Posted on 03/06/2005 6:46:25 AM PST by fight_truth_decay
Michael Tuohey sobbed with grief after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He also felt guilt.
A U.S. Airways ticket agent at the time, Tuohey had handed boarding passes to Mohamed Atta and Abdul Aziz Alomari that morning as they rushed to make their flight at Portland International Jetport.
In the days after Atta and his fellow suicide hijackers killed close to 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, Tuohey held himself at least partly responsible.
He was suspicious of them, he said, but did nothing. Later, as he watched news reports of the towers crumbling, of people jumping from the skyscraper windows to avoid being burned alive, he blamed himself.
"In your mind you're saying, 'Why didn't you react? Why didn't you do something?' " Tuohey said during an interview at his home in Scarborough. "You just have that torturous thing pulling your mind apart."
Tuohey has found some peace in the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission, which determined that the FBI, CIA and other branches of the U.S. government bore a far greater responsibility for the attacks on the twin towers and Pentagon, that their lack of communication contributed to the inability to stop the attacks.
Tuohey is telling his story now because recently declassified material not included with the 9/11 Commission's public report uses his brief exchange with Atta to shed light on why the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 plot chose to fly from Portland rather than Boston.
Atta most likely wanted to avoid having all 10 hijackers arrive at Boston's Logan International Airport at roughly the same time, the report says. The information gleaned from Tuohey and released last month showed that Atta expected to be checked through to American Airlines Flight 11 and that he became angry when he was told he could not avoid checking in again in Boston.
Tuohey remembers that anger vividly.
"He looks at me and says, 'I thought there was one-step check-in. . . .They told me one-step check-in,' " Tuohey said. "I looked in this guy's eyes, and he just looked angry. I just got an uncomfortable feeling."
LAST-MINUTE CHECK-IN
Tuohey, 58, worked as a ticket agent for the airlines for more than 30 years, 18 of them in Portland. He retired last year
On Sept. 11, 2001, he showed up at 4:30 a.m. to get ready for the morning rush along with three others working the ticket counter.
"The busiest part of the day is the first two and a half hours. We had five or six flights between 6 a.m. and 7:30 a.m.," he said.
Tuohey was working the preferred customers line, where the frequent travelers and high-end fliers get quick service. The line was empty, so he told a colleague he planned to step out back for a cigarette break.
Then he spotted two young men come in and motioned them to his station.
"At first I was looking down at the computer. I said, 'You're cutting it close,' " he said, noting it was 5:40 and the flight left at 6 a.m. The men were flying first class to Los Angeles, making a connection in Boston.
"Got any bags?" Tuohey asked.
They hoisted two pieces of luggage toward the counter. Tuohey could not know at the time that the luggage contained a hand-held electronic flight computer, a simulator manual for Boeing 757 and 767 aircraft, and a handwritten document in Arabic titled "In the name of God 'all mighty,' Death Certificate."
Tuohey asked the standard security questions, which he'd asked thousands of travelers:
"Has anyone unknown to you asked you to carry an item on board the aircraft?"
No.
"Has any item you're carrying been out of your control since the time you packed them?"
No.
Tuohey then checked their driver's licenses, both issued in Florida.
"I look at the younger fellow first because he was a little taller. He just looked goofy."
Then his eyes locked on Atta.
"It just sent chills through you. You see his picture in the paper (now). You see more life in that picture than there is in flesh and blood," Tuohey said.
Then Tuohey went through an internal debate that still haunts him.
"I said to myself, 'If this guy doesn't look like an Arab terrorist, then nothing does.' Then I gave myself a mental slap, because in this day and age, it's not nice to say things like this," he said. "You've checked in hundreds of Arabs and Hindus and Sikhs, and you've never done that. I felt kind of embarrassed."
It wasn't just Atta's demeanor that caught Tuohey's attention.
"When I looked at their tickets, they had first-class, one-way tickets - $2,500 tickets. Very unusual," he said. "I guess they're not coming back. Maybe this is the end of their trip."
Then he told Atta, who was handling the transaction, that he would have to check in with the American Airlines ticket counter in Boston.
Atta objected.
"It looked like he was going to step forward," Tuohey said, "and he whipped around and said something to the kid in Arabic. I think he knew if he gave me a hard time, he was going to miss that flight."
Later, Atta and Alomari were seen at Logan asking directions to the American terminal.
WRESTLING WITH GUILT
In Portland, the men's baggage tickets and boarding passes had been generated at 5:43 a.m. Three hours later, one of the counter agents from United Airlines broke the news that a jet had crashed into the World Trade Center.
"Your jaw dropped," Tuohey said. "They gave me the American Airlines flight number, and my heart sank.."
He told a co-worker of his discomfort about Atta and Alomari. "I said, 'I checked in two guys for the flight, and I thought they were terrorists and now I feel bad for them.' "
A few minutes later, he learned about the second flight.
"I just knew. My gut told me there was something wrong with this guy. It was enervating. Your stomach tied up in a knot."
One of Tuohey's co-workers called the FBI, and Tuohey went home. His house was empty. His wife, a flight attendant, had been stranded elsewhere when all commercial aircraft were grounded.
He had been home, watching the news, for less than an hour when he was called back to work to speak with an FBI agent about the two men who had connected with the American flight via Portland.
Tuohey asked about the security camera behind his counter position, noting it would have caught the men's picture as they dealt with him. But he was told that camera was broken and had been out of service for some time.
