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911 - September 11, 2001 Despite F.B.I. Memo, Students in By JO THOMAS New York Times
5/24/2002 |
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PHOENIX, May 24 — Although an F.B.I. agent here sent a memorandum to Washington last July urging a nationwide check on Middle Eastern students at flight schools, managers at several schools in the Phoenix area said the local F.B.I. office did not ask them for tips on suspicious students before Sept. 11.
In interviews this week, the flight instructors said they had no inkling last summer that a Federal Bureau of Investigation counterterrorism squad in Phoenix was worried about Arab and Muslim students.
Some Middle Eastern men, including one recently convicted of lying to the F.B.I. about possible ties to Hani Hanjour, one of the Sept. 11 hijackers, trained in August on a simulator at the Sawyer School of Aviation at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, court records and interviews show.
Jud Farrer, who managed the school then, said that had he known the F.B.I. was concerned that some students might be Islamic militants, "I would have called someone."
Jerry Dilk, director and part owner of the Westwind School of Aeronautics, one of the nation's largest flight schools, said Westwind had had a good relationship with the F.B.I., but he had no clue there had been cause for alarm.
"Should flight schools be clairvoyant?" Mr. Dilk asked.
The disclosure of the F.B.I. memorandum, written by Kenneth Williams, an agent based in Phoenix, set off a furor this month in Washington, where counterterrorism supervisors had deposited it in their files in July without taking action. Many in Congress and elsewhere have strongly criticized the headquarters officials for failing to act on Mr. Williams's recommendation that the F.B.I. interview hundreds, if not thousands, of Middle Eastern students at the nation's flight schools.
But in the interviews here, several current and former flight school managers said they saw no signs that Mr. Williams and his colleagues had undertaken such a systematic program in their own area.
Flight school officials have said that Mr. Hanjour, who is thought to have been the pilot on the hijacked jet flown into the Pentagon, trained at schools in Arizona several times from 1996 through February 2001.
Shortly after the attacks on Sept. 11, former employees at the Sawyer school said, a review of school records suggested that Mr. Hanjour might have returned last summer, though F.B.I. officials later said they could find no proof that he had.
But officials who have reviewed the July memorandum said that rather than having Mr. Hanjour in his sights, Mr. Williams was focused on a handful of other flight students, including some with ties to a radical British group called Al Muhajiroun, which has stridently supported Osama bin Laden and other terrorists.
Officials in Washington have said that some of the students, who are still under investigation, expressed extreme animosity toward the United States. Mr. Williams's memorandum had speculated that Mr. bin Laden's followers might be training at American flight schools for an attack inside the United States.
Mr. Williams has declined to be interviewed, and Manuel Johnson, an F.B.I. spokesman in Phoenix, declined to comment today on the complaints by the flight schools. But officials have said that Mr. Williams told members of Congress this week that he did not believe that prompt action on his memorandum would have uncovered the Sept. 11 plot.
Still, Mr. Farrer and Justin Buker, another former Sawyer school employee, said today that Mr. Williams and another Phoenix agent rushed out to the school in mid-September, after a computerized check of the school's database suggested that Mr. Hanjour might have been there during the summer.
Mr. Farrer and Mr. Buker said the records indicated that Mr. Hanjour might have signed up to use a flight simulator in August with three other Muslim men, including Faisal M. al-Salmi, the man who was convicted on charges that he had lied about his associations with Mr. Hanjour. But Mr. Salmi's lawyer, Gerald A. Williams, said that documents supplied to him by the school showed only an entry with Mr. Hanjour's name and the date June 23, 2001, with no further indication that Mr. Hanjour trained there last summer.
The lawyer said that at Mr. Salmi's trial in February the F.B.I. agents acknowledged they had no more evidence that Mr. Hanjour had been in Phoenix at all last summer.
Two men have come forward saying they had mixed success in trying to point Mr. Williams of the F.B.I. toward Islamic militants in the Phoenix area in the late 1990's.
One, Harry Joseph Ellen, 54, a Phoenix businessman who became a Muslim, said he had told Agent Williams about a conversation he had in late 1996 or early 1997 with a mysterious visitor from Algeria. The visitor identified himself as an instructor of commercial pilots, and he met in Phoenix with various Muslim men.
A second man, Aukai Collins, 28, an American who converted to Islam and lost a leg helping militants fight the Russians in Chechnya, told ABC News on Thursday that he gave the F.B.I. extensive reports on Islamic activity in Phoenix from 1996 to 1999.
Mr. Collins has written a book, "My Jihad," in which he says he met Mr. Hanjour in Phoenix and found him to be a nonreligious drifter who drank and chased women. Mr. Collins added in an interview today that he felt that F.B.I. agents had spent too much time watching the local mosque. "The real troublemakers avoided the mosque," he said.
Mr. Ellen and Mr. Collins said they had quarreled with Agent Williams and quit helping him. F.B.I. officials said today they had questions about both men's credibility.
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