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Fintan
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Joined: 18 Jan 2006
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 Posted: Thu Dec 21, 2006 3:57 pm Post subject: Bag Was 9/11 Rosetta Stone |
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| Quote: | An untold story of 9/11
by Michael Dorman Saturday, December 16th, 2006
Former federal terrorism investigators say a piece of luggage hastily checked in at the Portland, Maine, airport by a World Trade Center hijacker on the morning of Sept. 11 provided the Rosetta stone enabling FBI agents to swiftly unravel the mystery of who carried out the suicide attacks and what motivated them.
A mix-up in Boston prevented the luggage from connecting with the plane that hijackers crashed into the north tower of the trade center. Seized by FBI agents at Boston’s Logan Airport, investigators said, it contained Arab-language papers revealing the identities of all 19 hijackers involved in the four hijackings, as well as information on their plans, backgrounds and motives.
The luggage saga represents what the former federal authorities describe as an untold story of 9/11 — offering explanations for questions long unanswered about the investigation of the tragedy, such as how authorities were able to identify the hijackers so soon after the attacks.
The former federal investigators said information found in the bag was passed on to Justice Department lawyers, who prosecuted Zacarias Moussaoui on charges growing out of the suicide attacks. A Justice Department spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse, said: “Under the judge’s order, we’re not going to comment on anything relating to the case.”
Mohamed Atta, a chief coordinator of the hijackings, and conspirator Abdulaziz AlAlomari spent the night before the attacks in room 232 of a Comfort Inn south of Portland. They checked out at 5:33 a.m. on Sept. 11. Portland Police Chief Michael Chitwood said they drove in a rented blue Nissan Altima — eventually seized by the FBI — to Portland International Jetport.
Records show the Altima was parked in an airport lot around 5:45, allowing Atta and Alomari only a few minutes to catch a 6 a.m. commuter flight to Boston’s Logan Airport. Although they planned to hijack an American Airlines jet that would take off from Logan later that morning, investigators said they might have gone through Portland in the belief that airport security would be less stringent there.
Once the commuter flight landed at Logan, Atta and Alomari boarded American Airlines Flight 11 bound for Los Angeles — which they would crash into the trade center.
‘A number of telling items’
A staff report to the 9/11 Commission later concluded: “The Portland detour almost prevented Atta and Alomari from making Flight 11 out of Boston. In fact, the luggage they checked in Portland failed to make it onto the plane. Seized after the Sept. 11 crashes, Atta and Alomari’s luggage turned out to contain a number of telling items, including correspondence from the university Atta attended in Egypt; Alomari’s international driver’s license and passport; a videocassette for a Boeing 757 flight simulator; and folding knife and pepper spray, presumably extra weapons the conspirators decided they didn’t need.”
The report did not say how many bags were checked in Portland, nor did it differentiate them by their contents. But three commission staff members who helped prepare the report said there were two pieces. Two staff members, John Raidt and R. William Johnstone, said it was clear both bags belonged to Atta. “He plopped both of them down on the luggage rack,” Raidt said. “Alomari just stood by.”
An affidavit filed by FBI agent James K. Lechner in federal district court in Portland reported that two bags checked by Atta were recovered at Logan Airport Sept. 11. They were never placed on Flight 11 before it departed from Boston, Lechner said, but there was no explanation of why they had not been loaded. Lechner described them as “a green Travel Gear bag” and “a black Travelpro bag.”
A former FBI agent and a former federal prosecutor who helped direct the New England investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks told Newsday that one bag found in Boston contained far more than what the commission report cited, including the names of the hijackers, their assignments and their al-Qaida connections.
“It had all these Arab-language papers that amounted to the Rosetta stone of the investigation,” former FBI agent Warren Flagg said. The former federal prosecutor, who declined to be identified publicly, supported Flagg’s account.
Hijacker IDs
“How do you think the government was able to identify all 19 hijackers almost immediately after the attacks?” Flagg asked. “They were identified through those papers in the luggage. And that’s how it was known so soon that al-Qaida was behind the hijackings.
