that tragedy, especially today on it's anniversary. They will all carry the hurt and loss in their hearts forever. I also pray, Father, that you bless and protect all of us from harm. And lastly, Father, I pray that you change the hearts and thoughts of the terrorists themselves.
In Christs' name we pray,
Amen
Mike
America has always taken the stand that no one would dare attack this great nation for fear of retaliation. It's amazing that we had become so complacent, that a group of radical muslum extremist could inflict such a wound, on the body of our great nation. This wound, like Pearl Harbor will never completely heal since it happened on our soil. Generations to come will experience the effects of this haneous act and lets pray that they never forget why and how it happened.
WE MUST NEVER FORGET!!!
Heavenly Father, bless those who lost their lives in the 9/11 tragedy, but I pray that You comfort those, who lost someone in that tragedy, especially today on it's anniversary. They will all carry the hurt and loss in their hearts forever. I also pray, Father, that you bless and protect all of us from harm. And lastly, Father, I pray that you change the hearts and thoughts of the terrorists themselves.
In Christs' name we pray,
Amen
Mike
Posted: Sun Sep 11, 2005 12:21 pm
Amen.
Posted: Sun Sep 11, 2005 1:49 pm
Amen
Another reason to stay sharp out there
Posted: Mon Sep 12, 2005 11:02 am
...and to support armed pilots:
"Annie Jacobsen: Another 9-11 could easily happen
Author spent a year investigating what might have been a terrorist 'dry run'
06:38 AM CDT on Sunday, September 11, 2005
On June 29, 2004, I flew on Northwest Airlines Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles with my husband, Kevin, and our young son. Also on our flight were 14 Middle Eastern men who behaved in ways that made me believe our flight could be hijacked. My account of that terrifying ordeal caused a national sensation when it was published on WomensWallStreet.com a year ago, sparking an intense debate about airline safety and whether Islamic terrorists were probing commercial flights.On June 29, 2004, I flew on Northwest Airlines Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles with my husband, Kevin, and our young son. Also on our flight were 14 Middle Eastern men who behaved in ways that made me believe our flight could be hijacked. My account of that terrifying ordeal caused a national sensation when it was published on WomensWallStreet.com a year ago, sparking an intense debate about airline safety and whether or not Islamic terrorists were probing commercial flights.
After the article ran, hundreds of airline personnel contacted me to say they had witnessed similar events. Gary Boettcher, an American Airlines captain and president of the 22,000-member Coalition of Airline Pilots Associations, said that what happened on Flight 327 “is not a singular nor isolated experience. The terrorists are probing us all the time.�
Mark Bogosian, another American Airlines pilot, wrote: “The incident you wrote about and incidents like it occur more than you like to think. It is a 'dirty little secret' that all of us, as crew members, have known about for quite some time.�
Ordinary citizens also wrote me about their experiences with bizarre behavior by Middle Eastern men during commercial flights. Some were frustrated because they'd written to the Department of Homeland Security and heard nothing in reply; other citizens spit tacks.
To many, I represented the quintessential racist. I was a paranoid xenophobe. People's reaction to the story went far beyond the story itself. It became a measure of how people have coped with their feelings, particularly about Muslims and terrorism after 9-11, feelings they couldn't otherwise express.
When the men from Flight 327 were identified as the backup band for a Syrian singer, the plot thickened for some time, and then it faded from the public's attention. But the story never faded from my radar, and, apparently, it never faded from our government's, either. Eight months after Flight 327 landed, four federal agents from Homeland Security's Office of the Inspector General came knocking at my door.
The story kept my interest because what I experienced during that flight and what I've learned in the ensuing year make me question whether the United States can realistically uphold the civil liberties of every individual, including non-citizens, and still protect us from terrorist threats. In theory, yes, but in practice, it is not being done.
The tangled tale of Flight 327 illustrates the sad state of airline security. At every turn of the investigation, the federal agencies involved have proved inept. Most alarming, they've been willing to lie about it. We are not as safe as the airlines and the government want us to believe. Four years after Islamic terrorists turned jetliners into missiles and killed 3,000 people, I am convinced that 9-11 could easily happen again.
