They had their man. Mohammad Ahmad al-Qahtani. It was Aug. 4, 2001.
The Saudi citizen had flown into Orlando International Airport. He was briefly detained after acting like a complete ass to a U.S. Customs agent. He was cagey, squirrelly. So agents took him into a room and started asking questions.
Ultimately, al-Qahtani’s interrogators determined he was just another “migrant.” A migrant with $2,800 in cash coming in to the United States on a one-way ticket.
“They didn’t view him in the counterterrorism prism,” said Michael Lebowitz, a former senior attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Security Division. “If they would have, those investigators — a few weeks prior to 9/11 — would have had their hands on a travel itinerary with the phone number and contact information for a guy named Mustafa al-Hawsawi who was the main 9/11 conspirator, clothing and feeding the hijackers within the United States.”
‘It Fell Through the Cracks’
Lebowitz is an authentic expert on the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The combat veteran, who served in a U.S. Army Pathfinder unit post-9/11, was tapped as a special counsel and war crimes prosecutor in Guantanamo Bay matters. In fact, he helped prosecute the 9/11 case, the USS Cole bombing case, and a case against al-Qaeda’s top commander in Afghanistan.
He knows counterterrorism. He wrote the book on it, Second Wave: Inside Al Qaeda’s Post-9/11 Attack Plan and America’s Secret Effort to Stop It.
Lebowitz joined me on the latest episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, set for release on Friday. We discussed the state of national security 25 years after radical Islamists struck America and forever changed the world.
Had authorities in Orlando probed a little more deeply, they would have learned that the rude Saudi they briefly detained possessed a prepaid calling card with the phone number of the horrid and hairy Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the mastermind behind 9/11. Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker, was waiting at the airport. He was al-Qahtani’s ride. Atta got a parking ticket waiting for his man, Lebowitz said.
The agents in Orlando had — briefly in their custody — the terrorist who was meant to be the 20th hijacker, and the fifth hijacker on United Airlines Flight 93.
Instead, they fingerprinted al-Qahtani and told him to use that $3,000 he was carrying to buy a ticket and get the hell out of the country.
“This whole confluence of events caused the vital information that I believe could have potentially foiled 9/11,” Lebowitz said. “It fell through the cracks.”
“And the fear is that we are at the same position where we were prior to 9/11 where vital information can fall through the cracks.”
We are at War with Ourselves
Much immediately changed after those hijacked jets slammed into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and crashed into that quiet farm field just outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The “War on Terror” quickly punched the Taliban in Afghanistan, which gave sanctuary to Osama bin Ladin and his al-Qaeda hell hounds. Then the Pentagon and President George W. Bush decided to tangentially launch the War in Iraq to purge the country of Saddam Hussein and his government. Weapons of mass destruction, and all that.
They created the Department of Homeland Security, the Transportation Safety Administration, the Office of the Director Of National Intelligence. The idea was to secure the homeland from another 9/11, secure the skies so air travelers would feel safe to fly again, and share intelligence so the United States wouldn’t be caught sleeping again.
Along the way, one terrorist group after another filled the vacuum left by the of the previous terrorist groups.
We got longer lines and shorter leashes on our civil liberties. We got a 20-year war that chaotically ended with the Taliban back in power in Afghanistan using the billions of dollars of weapons the U.S. military abandoned in its haste to leave. We got a Deep State and a broken Congress more interested in imprisoning and killing political opponents at home than stopping foreign enemies at our gates.
Meanwhile, the “Hate America” Americans have vilified and called for the dismantling, the defunding, of the post-911 agencies actually protecting the homeland — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. In the 25 years since the terrorists struck, just one president has seriously enforced the laws Congress passed barring illegal aliens entry into the United States.
Lebowitz said there are many reasons why we are no safer than we were on Sept. 10, 2001. Complacency, misplaced policy priorities, the gutting of effective intelligence gathering, a broken immigration system, a failure of Democrat and Republican administrations to heed the lessons learned through suffering and history.
But what makes us most vulnerable to the next 9/11 is that we are at war with ourselves, in so many ways. The erosion of faith, family, and foundational American values has left America weak and exposed to evil, to enemies laughing at and preying on our division and our “inclusion.”
Paper Airplanes
The monsters who murdered nearly 3,000 innocent people in New York City and Washington, D.C., and rural Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001 have been replaced by the next generation of monsters. They rejoice on this solemn anniversary, laying in wait for their next opportunity to strike.
Lebowitz, a 20-year-plus veteran of the Army, is steeped in Military Bearing, the way service members are taught to conduct themselves. It’s standing tall, with confidence, a disciplined confidence, carrying oneself with professionalism and exuding calm, particularly in hostile situations. Military Bearing is a mental shield that is indispensable in combat and, for a war crimes prosecutor, in the courtroom.
Lebowitz needed every bit of that bearing during the marathon arraignment of 9/11 conspirators held at Guantanamo Bay. The court proceeding, at 13 hours, was the longest arraignment in American history. It was grueling.
Lebowitz vividly recalled the despicable behavior in the courtroom of one of the suspects, Walid bin Attash, the Yemeni foreign national who allegedly tested out whether razor knives and box cutters could be carried onto commercial airplanes. They could, no problem. The hijackers would use the blades to take control of the jets they used as suicide missiles.
“We had victim family members in the back of the courtroom,” Lebowitz recalled. “Attash made a paper airplane, held it up and, showed it to the family members and smiled as he threw it across the courtroom.”
“Outwardly I was cool and collected, but inwardly I was like, ‘What a psychopath,’” the war crimes prosecutor said.
More terrorists cut from the same cloth are being created every day, in foreign lands and inside the nation they hate.
They know just how vulnerable the Land of the Free is 25 years later.