The former prosecutor agreed that papers from the luggage helped identify suspects. “I can’t speak on the record about that evidence,” he said. “This evidence was gathered under grand jury subpoenas and I can’t discuss grand jury matters.”
The papers discovered in the hijackers’ luggage were bolstered by other evidence gathered against the conspirators by the FBI, the former federal prosecutor said. “These guys left behind a paper trail,” he said. “They had bank accounts. They rented cars. They had to show what they were doing in the United States. We investigated 9/11 from day one on the assumption that there might be a criminal prosecution.”
But when it seemed clear that all 19 hijackers had been killed in the attacks, jurisdiction transferred from various federal prosecutors’ offices around the country to Justice Department headquarters in Washington.
Flagg, an FBI agent for 22 years, worked on terrorism cases, among others. Now president of Flaggman Inc., a Manhattan-based investigative firm, he was retired by Sept. 11 but stayed in close touch with former FBI colleagues and prosecutors.
He said he first heard the account of the luggage’s significance in the investigation on Sept. 28, 2001, after attending the funeral for John O’Neill, a former top FBI antiterrorism official who died helping others to safety Sept. 11 in his new job as director of security at the World Trade Center.
After the funeral, he said, he fell into conversation with a young FBI agent he had helped train in the New York office. The agent, working on the Sept. 11 investigation, told him about the luggage. The agent said the New England prosecutor helping direct the investigation — whom Flagg also knew — was familiar with the evidence. Flagg said he telephoned the prosecutor that same day and received confirmation of the agent’s account.
“I was devastated because word had already leaked out of the hijackers’ identities,” Flagg said. “But I was also excited that the FBI had so much evidence so quickly.”
The young FBI agent, who has since left the agency, works in private industry and is reportedly in Dubai. He could not be reached for comment.
News reports published in late September and early October 2001 described a piece of luggage apparently belonging to Atta that had been discovered at Logan Airport after the attacks.
That piece of luggage was said to contain Arab-language papers amounting to Atta’s last will and testament, along with instructions to the other hijackers to prepare themselves physically and spiritually for death. The papers also admonished them: “Check all of your items — your bag, your clothes, knives, your will, your IDs, your passport, your papers. … Make sure that nobody is following you.” Similar papers were also found in the wreckage of another crashed airliner.
Flagg and the former prosecutor, however, said it was the second bag that identified all 19 hijackers.
“That was the one that became the Rosetta stone,” Flagg said.
http://www.rinf.com/columnists/news/an-untold-story-of-911-2 |
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MichaelC
Joined: 06 Jul 2006
Posts: 1968
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| Posted: Thu Dec 21, 2006 5:01 pm Post subject: |
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| This is almost as good as the "hijacker's passport" that survived the crash, fire, and demolition! |
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Jerry Fletcher
Joined: 21 Jan 2006
Posts: 837
Location: Studio BS
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| Posted: Fri Dec 22, 2006 7:19 am Post subject: |
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At least mildly entertaining.
| Quote: |
Flagg, an FBI agent for 22 years, worked on terrorism cases, among others. Now president of Flaggman Inc., a Manhattan-based investigative firm, he was retired by Sept. 11 but stayed in close touch with former FBI colleagues and prosecutors. |
So what does this clown actually have to do with anything?
| Quote: |
The former federal prosecutor, who declined to be identified publicly, supported Flagg’s account. |
| Quote: |
The young FBI agent, who has since left the agency, works in private industry and is reportedly in Dubai. He could not be reached for comment. |
Investigative journalism at it's tightest. |
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Thermopylae
Joined: 01 Jan 2007
Posts: 2
Location: Connecticut
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| Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2007 10:17 pm Post subject: Terrorists ID'd |
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| The FBI was able to track the terrorists down that were living in the United States very quickly because some of them left suicide notes with relatives and most of them used credit cards for all of their purchases. That is how the FBI was able to get to Huffman Aviation in Florida so quickly too. The terrorists paid for flight training using their credit cards. The interesting thing is that the credit card bills were being paid through the UAE which certainly connects foreign influence to the plot. |
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reprehensor
Joined: 07 Aug 2006
Posts: 27
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| Posted: Wed Jan 03, 2007 12:06 pm Post subject: |
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So, so fast!
| Quote: | Eventually, in both cases a commission is set up – the Warren Commission in 1963 and the 9/11 Commission this time in 2003.
