 |
On September 23, 2001, at the request of Attorney General
John Ashcroft, the government grounded all the crop-dusters
in America— over 5,000 planes that ordinarily spray
pesticides on crops. The FBI then issued an ominous
nationwide alert citing the possibility of a terrorist
crop-duster attacks. The next day, before the House
Committee on the Judiciary, Ashcroft testified that
he had ordered these actions based on information the
FBI received that these crop-dusting aircraft could
be used " to distribute chemical or biological weapons
of mass destruction." Specifically, he reported that
the FBI has confirmed that Mohammed Atta, one of the
suspected hijackers, was acquiring knowledge of crop-dusting
aircraft prior to the attacks on September 11th." In
addition, another suspect, Zacarias Moussaoui, who had
been arrested prior to September 11th, had data on his
personal computer pertaining to the "aerial application
of pesticides." These incidents indicated a pattern
among conspirators to use crop dusters for terrorism.
Ashcroft connected these dots. In December, when Moussaoui
was indicted as part of the conspiracy, two of the overt
acts cited in the indictment were: 1) "in 2000 and
2001, in Florida, Mohammed Atta made inquiries regarding
starting a crop dusting company." 2) "In or about June
2001, in Norman, Oklahoma, Zacarias Moussaoui made inquiries
about starting a crop dusting company." The News media
greatly expanded the terror crop duster story in the
next six months. It reported in great detail how Atta
and his colleagues traveled around airports inspecting
and video-taping crop- dusters and how Atta attempted
to get a government loan to buy his own crop-duster.
As it turned out, all these news stories, as well as
Ashcroft's information about Atta, were based on the
recollections of two people— Johnell Bryant and James
Lester. Johnell Bryant, a loan manager in the Department
of Agriculture's Florida Farm Service Office, recalled
after September 11th that Atta came to her office to
get a $650,000 cash loan to finance a twin-engine, six-passenger
airplane (not a crop-duster.) She said that the man
had told her that he intended to build a tank in the
passenger plane so he could also use it for crop-dusting.
She said that the meeting had occurred in 2000, between
"the third week of April to the third week of May of
2000." She was able to fix the date because the Far
Service subsequently moved their office to Florida City.
While no doubt some Arab-looking man made an inquiry
about getting a loan during this period, Mohamed Atta
was in Germany during that time period, applying for
his visa to come to the United States. He did not arrive
in the United States until June 3rd 2000. If so, the
person who came into Bryant's office to get a loan to
buy a passenger plane in April or May 2000 could not
have been Mohamed Atta. James Lester, an airplane maintenance
worker in Belle Glade Florida, identified Atta from
photographs shown him by the FBI after the September
11th attack. He said he was one of a group of 12-15
"arab- looking" men who had visited the airport and
asked about crop-dusters, including the weekend of September
9-10th 2001. But the hijackers had left Florida prior
to that weekend and the FBI had charge-card receipts
and car-rental records that put Atta in New York and
Boston on the weekend of September 9-10th. If so, Atta
could not have been part of the group of "arab-looking"
men that visited the Belle Glade Airport that weekend.
When these conflicts in dates became apparent after
the FBI re- interviewed the two witnesses, the Department
of Justice decided to drop the terror crop-dusters from
its case. On June 25 2002, it replaced the previous
indictment with a new one that omitted the claim that
"Mohammed Atta made inquiries regarding starting a crop
dusting company," any other references to"crop dusting"
encounters by anyone alleged to be part of the conspiracy.
The terror crop-dusting planes, a fictoid initially
of Ashcroft and the Justice Department, is now only
a fictoid of the media.
|
