← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · weisbrot
Thread ID: 14114 | Posts: 3 | Started: 2004-06-09
2004-06-09 19:05 | User Profile
[url]http://www.sptimes.com/2004/06/09/Tampabay/TIA_now_verifies_flig.shtml[/url]
TIA now verifies flight of Saudis The government has long denied that two days after the 9/11 attacks, the three were allowed to fly. By JEAN HELLER, Times Staff Writer Published June 9, 2004
[Times art] The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, better known as the 9/11 Commission, sent a list of questions to Tampa International Airport. It appears concerned with the handling of the Tampa flight.
TAMPA - Two days after the Sept. 11 attacks, with most of the nation's air traffic still grounded, a small jet landed at Tampa International Airport, picked up three young Saudi men and left.
The men, one of them thought to be a member of the Saudi royal family, were accompanied by a former FBI agent and a former Tampa police officer on the flight to Lexington, Ky.
The Saudis then took another flight out of the country. The two ex-officers returned to TIA a few hours later on the same plane.
For nearly three years, White House, aviation and law enforcement officials have insisted the flight never took place and have denied published reports and widespread Internet speculation about its purpose.
But now, at the request of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, TIA officials have confirmed that the flight did take place and have supplied details.
The odyssey of the small LearJet 35 is part of a larger controversy over the hasty exodus from the United States in the days immediately after 9/11 of members of the Saudi royal family and relatives of Osama bin Laden.
The terrorism panel, better known as the 9/11 Commission, said in April that it knew of six chartered flights with 142 people aboard, mostly Saudis, that left the United States between Sept. 14 and 24, 2001. But it has said nothing about the Tampa flight.
The commission's general counsel, Daniel Marcus, asked TIA in a letter dated May 25 for any information about "a chartered flight with six people, including a Saudi prince, that flew from Tampa, Florida on or about Sept. 13, 2001." He asked for the information no later than June 8.
TIA officials said they sent their reply on Monday.
The airport used aircraft tracking equipment normally assigned to a noise abatement program to determine the identity of all aircraft entering TIA airspace on Sept. 13, and found four records for the LearJet 35.
The plane first entered the airspace from the south, possibly from the Fort Lauderdale area, sometime after 3 p.m. and landed for the first time at 3:34 p.m. It took off at 4:37 p.m., headed north. It returned to Tampa at 8:23 p.m. and took off again at 8:48 p.m., headed south.
Author Craig Unger, who first disclosed the possibility of a post-9/11 Saudi airlift in his book House of Bush, House of Saud, said in an interview that he believes the jet came to Tampa a second time to drop off two former law enforcement agents from Tampa who accompanied three young Saudis to Lexington for security purposes.
The Saudis asked the Tampa Police Department to escort the flight, but the department handed off the assignment to Dan Grossi, a former member of the force, Unger said. Grossi recruited Manuel Perez, a retired FBI agent, to accompany him. Both described the flight to Unger as somewhat surreal.
"They got the approval somewhere," Perez is quoted as telling Unger. "It must have come from the highest levels of government."
While there is no manifest for those aboard the Lear flight to Kentucky, Unger says the foreign nationals left Lexington for London aboard a Boeing 727. That manifest lists eight Saudis, two Sudan nationals, one Tunisian, one Philippine citizen, one Egyptian and two British subjects.
Of those, three listed residences on Normandy Trace Drive in Tampa, and all of them held Florida drivers' licenses. They are Ahmad Al Hazmi, then 19, Fahad Al Zeid, then 20, and Talal M. Al Mejrad, then 18, all male Saudis.
It is not known which, if any, is a Saudi prince.
Perez, the former FBI agent on the flight, could not be located this week, and Grossi declined to talk about the experience.
"I'm over it," he said in a telephone interview. "The White House, the FAA and the FBI all said the flight didn't happen. Those are three agencies that are way over my head, and that's why I'm done talking about it."
Grossi did say that Unger's account of his participation in the flight is accurate.
The FAA is still not talking about the flights, referring all questions to the FBI, which isn't answering anything, either. Nor is the 9/11 Commission.
Unger's book criticizes the Bush administration for allowing so many Saudis, including the relatives of bin Laden, to leave the country without being questioned thoroughly about the terrorist attacks.
Fifteen of the 19 men who hijacked four airlines on Sept. 11 were Saudi, as is bin Laden.