When Flight 327 landed at Los Angeles International Airport last summer, representatives from the FBI, the Los Angeles Police Department, the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the Federal Air Marshals Service met the plane. But one critical arm of the federal government was missing: agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — the law-enforcement arm of Immigration and Naturalization Service created after 9-11 for exactly this kind of event.
The presence of ICE is imperative when dealing with potential terror suspects because the agency examines travel documents and checks for expired visas and doctored passports. ICE violated its own protocol by failing to show up.
My husband and I were interviewed extensively by an agent with the Federal Air Marshals Service. We provided detailed statements about what we'd witnessed. Most alarming was the bizarre behavior by the Middle Eastern men in and around the aircraft lavatories. In an overtly provocative move, seven men stood up at once — after the plane had been cleared for landing — and used the bathroom consecutively.
Later, I would learn that authorities were, at that time, on the lookout for terrorists doing “dry runs.� Both the FBI and the Transportation Security Administration knew terrorists were making bids to assemble explosives in aircraft bathrooms. The FBI had identified bathrooms as a place where suspicious incidents had already occurred, and the TSA had warned airlines to watch out for this kind of behavior.
Immediately after the flight, there was no mention of the incident in the media. I started making inquiries. I was surprised to receive an unsolicited phone call from a federal agent, Dave Adams, media spokesman for the Federal Air Marshals Service. Mr. Adams told me that he understood I was working on a story about Flight 327 and wanted to assure me that there was no story. The Middle Eastern men were Syrian musicians hired to play at a desert casino, he said. They had been questioned, individually and at length, and let go.
“The men were scrubbed,� Mr. Adams insisted, then suggested that I “let it go.�
I did not take his advice. Something happened on that flight. I wrote about it for WomensWallStreet.com and detailed what I'd seen. I ended the piece with some questions: Were the men really just musicians? If 19 terrorists can learn to fly airplanes into buildings, couldn't 14 terrorists learn to play instruments? Soon, people all across the country would be asking the same thing.
Immediately after my article appeared, I received thousands of supportive e-mails. I also began to hear from federal air marshals. In making a public issue of Flight 327, I'd uncovered a dangerous fact kept hidden by upper management of the Federal Air Marshals Service: Probes had been occurring on flights ever since 9-11. Knowledge of these probes was being kept from the public, from other federal agencies and from congressional oversight committees. My reporting opened an inquiry by the House Judiciary Committee.
I made appearances on MSNBC and CNN and discussed the incident on radio shows. The federal agencies involved continued to insist that nothing happened on Flight 327. But the public's interest was piqued, and other publications began writing about probes. And other passengers came forward to corroborate my version of events.
Desperately trying to kill the story, representatives of the air marshals agency appeared on CNN's NewsNight With Aaron Brown and declared they'd trailed the Syrians to the casino. One year later, in a stunning admission of guilt, the Federal Air Marshals Service admitted on the record that its agents had done no such thing. No one followed the musicians anywhere.
Then we saw a national media search for the mysterious Syrian band. A writer for National Review Online finally identified the group as the backup band for Nour Mehana (known as “the Syrian Wayne Newton,� he is also famous for a song that glorifies Palestinian suicide bombers). With the band identified, ABC's Good Morning America tried contacting Nour Mehana, offering him and his band a chance to play live on national television. It They never heard back.
Two of Mr. Mehana's promoters told me that the singer charges $32,000 a show. I traveled to the San Diego casino where the band played. When I asked the theater manager about the show, two security guards told me to leave the premises immediately. Instead, I located an employee who saw the band perform before a crowd she numbered at 400 (another employee gave a smaller estimate), with tickets to the show costing $24 to $30.
If those numbers were correct, the casino would have lost over $20,000 on the event. What was the cost-effectiveness of flying 14 men in from Syria for a money-losing event? Moreover, why fly Syrians in at all when, as I would discover, there are no shortage of musicians in California who play his style of music? I was asking these questions when two guards interrupted and escorted me to my car.
It turns out that Mr. Mehana and his “band� worked with five different promoters in the summer of 2004. Five promoters — none of whom had stories about the band, its members or their whereabouts that matched up.
