Flight Instructor Connected the Dots

[Intelligence reports that mentioned the possibility of terrorists hijacking commercial jetliners. A presidential briefing paper entitled "Osama bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside U.S."
An FBI report on suspicious Muslims eager to learn how to control jumbo jets without learning how to land or take off.

The official Bush line is that this simply wasn't enough information to prevent the 9/11 attacks. Exaggeration, criminal malfeasance or another outright lie?]

Flight Instructor Recalls Suspicions About Moussaoui

By Neil A. Lewis, The New York Times


WASHINGTON, March 9 - A veteran airline pilot and instructor told a jury Thursday how he and others at a Minnesota flight school quickly grew suspicious of Zacarias Moussaoui's motives for trying to learn how to pilot a large commercial airliner.

The pilot, Clarence Prevost, testified that he at first was baffled at why Mr. Moussaoui, who had not yet even been qualified to fly solo in a small private plane, had signed up to take expensive lessons with a flight simulator for a Boeing 747-400. He said he became especially alarmed when he discovered that Mr. Moussaoui had paid for the lessons in $100 bills.

Mr. Prevost said he persuaded the managers at the Pan Am International Flight Academy near Minneapolis to call the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an action that eventually led to Mr. Moussaoui's arrest on immigration charges three weeks before the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.

Mr. Moussaoui's case drew wide attention in 2002, when an F.B.I. agent in Minnesota, Coleen Rowley, complained that top bureau officials repeatedly stifled attempts by Minneapolis agents to obtain a warrant to examine Mr. Moussaoui's laptop computer. Mr. Moussaoui's computer was not searched until after the attacks. It contained data about the cockpit layouts of large commercial aircraft and phone numbers like one in Germany for the roommate of Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the Sept. 11 plot.