The 9/11 Commission, which has said the flights out of the United States were handled appropriately by the FBI, appears concerned with the handling of the Tampa flight.
"What information, if any, do you have about the screening by law enforcement personnel - including law enforcement personnel affiliated with the airport facility - of individuals on this flight?" the commission asked TIA.
The TIA Police Department said a check of its records indicated no member of its force screened the Lear's passengers.
Despite evidence that the flight occurred, several new questions have arisen.
Raytheon Aircraft is the only facility at TIA that services general aviation, which includes charter flights. When appropriate, Raytheon collects landing fees from those aircraft for TIA and reports to TIA on the flights.
According to airport records, Raytheon collected landing fees from only two aircraft on Sept. 13, one of them a Lear 35. But according to the record, the registration on the Lear is 505RP, a tail number which, according to the latest federal records, is assigned to a Cessna Citation based in Kalamazoo, Mich., and Oskar Rene Poch.
Poch confirmed Tuesday that he owns a Citation with that tail number and did before the terrorist attacks.
"Somebody must have gotten the registration number wrong in Tampa," he said.
TIA spokeswoman Brenda Geoghagan said it is believed the Lear's Sept. 13 journey began in Fort Lauderdale, possibly at a charter company called Hop-a-Jet Inc. The fact that the four trips in and out of Tampa all carried the flight designation "HPJ32" lends support to that idea.
But an official of Hop-a-Jet who wouldn't identify himself said the company does not own an aircraft with the registration number 505RP. Furthermore, he said, if that tail number is assigned to a Cessna Citation, the company doesn't own any Citations, either.
Most of the aircraft allowed to fly in U.S. airspace on Sept. 13 were empty airliners being ferried from the airports where they made quick landings on Sept. 11. The reopening of the airspace included paid charter flights, but not private, nonrevenue flights.
"Whether such a (LearJet) flight would have been legal hinges on whether somebody paid for it," said FAA spokesman William Shumann. "That's the key."
[Last modified June 9, 2004, 01:00:39]
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
[url]http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/sports/8744243.htm?1c[/url]
Posted on Mon, May. 24, 2004
Books attempt to link Saudi War Emblem owner to Sept. 11 attacks
By MICHAEL O'KEEFE
New York Daily News
NEW YORK - Richard Mulhall left his hotel in Lexington, Ky., early on Sept. 11, 2001, and headed to Keeneland to check out the horses that would be auctioned later that day at the annual September Yearling Sale. But when the Thoroughbred Corp. race manager got to the track, he learned the sale had been postponed. New York and Washington had been attacked.
Mulhall returned to the hotel and watched the smoking wreckage of the World Trade Center on TV with his boss, Prince Ahmed bin Salman, the affable Saudi royal who had emerged as one of horse racing's most colorful and successful owners in just a few years.
"He was in shock," Mulhall says. "He was as surprised as I was. He loved America."
Three years later, two best-selling books are casting Prince Ahmed in a very different light. In "Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11," journalist Gerald Posner says Ahmed may have been an intermediary between al Qaida and Saudi officials who had quietly supported the terrorist group for years. Ahmed, according to Posner's book, may even have known in advance that America would be attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.
The allegations - echoed in Craig Unger's "House of Bush, House of Saud" - have roiled relations between the United States and Saudi Arabia and raise new questions about Prince Ahmed, the urbane, U.S.-educated businessman who owned 2002 Triple Crown contender War Emblem and Point Given, the 2001 Horse of the Year.
Did Ahmed, who died from a heart attack at age 43 just weeks after War Emblem stumbled in the Belmont Stakes, lead a double life? Did this good-humored bear of a man with the booming laugh and stylish suits have ties to the terrorists who murdered 3,000 people at the World Trade Center? Did the owner of The Thoroughbred Corp., one of the most prestigious stables in horse racing, sit on his hands while America's enemies plotted against it?
"It's all bull----," says Mulhall, Ahmed's closest friend in the United States.
Ahmed's brother, Prince Faisal bin Salman, has hired a New Jersey public relations firm to battle the allegations. "We will do what we have to do to clear my brother's name," says Prince Faisal. "This is like accusing Ronald Reagan of being a communist."
Prince Ahmed simply didn't have the constitution for high-level international intrigue, says War Emblem trainer Bob Baffert. "The prince hated politics," Baffert says. "He lived for the horses. He was a fun-loving guy. It was impossible for him to keep secrets. He was really just a big kid."
