Diary of the terrorists (lots of details in this article)

The hijackers had Visa cards, frequent flyer numbers, regular tables at their local restaurants. Marian Wilkinson traces the ways in which the terrorists planned their attacks as they fitted seamlessly into American life.

The man who the FBI believe led the horrific terrorist attacks that destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Centre, killing thousands of people, had a consuming interest in urban design and civil engineering.

This was just one of the bizarre, contradictory details that have emerged about the 19 men the FBI has identified as hijackers on board the four aircraft that crashed on September 11.

The hijackers did not live as Islamic fundamentalists or nor did they escape from the poverty of Palestinian or Afghan refugee camps.

They mostly came from middle- and upper-class families from Middle Eastern countries. They were educated, at least seven are believed to have trained as pilots, often in the United States. They had Visa cards, drank alcohol, and some spoke English and German as well as Arabic.

The confounding contradictions in these men is one reason their movements and intricate planning went undetected until it was too late.

Mohamed Atta, the man considered by the FBI as one of the key organisers, spent a night in a Florida sports bar just days before he crashed flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Centre.

In the Florida town of Hollywood, bar staff saw him drinking and playing video games. But in Hamburg, Germany, when he was a student at the Technical University, he organised a special prayer room for fundamentalist teaching.

The fragmentary details of the hijackers' lives indicate plans for the attack may have been under way at least 16 months ago.

On May 18 last year, Atta obtained a visa from the US consulate in Berlin. Atta, 33, was born in the United Arab Emirates but his father was a well-off lawyer who lived in Egypt and Atta had an Egyptian driver's licence.

In the 1990s he went to study in Hamburg, learning urban design and civil engineering at the Technical University.

One of his friends from university told The New York Times that Atta "was not anti-Western in a cultural sense" but he was shocked by the breakdown in the Middle East peace process and the attacks on Iraq during the Gulf War.

"I saw in him a process of increasing embitterment, and that is the only thing I can state now, looking back," his friend said.

"He apparently must have changed a lot to do this and moved in directions that were not forseeable."

At the university, he established a prayer group on campus and allegedly began to recruit for fundamentalist causes. At least two of the other hijackers went to the Hamburg university and are thought to have attended this prayer group, including his cousin, Marwan Al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrahi.

Cox News Service also reports that in 1986, Atta was listed as a suspect in a bus bombing in Israel, an act that should have put him on a CIA-FBI Immigration Service watch list.

But no-one stopped Atta when he first flew to the US 15 months ago, on June 3 on a flight from Prague to Newark, New Jersey. He arrived on a temporary visitor's visa for six months.

One month later, he moved to Venice, Florida, for a summer pilot training school at Huffman Aviation. With him at the school was a second hijacker, Marwan Al-Shehhi.

They paid $US10,000 ($19,000) by cheque for their lessons and briefly stayed with one of the school employees, Charles Voss, until Voss's wife asked them to leave.

The two then moved to South Florida and undertook more pilot training at the SimCenter Inc school in Dade County, where they apparently spent their time practising turns. This time they paid the $1,500 bill in cash.

"Looking back on it, it was a little strange that all they wanted to do was turns," Henry George, the boss of SimCenter told The Miami Herald.

At least 12 of the hijackers lived in Florida at some time during the past 18 months to two years, and many of them went to at least one of the State's pilot training schools.

In an unexplained move, on January 4 this year, Atta suddenly flew out of Miami, to Madrid, Spain, for a week and Spanish police are checking whether he met members of any terrorist organisation there before he returned to the US.

Incredibly, Atta was allowed back into the US even though he had overstayed his temporary visa before he left.

Four months later, in May, Atta obtained a Florida driver's licence and rented an apartment in Hollywood, Florida, with Marwan The two begin renting planes by the hour, as well as cars from the local Warrick's Rent-a-Car.

On August 28 Atta booked a one-way ticket on American Airlines flight 11 for September 11, travelling from Boston to Los Angeles.

The booking was made over the Internet using his new Visa card and a frequent flyer membership obtained just three days before.

He also booked a ticket for a 29-year-old Saudi pilot, Abdulaziz Alomari, who also lived in Hollywood, Florida.

Around the same time, the other three hijackers who would take over flight 11 booked their tickets: Satam Al Suqami, a 25-year-old from the United Arab Emirates who paid for his ticket in cash, and two brothers, Waleed Alshehri, 24, and Wail Alshehri, 28, who gave their address as a post office box in Atta's suburb, Hollywood, Florida.

Waleed Alshehri had a pilot's licence and had graduated from a four-year course in aeronautical science from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida in 1997.

According to The New York Times, he had been a long time US resident, first in Florida then in Vienna, Virginia, where he lived on a street with brick houses displaying the American flag.

All of the 19 identified hijackers bought their tickets between August 25 and August 28, six of them giving Atta's home number as their contact. Several of the tickets were business class seats, two were first class.

The next day, August 29, Atta picked up another rental car and would clock up more than 1,600 kilometres before he returned it 11 days later. It is not known where he travelled.

Four days before the attack, Atta and Marwan spent the night drinking in the Shuckums sports bar in Hollywood, their local suburb, where they were joined by a third man. The staff remember the trio because Marwan argued over the bill.

On September 9 Atta returned the rental car in Florida and it is unsure how he travelled north. But he and several of the hijackers arrived in Portland, Maine, the night before the attacks.

Early in the morning of September 11, Atta and Alomari boarded a flight for Boston's Logan airport. There they met the Alshehri brothers.

