Free Republic

<p>WASHINGTON -- Attorney General John Ashcroft said Wednesday the terrorists behind the attacks on the United States likely received support from foreign governments and that it was too early to tell if surprise arrests in Michigan were a major break in the case.</p>

Man with links to 9/11 pilot deported 10 June 2006 A man the Government says had a direct link with a September 11 terrorist has been deported from New Zealand because he was a threat to national security. Immigration Minister David Cunliffe confirmed today Yemeni national, Rayed Mohammed Abdullah Ali, was deported because his continued presence in New Zealand posed a threat. "He was directly associated with persons responsible for the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001," Mr Cunliffe said in a statement. He was deported under the rarely used Section 72 of the Immigration Act...

AHMED HIKMAT SHAKIR IS A shadowy figure who provided logistical assistance to one, maybe two, of the 9/11 hijackers. Years before, he had received a phone call from the Jersey City, New Jersey, safehouse of the plotters who would soon, in February 1993, park a truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center. The safehouse was the apartment of Musab Yasin, brother of Abdul Rahman Yasin, who scorched his own leg while mixing the chemicals for the 1993 bomb.When Shakir was arrested shortly after the 9/11 attacks, his "pocket litter," in the parlance of the investigators, included contact...

The air traffic controller who watched the last minutes of the hijacked flight which crashed into the Pentagon told today how she believed it was heading for the White House. Danielle O’Brien said the last words heard by the pilots of American Flight 77 as they left Washington Dulles Airport on the morning of September 11, were hers, telling them: ‘‘Good luck.’’ Within minutes she was watching in horror as the plane headed for protected airspace over the White House and she began counting down the minutes until it would have reached the President’s mansion - only to turn away ...

For all its successes, the U.S. anti-terror war was conceived in sin, the sin of U.S. government negligence. As much post-9/11 journalism has pointed out, there was the foreign-policy error of abandoning post-Soviet Afghanistan after having infused it with weapons, the CIA's failure to act more forcefully on tips and intercepts regarding al-Qaida operatives overseas, and the FBI's and INS's similar failings regarding suspicious characters already in the United States. And the FAA's (and the airlines', the airports', and security firms') breakdown on airport security. However, there has been a good deal less focus on another federal fubar, that ...