Posner and Unger are respected journalists, and University of Vermont professor Gregory Gause, a Saudi expert, says anything is possible in the super-secretive world of Saudi royalty. But the charges the authors level against Ahmed, he agrees, simply don't add up. "I'm not saying it's not true," Gause says. "But this was a guy who seemed more interested in race horses than politics. This would really be completely out of character."
Elite American and Pakistani commando units bagged a big one during a March 2002 raid on a two-story house outside Faisalbad, a gritty industrial city in western Pakistan.
Abu Zubaydah was al Qaida's chief of operations, a key member of Osama bin Laden's inner circle who ran the terror group's training camps in Afghanistan and directed the attack on the USS Cole.
American intelligence officials knew Zubaydah, badly wounded in the strike, could provide details about the Sept. 11 attacks and information about future plots, according to Posner. But the terrorist leader refused to even acknowledge his own identity. So Zubaydah was flown to a secret CIA complex in Afghanistan, and provided just enough care to ensure his survival. He was shot up with sodium pentothal - "truth serum" - and deprived of sleep.
In Afghanistan, Posner writes, the CIA set up a room to look exactly like the medical ward of a Saudi Arabian jail and brought in two Arab-Americans to pose as Saudi security officials. The agency, Posner says, figured the Saudis' well-known reputation for rough interrogations and public executions would make Zubaydah eager to return to "American" custody, even if he had to spill his guts.
But when the "Saudi" officers entered the room to question Zubaydah, Posner says, the prisoner began talking freely. Zubaydah said he had important friends in Riyadh, and he ordered his interrogators to call Prince Ahmed, providing phone numbers from memory. "He will tell you what to do," Zubaydah told the agents.
Baffert says the charge that Ahmed knew of the plan to attack America beforehand is ludicrous. "If he knew about Sept. 11 in advance," Baffert says, "then why was he here? There's no way he knew what was going to happen."
He remembers how his former employer's shock turned to anger on Sept. 11, after news reports linked Osama bin Laden to the attacks. "He said, 'That guy is no good,'"
Baffert remembers. ``We kicked him out of our country and now he is angry at our government, too.''
__
Ahmed bought two horses after the Keeneland sale resumed on Sept. 12 and three days later flew from Lexington to London. Unger's book says Ahmed was one of dozens of Saudi VIPs who left the U.S., with White House approval, before the FBI could interview them. Nobody of interest to investigators was allowed to leave, the Sept. 11 commission recently concluded, but Unger remains suspicious. Dozens of Saudi elites left the country before they were interviewed by authorities, Unger says.
"You interview everybody that knows the suspect. That's basic police work," Unger says. "Everybody who watches 'Law and Order' knows that."
Unger says there is a link between Ahmed and Osama bin Laden: the prince's father, Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz (King Fahd's brother), was an active supporter of bin Laden's efforts to drive the Soviets from Afghanistan in the 1980s. Unger also reports that Salman, the governor of Riyadah, may have given the green light to Islamist terrorists, hoping to use the ensuing chaos to advance his own fortunes - maybe even all the way to the throne.
Ahmed's family and friends, however, say Unger's book is tripe. "Osama bin Laden is the arch enemy of the Saudi regime," Prince Faisal says. "He was kicked out of the country 10 years ago. His citizenship was revoked. This does not make sense."
Mulhall, whose daughter - Ahmed's goddaughter - is Imperialism trainer Kristin Mulhall, says Prince Ahmed's loyalties were clear: "He loved this country.
California was his second home. He spent a lot of time here. He did a lot of business here."
Mulhall met the prince in the early 1980s, when Ahmed was a student at the University of California at Irvine. Ahmed later shocked the racing world by spending record sums on horses, but back then he played down his royal bloodline, introducing himself as "Al Salman." He tooled around Southern California in a Honda. His favorite restaurant was Denny's.
"He couldn't read much English," Mulhall says with a laugh. "But at Denny's, he could point at the pictures in the menu."
The prince had dabbled in European racing in the early '80s, but he fell in love with American racing while at college. He met Mulhall when he went to view a stallion named Jumping Hill. He purchased more than a dozen claiming horses before returning to Saudia Arabia in the mid-'80s. "Even back then," Mulhall says, "he talked about winning the Kentucky Derby."