Federal agencies continued to stonewall my access to information. Congress continued its work, making some of what it found public but keeping most of it quiet. Meanwhile, I continued writing about aspects of airline security: Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta's safety-defying but politically correct policies, the utter lack of flight attendant training in dealing with terrorist threats, the hurdles pilots must face to become licensed to carry guns, a bogus air marshal dress code, an ineffective “no-fly� list. The picture that emerges is of an airline industry desperate for real and effective leadership in the face of a potentially catastrophic threat.
Finally, I located a photo of Mr. Mehana and his band performing at a northern California club, just two weeks before Flight 327. The men in the photograph were not the men on the plane. Two other passengers from Flight 327 looked at the photo and reached the same conclusion.
So who were the men on Flight 327? I have a theory, one supported by federal air marshals who believe they have witnessed in-flight probes.
A probe is about testing the system. A probe is about gathering intelligence to use for a future terrorist attack. In my judgment, Flight 327 was, at the very least, a probe. Operatives from a terrorist cell are often hidden within a larger group. The men on Flight 327, I believe, were not all musicians. Some may have been, but others were treating the airplane like a Trojan horse. And the federal government allowed them to get away with it.
As the Department of Homeland Security agents who interviewed me indicated, its Office of Inspector General has investigated the incident from the beginning, interviewing the flight crew, federal air marshals and passengers. Once the investigation is complete, two reports will be generated: a classified one for DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff and one for the public. The public deserves to be told what really happened on Flight 327. The public deserves to know the number of probes that have been reported on airplanes, and the public deserves to know why federal agents have been covering them up. If all the public gets is a sanitized version of how Flight 327 was mishandled, it may be a sad indicator of business as usual.
The House Judiciary Committee has been investigating Flight 327 for a year as well. But to date, committee spokesman Jeff Lungren can neither confirm nor deny whether there will be any public hearings on the matter.
And this is why I fear 9-11 could happen again. Federal agencies and commercial airlines are more concerned about protecting their images than protecting our skies. The House Judiciary Committee and the Office of the Inspector General are willing to look into the incident aboard Flight 327, but thus far, they've been unwilling to share what they've learned. And the Department of Transportation and civil liberties groups are more concerned with political correctness than with safety.
Ordinary people who fly, who work for the airlines, who serve in government and who see what is happening — and what is being covered up — deserve the full truth so we can know what we're really dealing with in the skies over America and can use that knowledge to protect ourselves. But they haven't created a loud-enough voice to demand an end to the official charade. Not yet, anyway.
Annie Jacobsen is a Los Angeles-based journalist and writer for WomensWallStreet.com. This essay is adapted from her new book “Terror in the Skies: Why 9/11 Could Happen Again� (Spence). You may e-mail her at annie@womenswallstreet.com. "
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent ... a86c4.html
"Annie Jacobsen: Another 9-11 could easily happen
Author spent a year investigating what might have been a terrorist 'dry run'
06:38 AM CDT on Sunday, September 11, 2005
On June 29, 2004, I flew on Northwest Airlines Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles with my husband, Kevin, and our young son. Also on our flight were 14 Middle Eastern men who behaved in ways that made me believe our flight could be hijacked. My account of that terrifying ordeal caused a national sensation when it was published on WomensWallStreet.com a year ago, sparking an intense debate about airline safety and whether Islamic terrorists were probing commercial flights.On June 29, 2004, I flew on Northwest Airlines Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles with my husband, Kevin, and our young son. Also on our flight were 14 Middle Eastern men who behaved in ways that made me believe our flight could be hijacked. My account of that terrifying ordeal caused a national sensation when it was published on WomensWallStreet.com a year ago, sparking an intense debate about airline safety and whether or not Islamic terrorists were probing commercial flights.
After the article ran, hundreds of airline personnel contacted me to say they had witnessed similar events. Gary Boettcher, an American Airlines captain and president of the 22,000-member Coalition of Airline Pilots Associations, said that what happened on Flight 327 “is not a singular nor isolated experience. The terrorists are probing us all the time.�
Mark Bogosian, another American Airlines pilot, wrote: “The incident you wrote about and incidents like it occur more than you like to think. It is a 'dirty little secret' that all of us, as crew members, have known about for quite some time.�
Ordinary citizens also wrote me about their experiences with bizarre behavior by Middle Eastern men during commercial flights. Some were frustrated because they'd written to the Department of Homeland Security and heard nothing in reply; other citizens spit tacks.