Atta and his co-conspirators then boarded American Airlines Flight 11 bound for Los Angeles.

Atta sat in seat 8D. Sometime before breakfast, the hijackers, using knifes and cardboard cutters, took over the aircraft.

One hour later, they crashed the fuel-laden Boeing 767 into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre killing themselves, their fellow passengers and thousands of New Yorkers.

According to The Washington Post, Atta's bags missed the flight and were found by the FBI containing a suicide note and other clues taking investigators to Hamburg, Florida, Canada and Maine.

Twenty minutes after Atta departed Logan, Marwan was on United Airlines flight 175. The security guard at the gate had told one of his comrades, "have a good flight".

On board this flight with Marwan were Fayez Ahmed, Mohald Alshehri, Hamza Alghamdi and Ahmed Alghamdi - all allegedly from Delray Beach, Florida.

A little over an hour later, they, too, overwhelmed the pilot and crew and United Airlines flight 175 crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Centre, confirming to the world, if there was any doubt, that this was a major terrorist attack.

On board were the hijackers Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhamzi. They used their own names to buy the tickets.

Two weeks earlier, on August 23, the FBI had put out an alert for the two men to try to prevent them entering the country. But they had already arrived in Los Angeles on Saudi passports.

According to The Washington Post, they were know to be associates of Osama bin Laden and the CIA had warned they were attempting to enter the US on August 21.

According to The Washington Post, Al-Midhar had been spotted on a video tape provided to the CIA speaking with a man in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, who was a suspect in last October's bombing of the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen.

The tape is another piece of circumstantial evidence linking the September 11 attacks to bin Laden, who is suspected of links to the Cole bombing.

The two had reportedly rented rooms in San Diego, south of Los Angeles, from a retired professor the previous September.

On the flight with them was a third hijacker, 25-year-old Hani Hanjour. Like some of his comrades, Hanjour was a long time US resident who attended an airline training centre in Arizona in 1996 and 1997 and is believed by the FBI to be a pilot who got his licence in 1999.

For six weeks before the attacks, Hanjour had flown over Washington in small planes.

One flight school in Maryland outside Washington confirmed Hanjour had attempted to rent a light plane but had refused to supply his address and phone number.

Just after 9.30am, American Airlines Fight 77, with the hijackers on board, headed for the White House but then suddenly veered and crashed into the Pentagon.

On the fourth and final flight was the last hijacker believed to be a pilot, Ziad Jarrahi.

The son of a middle-class Lebanese family, Ziad Jarrahi is believed to have met Atta and his cousin at university in Hamburg. He was on board the United Airlines flight that took off from Newark, New Jersey, just after 9am.

This flight appeared to be either headed for the White House or Camp David until the passengers overwhelmed the hijackers. It crashed in Stony Creek Township, Pennsylvania, killing all on board.

All 19 men died in the hijackings: their motivations for their actions will only come to light through the evidence of others.

"According to The Washington Post, Atta's bags missed the flight and were found by the FBI containing a suicide note and other clues taking investigators to Hamburg, Florida, Canada and Maine."

Why did this guy need to pack a bag? Sounds like he deliberately gave the bag to the airline late so that it would be placed on a later flight and found. The suicide note sure wouldn't have been legible after the plane exploded. Are all of the "clues" really disinformation?

The two then moved to South Florida and undertook more pilot training at the SimCenter Inc school in Dade County, where they apparently spent their time practising turns. This time they paid the $1,500 bill in cash.
"Looking back on it, it was a little strange that all they wanted to do was turns," Henry George, the boss of SimCenter told The Miami Herald.

“Looking back on it, they gave me $1500 in cash, and that’s all I really cared about.”

I think it is grossly irresponsible for a flight instructor to give flying lessons to a couple of Muslim guys who have no interest in learning how to take off or land, and are only interested in learning how to turn.

A call to the FBI, at least, would have been in order.

It doesn't say here if these terrorists had expired visas, multiple passports, green cards or even any documentation that would have allowed them to stay here in the country legally - and perhaps even be tracked or monitored by authorities, such as the FBI or even the INS.

We have an immense hole in our "immigrant" apparatus that needs to be fixed right away. We have almost no idea who is here, where, or why. I'm not talking American citizens here - I'm talking about aliens, legal as well as illegal. We don't need a "National Identity Card". What we need is to identify those among us who are not citizens, and that should be an easy thing to do!

I say, put out a nationwide dragnet and round up all these people right away and quickly expel them back to where they came from. They can return later with updated documentation that actually works - when we figure out how to do that.

In the meantime, we can go onto the next problem - prosecuting a deadly war - without worrying about that potential Fifth Column among us.

Atta was a "sleeper". He had to be recruited from a westernized milieu. It is not difficult, I assume, to find arabs that are outraged by our policies toward Israel or Iraq, yet are westernized on the surface. In fact, Iraq under Saddam was rather modern state and Saddam's Baath party if I am not mistaken, advocated modernity and socialism, as opposed to feudalism and hard core Islam. That was the basis of our rapprochement with Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and that was, I am guessing, the underlying reason for our embrace of Arafat: he is seen as a secular leader, someone we can deal with, not a religious ascetic.

Also, many in the West have a very superficial view on what the Western culture is.We often think that someone has culturally assimilated because he wears jeans, listens to rock music and drinks beer. Such was Atta's friend's assessment. Thus great hopes were placed on Andropov because of his jazz collection. All it is is culture, and mostly a junk part of it to boot. This war is between civilizations. People don't self-sacrifice for Coca-Cola, but they do die for their civilization.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.