Ahmed, friends say, resisted family pressure to get involved in politics. Instead, he entered the business world, becoming the chairman of Saudi Research and Marketing, which publishes newsweeklies, women's magazines and Asharq al-Awsat, a prominent Arabic newspaper published in London.
The prince returned to the United States in the early 1990s and formed The Thoroughbred Corp. His horses, draped in their distinctive green and white colors, included Spain, racing's all-time female money winner, Grade I winner Sharp Cat and Point Given, a Triple Crown threat who had a bad outing in the 2001 Kentucky Derby but then went on to win the Preakness and the Belmont.
But Ahmed's most famous horse was War Emblem. Ahmed bought the Illinois Derby winner for an astonishing $910,000 just weeks before the Run for the Roses. Critics ripped Ahmed, saying he was trying to buy a Derby win, but none of that diminished the thrill of winning racing's most famous race. The flamboyant Ahmed kissed War Emblem on the nose after the race, then led him to the winner's circle.
War Emblem won the 2002 Preakness but Ahmed was denied the Triple Crown when his horse stumbled out of the gate and finished poorly in the Belmont Stakes. The prince did not attend Belmont that year.
The official reason was that he had to attend to family matters overseas. Some speculated that Ahmed, the first Arab to win the Kentucky Derby, was uncomfortable coming to New York so soon after Sept. 11. Mulhall now says the prince was hospitalized, undergoing surgery for a stomach problem and receiving treatment for an addiction to painkillers.
A few weeks later, on July 22, 2002, Prince Ahmed died in his sleep in Riyadh. Saudi officials said the cause of death was a heart attack.
In just a few years, Ahmed had established an incredible record in horse racing: Thoroughbred Corp. horses had won 291 races and earned more than $30 million between 1995 and 2002. He was known in racing circles as a guy who loved his family, his friends and his horses.
"He gave the appearance of being very happy," says Mill Ridge Farms owner Alice Chandler, whom Ahmed called "Mom." "He was so excited about everything he did. He enjoyed his money. He liked to have fun and he liked to win."
Halfway around the world, American intelligence officials were trying to figure out if the prince was just another high-rolling royal, or an official Saudi link to the world's most vicious terrorist group.
Heart problems ran in Ahmed's family - his older brother, Fahd, also died of a heart attack - and the prince was a heavy smoker who rarely exercised. But his sudden, unexpected death raised questions when two other Saudi royals Posner says Zubaydah linked to Al Qaida also died under mysterious circumstances, one in a crash while driving to Ahmed's funeral, the other reportedly in the desert from thirst.
Posner, however, agrees on at least one point with Prince Ahmed's friends: The horse racing royal was an unlikely name for Zubaydah to throw out to interrogators.
Perhaps, Posner told the New York Daily News, Zubaydah was lying, trying to buy time because he thought torture was imminent. When Zubaydah learned his "Saudi" interrogators were actually Americans, he recanted his entire story.
Or maybe, Posner suggests, Zubaydah was an intermediary between al Qaida and Saudi officials who provided support to the group as long as it kept its terrorist activities outside of the kingdom. "He was so apolitical," Posner says of Prince Ahmed. "But maybe that was just his cover."
Saudi officials say Posner and Unger are irresponsible journalists using half-truths and lies to fan anti-Arab and anti-Saudi hysteria. "These people trying to profit from the 9/11 tragedy are just like the people who sell fake Fire Department shirts near Ground Zero," says Saudi embassy spokesman Nail al-Jubeir. "I guess fiction is more interesting than fact."
Unger says nobody has discredited Posner's reporting or determined if Zubaydah was lying or telling the truth.
"In the book, I don't draw conclusions," Posner agrees. "I don't have the final answers. I'm still trying to chase this down. But I think what this means is we need a more serious investigation of the Saudis. We need a push by the Bush administration to get more answers
2004-06-09 19:39 | User Profile
It should be obvious by now, even to lesser skeptics, that the US Gov is/was complicit, or even worse, in the black psy-operation called 9/11. No doubt in my mind. Remember, these guys lied to us and the world into a War with Iraq.
2004-06-09 20:59 | User Profile
I wonder how come 7 out of the 19 so called "terrorists" are alive and doing well.
I wonder how come the only two passports that survived the planes crashes belonged to the "terrorists".
I have to many "I wonder" to put here, but you get the idea.