To many, I represented the quintessential racist. I was a paranoid xenophobe. People's reaction to the story went far beyond the story itself. It became a measure of how people have coped with their feelings, particularly about Muslims and terrorism after 9-11, feelings they couldn't otherwise express.
When the men from Flight 327 were identified as the backup band for a Syrian singer, the plot thickened for some time, and then it faded from the public's attention. But the story never faded from my radar, and, apparently, it never faded from our government's, either. Eight months after Flight 327 landed, four federal agents from Homeland Security's Office of the Inspector General came knocking at my door.
The story kept my interest because what I experienced during that flight and what I've learned in the ensuing year make me question whether the United States can realistically uphold the civil liberties of every individual, including non-citizens, and still protect us from terrorist threats. In theory, yes, but in practice, it is not being done.
The tangled tale of Flight 327 illustrates the sad state of airline security. At every turn of the investigation, the federal agencies involved have proved inept. Most alarming, they've been willing to lie about it. We are not as safe as the airlines and the government want us to believe. Four years after Islamic terrorists turned jetliners into missiles and killed 3,000 people, I am convinced that 9-11 could easily happen again.
When Flight 327 landed at Los Angeles International Airport last summer, representatives from the FBI, the Los Angeles Police Department, the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the Federal Air Marshals Service met the plane. But one critical arm of the federal government was missing: agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — the law-enforcement arm of Immigration and Naturalization Service created after 9-11 for exactly this kind of event.
The presence of ICE is imperative when dealing with potential terror suspects because the agency examines travel documents and checks for expired visas and doctored passports. ICE violated its own protocol by failing to show up.
My husband and I were interviewed extensively by an agent with the Federal Air Marshals Service. We provided detailed statements about what we'd witnessed. Most alarming was the bizarre behavior by the Middle Eastern men in and around the aircraft lavatories. In an overtly provocative move, seven men stood up at once — after the plane had been cleared for landing — and used the bathroom consecutively.
Later, I would learn that authorities were, at that time, on the lookout for terrorists doing “dry runs.� Both the FBI and the Transportation Security Administration knew terrorists were making bids to assemble explosives in aircraft bathrooms. The FBI had identified bathrooms as a place where suspicious incidents had already occurred, and the TSA had warned airlines to watch out for this kind of behavior.
Immediately after the flight, there was no mention of the incident in the media. I started making inquiries. I was surprised to receive an unsolicited phone call from a federal agent, Dave Adams, media spokesman for the Federal Air Marshals Service. Mr. Adams told me that he understood I was working on a story about Flight 327 and wanted to assure me that there was no story. The Middle Eastern men were Syrian musicians hired to play at a desert casino, he said. They had been questioned, individually and at length, and let go.
“The men were scrubbed,� Mr. Adams insisted, then suggested that I “let it go.�
I did not take his advice. Something happened on that flight. I wrote about it for WomensWallStreet.com and detailed what I'd seen. I ended the piece with some questions: Were the men really just musicians? If 19 terrorists can learn to fly airplanes into buildings, couldn't 14 terrorists learn to play instruments? Soon, people all across the country would be asking the same thing.
Immediately after my article appeared, I received thousands of supportive e-mails. I also began to hear from federal air marshals. In making a public issue of Flight 327, I'd uncovered a dangerous fact kept hidden by upper management of the Federal Air Marshals Service: Probes had been occurring on flights ever since 9-11. Knowledge of these probes was being kept from the public, from other federal agencies and from congressional oversight committees. My reporting opened an inquiry by the House Judiciary Committee.
I made appearances on MSNBC and CNN and discussed the incident on radio shows. The federal agencies involved continued to insist that nothing happened on Flight 327. But the public's interest was piqued, and other publications began writing about probes. And other passengers came forward to corroborate my version of events.