And the starting point for both commissions is to validate what was already decided by the FBI on the day in question. That is the first of the common features that I would like to look at a bit more closely because it sort of hit me between the eyes when I thought about the two together.
Now if you remember the case of Oswald ... within fifteen minutes of the assassination and long before Oswald was picked up in the Texas Theater, they put out on the police network and possibly other networks, a description of the killer – five foot ten – 165 pounds, which exactly matches what is in his FBI file, exactly matches what’s in CIA documents about him.
One of the problems is it doesn’t match the actual height and weight of the man picked up and charged, which is more like five foot nine and 140 pounds. And it’s also very suspect because as far as we can trace the origins of this exact fit with the FBI file, it’s attributed to Howard Brennan – who saw someone two blocks from here in the sixth floor window, from the waist up. So you’ll have to figure out how they were able to get that exact measurement. It appears someone had already decided who was going to be charged before the police found Oswald in the Texas Theater.
Now the parallel to that for 9/11 is, I have to say, even more astounding, because of Richard Clarke, who was director for counter-terrorism activities in the White House, and a very important eyewitness. His book Against All Enemies is almost totally ignored by the 9/11 Commission, and it had to be ignored by the Commission because it is at odds, in many important respects, with what the 9/11 Report says ... But he tells us that at 9:59 am on September 11, which is the time when the second tower collapses, the North Tower, the FBI already had a list of the alleged hijackers.
This is extraordinary in the first place because the FBI always says about itself that it doesn’t do much intelligence in the field of terrorism; its specialty is criminal investigation afterwards. They had the names of hijackers at 9:59; at 9:59 am Flight 93 had not yet crashed. And even more astonishingly, if we believe the 9/11 Report (which of course on this point I do not believe), NORAD, which was searching for the hijacked planes, wasn’t aware that Flight 93 had been hijacked until 10:08, which is nine minutes later... |
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=SCO20061220&articleId=4207
What a tangled web. This of course assumes that there was a Flight 93. |
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Rumpl4skn
Joined: 11 Feb 2006
Posts: 2848
Location: 36� 3'N x 86�40'W
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| Posted: Sun Feb 04, 2007 9:53 pm Post subject: Re: Terrorists ID'd |
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| Thermopylae wrote: | | The FBI was able to track the terrorists down that were living in the United States very quickly because some of them left suicide notes with relatives and most of them used credit cards for all of their purchases. That is how the FBI was able to get to Huffman Aviation in Florida so quickly too. The terrorists paid for flight training using their credit cards. The interesting thing is that the credit card bills were being paid through the UAE which certainly connects foreign influence to the plot. |
Welcome to the forum, Mr. Mueller. 
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"No matter what happens, ever... there's ALWAYS at least one reason. And the top reason is ALWAYS money." |
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BOLSHEVIK
Joined: 25 Jan 2007
Posts: 28
Location: IN THE MOMENT
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| Posted: Sun Feb 04, 2007 10:45 pm Post subject: |
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Interesting, it may have been the only pieces of luggage that DID NOT get routed correctly that day. Seeing that all airport operations were closed around 9: AM EST. I wonder out of all the suicide bombing’s that have occurred world wide how many of bombers plan what their going to do after suicide, like carry extra luggage.
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BOLSHEVIK
Joined: 25 Jan 2007
Posts: 28
Location: IN THE MOMENT
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| Posted: Sun Feb 04, 2007 10:55 pm Post subject: |
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| reprehensor wrote: | | it’s attributed to Howard Brennan – who saw someone two blocks from here in the sixth floor window, from the waist up. So you’ll have to figure out how they were able to get that exact measurement. It appears someone had already decided who was going to be charged before the police found Oswald in the Texas Theater. |
Yes old Lee Harvey Oswald stars were all alined on 11/22/1963 up until he squeezed off the three rounds and then everything went wrong. Out of all the directions he could have went he ran to the Texas Theater the only one Howard Hughes built in Dallas.
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