As he watched the security video taken at the passenger screening area upstairs, he picked out the two men without a doubt. They were no longer wearing the coats and ties they had on when they approached the counter. Tuohey figures they must have taken them off on the way to screening and tucked them into their carry-ons.
Over the next couple of days, like millions of other Americans, Tuohey was riveted to the television news. Unlike the rest of the country, he was wracked by guilt at the thought he could have done something to stop it.
He contacted his company's employee assistance program, and for the first time in his life, he says, he sought out a counselor. It didn't help. He got better results when he called his mother, who helped ease his conscience.
Portland Police Chief Michael Chitwood, whose detectives interviewed Tuohey after the attack, said he would have been surprised if anyone in Tuohey's position had taken action.
"At that point in time the, the United States of America was not under attack on our homeland," Chitwood said. "You can't beat yourself up to death. What was he going to report, and who was he going to report it to?"
A few weeks later, another investigator came by Tuohey's house and showed him a large number of pictures and asked him to point out the men he had waited on that day.
"I went right to Atta," Tuohey said. "It's like the skull on a poison bottle. There's no mistaking that face."
Alomari took longer because a large number of the photos were of young, similar-looking men, he said.
At the time of the attacks, Tuohey was reluctant to talk publicly about his interaction with the hijackers, worried his failure to act could make him the target of lawsuits.
During his initial interview with the FBI, he asked that his name be kept confidential.
"All these people just got killed. They're going to sue me," he reasoned.
Tuohey is mentioned in the first footnote of the 9/11 Commission report, though his name is misspelled. His interactions with Atta and Alomari received scant public attention in the months and years following the attack, although he recently recounted his story on CNN.
Tuohey worked for three more years at the U.S. Airways ticket counter before retiring. His experience did not fill him with suspicion, but he was not shy about asking questions. Twice his iniquiries led to arrests, not for airline security issues but for outstanding arrest warrants.
"I will never ignore my instincts again," he said vehemently.
Not just them, but the dems/liberals friends in France, the Islamofascist, and the rest of the world who would believe at the drop of a needle , believe anything to discredit the USA.
Anyone besides me email the questions to the president at whitehouse dot gov?
Yes I did, I did, I did.
No Fear when you already have an FBI file.
Portland Police Chief Michael Chitwood, whose detectives interviewed Tuohey after the attack, said he would have been surprised if anyone in Tuohey's position had taken action.
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Tuohey worked for three more years at the U.S. Airways ticket counter before retiring. His experience did not fill him with suspicion, but he was not shy about asking questions. Twice his iniquiries led to arrests, not for airline security issues but for outstanding arrest warrants.
"I will never ignore my instincts again," he said vehemently.
The chances are pretty good that they went to The Showplace and then stayed in a motel.
Many of the Somalis I have spoken to did not come to the USA from Somalia. They were the the portion of the refugees Europe had agreed to accept. They lived in their European host country before choosing to come to the USA. Many bring one of their wives and the other wives wait at home in Europe for checks from America.
As someone once said, if there's a jackboot on your throat you don't care if it's worn on the right or the left foot.
I'd say the common element among the extreme right and left is utopianism, and the nihilistic hatred of the real world, and the paranoiac attitude toward it, that results from utopianism. Extremists of either ilk basically believe that justice and liberty can only be realized in the utopia. Human freedom doesn't exist and can't exist in the real world. Any apparent human freedom is a sham, often an intentional one perpetrated by the "conspiracy," the "government," the Jews, etc, and their willing or hapless "shills" and "dupes".
Whether the utopia is the socialist paradise, or the absence of all government, or the perfectly libertarian republic, or the establishment of the global caliphate under sharia law, whether it's a figment of the "right" or of the "left," really doesn't matter, because the utopia will never exist and never has. The common element is that the real world stands in the way of the utopia, and so must be destroyed, and all of its institutions discredited.
It doesn't much matter. As suggested in my preceding message, at the far extremes there isn't much practical difference between left and right. The main differences are literally impractical, in that they have to do with the nature of the proposed utopia that will never exist anyway.
I tend to think of the ideological spectrum as a circle rather than a line. The political center (where Reagan or Dubya belong!) would be at the bottom and middle of the circle. The bottom part of the circle might be called the region of "Liberalism" (in the classical sense of the term), and the top part could be called the region of "Absolutism" or "Totalitarianism". Instead of infinitely diverging, left and right actually begin to converge and eventually meet at the extremes, at the top of the circle.
Well, maybe if they had taken James Woods' concerns more seriously, this man would have a clean conscience today. Woods' actually did something, and they ignored him. Nothing would have been done.
I'm still suspicious as to why they stopped over night in Portland.
Welfare checks.
Re your #3:
Only 1200?
Last I heard Baldacci and Allen were sending 700 more. To which city I don't know. And a lot of homosexual activists are sending for all their friends to join them in Maine too, it seems.
The looting and trashing of Maine seems nearly complete.
Thanks.
I know the tkt agent who checked them in for the BOS LAX flight. Even if they had reported them, security would have done nothing.
There was less of a chance anyone would be suspicious if they didn't all bunch up like grapes. There is a connecting flight that would get them all together on the same plane.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
"Some of those so called " Far Right " groups could just be using that title of being a " FAR RIGHT " group in ex spousing their pseudo conservative/right views and values."
The groups I referenced are all Libertarian. Don't you 'know' that the Libertarians are the "only true conservatives"?
Try and tell a Libertarian that their dream world is utopian. About the best you can expect in return is some reference to "Atlas Shrugged".
I do agree with your comments.
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