Desperately trying to kill the story, representatives of the air marshals agency appeared on CNN's NewsNight With Aaron Brown and declared they'd trailed the Syrians to the casino. One year later, in a stunning admission of guilt, the Federal Air Marshals Service admitted on the record that its agents had done no such thing. No one followed the musicians anywhere.
Then we saw a national media search for the mysterious Syrian band. A writer for National Review Online finally identified the group as the backup band for Nour Mehana (known as “the Syrian Wayne Newton,� he is also famous for a song that glorifies Palestinian suicide bombers). With the band identified, ABC's Good Morning America tried contacting Nour Mehana, offering him and his band a chance to play live on national television. It They never heard back.
Two of Mr. Mehana's promoters told me that the singer charges $32,000 a show. I traveled to the San Diego casino where the band played. When I asked the theater manager about the show, two security guards told me to leave the premises immediately. Instead, I located an employee who saw the band perform before a crowd she numbered at 400 (another employee gave a smaller estimate), with tickets to the show costing $24 to $30.
If those numbers were correct, the casino would have lost over $20,000 on the event. What was the cost-effectiveness of flying 14 men in from Syria for a money-losing event? Moreover, why fly Syrians in at all when, as I would discover, there are no shortage of musicians in California who play his style of music? I was asking these questions when two guards interrupted and escorted me to my car.
It turns out that Mr. Mehana and his “band� worked with five different promoters in the summer of 2004. Five promoters — none of whom had stories about the band, its members or their whereabouts that matched up.
Federal agencies continued to stonewall my access to information. Congress continued its work, making some of what it found public but keeping most of it quiet. Meanwhile, I continued writing about aspects of airline security: Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta's safety-defying but politically correct policies, the utter lack of flight attendant training in dealing with terrorist threats, the hurdles pilots must face to become licensed to carry guns, a bogus air marshal dress code, an ineffective “no-fly� list. The picture that emerges is of an airline industry desperate for real and effective leadership in the face of a potentially catastrophic threat.
Finally, I located a photo of Mr. Mehana and his band performing at a northern California club, just two weeks before Flight 327. The men in the photograph were not the men on the plane. Two other passengers from Flight 327 looked at the photo and reached the same conclusion.
So who were the men on Flight 327? I have a theory, one supported by federal air marshals who believe they have witnessed in-flight probes.
A probe is about testing the system. A probe is about gathering intelligence to use for a future terrorist attack. In my judgment, Flight 327 was, at the very least, a probe. Operatives from a terrorist cell are often hidden within a larger group. The men on Flight 327, I believe, were not all musicians. Some may have been, but others were treating the airplane like a Trojan horse. And the federal government allowed them to get away with it.
As the Department of Homeland Security agents who interviewed me indicated, its Office of Inspector General has investigated the incident from the beginning, interviewing the flight crew, federal air marshals and passengers. Once the investigation is complete, two reports will be generated: a classified one for DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff and one for the public. The public deserves to be told what really happened on Flight 327. The public deserves to know the number of probes that have been reported on airplanes, and the public deserves to know why federal agents have been covering them up. If all the public gets is a sanitized version of how Flight 327 was mishandled, it may be a sad indicator of business as usual.
The House Judiciary Committee has been investigating Flight 327 for a year as well. But to date, committee spokesman Jeff Lungren can neither confirm nor deny whether there will be any public hearings on the matter.
And this is why I fear 9-11 could happen again. Federal agencies and commercial airlines are more concerned about protecting their images than protecting our skies. The House Judiciary Committee and the Office of the Inspector General are willing to look into the incident aboard Flight 327, but thus far, they've been unwilling to share what they've learned. And the Department of Transportation and civil liberties groups are more concerned with political correctness than with safety.
Ordinary people who fly, who work for the airlines, who serve in government and who see what is happening — and what is being covered up — deserve the full truth so we can know what we're really dealing with in the skies over America and can use that knowledge to protect ourselves. But they haven't created a loud-enough voice to demand an end to the official charade. Not yet, anyway.
Annie Jacobsen is a Los Angeles-based journalist and writer for WomensWallStreet.com. This essay is adapted from her new book “Terror in the Skies: Why 9/11 Could Happen Again� (Spence). You may e-mail her at annie@womenswallstreet.com. "
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent ... a86c4.html