(WMR) -- Lebanese
student pilot Ziad Jarrah, according to the National Commission on Terrorist
Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the �911 Commission,� was said to
have been the pilot of the United Airlines Boeing 757-200 that crashed into the
ground near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on the morning of September 11, 2001.
WMR has previously reported that based on numerous sources
within the National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and the U.S.
Air Force, United 93 was shot down by the Air Force over Pennsylvania by two
F-16s. A Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle was also in the vicinity of the
doomed Boeing 757 and crashed where the large passenger plane was reported to
have crashed.
In a compendium to the 9/11 Commission report titled, �Terrorist
Travel,� which contains travel documents allegedly used by the hijackers, a
photograph of the U.S. visa of Ziad Jarreh is shown. The visa is said to have
survived the crash of the Boeing 757 but miraculously, the fireball from the
exploding aircraft managed to save that part of the visa that shows Jarrah�s
headshot photograph and part of his visa number.
Jarrah was born in Lebanon to Sunni Muslim parents but
volunteered much of his time working with disabled and orphaned children at a
Catholic school and church. There has been much speculation about whether
Jarrah was ever a member of Mohamed Atta�s �Hamburg cell� and whether he even
boarded United flight 93 on 9/11. His background was remarkably secular.
However, based on videos of questionable origin and the visa
from the crash site in Pennsylvania, spared from total obliteration by what can
only be described as an �intelligent fire,� is all the FBI had to conclude that
Jarrah was the hijack team pilot of Flight 93. German authorities never
obtained any evidence linking Jarrah to the Hamburg cell of Atta and the other
accused hijackers.
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Atta�s visa (above) and Ziad Jarrah (below). |
The fire from the explosion of United 93 apparently �stopped
on a dime� and left Jarrah�s photo and U.S. visa number largely intact,
largely proving to the FBI that he was the pilot of the hijacked airliner.
All that. of course, if the 9/11 Commission is to be believed. Six out of the
nine members of the commission believe that they were lied to and sandbagged by
the Bush administration and top government officials.
The following is excerpted from the 9/11 Commission report
on the hijackers� travel documents:
�May 25 [2000] -- Ziad Jarrah, a native of Lebanon, applied
for and received a five-year B-1/B-2 (tourist/business) visa in Berlin. The
consular officer who issued the visa could not recall whether he interviewed
Jarrah. However, our review of Berlin visa policy for third-country nationals
suggests that Jarrah was a strong visa candidate, given his long residence in
Germany (approximately four years), academic involvement in Germany (at two
universities), and Lebanese nationality. Third-country nationals with more than
two years of residency in Germany met a threshold for visa approval. The
officer who adjudicated his visa has stated that wealthy Lebanese families
often send their children to school in Germany as a way to keep them out of the
Middle East turmoil, and that Jarrah looked like one of those wealthy
expatriates.�
Not only was Jarrah a model visa candidate in the eyes
of the Berlin consular officer but the visa issued would have a charmed
existence, surviving a fiery plane crash to reveal Jarrah�s photo and visa number.
And not only did the Berlin consular officer have a faulty
memory in his interview of Jarreh but the Lebanese national�s visa application
was destroyed by the State Department, along with those of other hijackers.
From page 45 of the 9/11 travel document compendium:
�Of the 23 hijacker visa applications, five were destroyed
routinely along with other documents before 9/11 and before their
significance was known. The visa applications of Nawaz al Hazmi, Kahlid al
Mihdhar (in 1999), Mohamed Atta, Marwan al Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah were
destroyed.�
The report does not state what �other documents� were
destroyed by the State Department prior to 9/11. Nor does the report explain
why it was �routine� to destroy visa applications for visitors who were still
in the United States.
The report does state that Jarrah�s electronic record of
Jarrah�s visa application still existed at the State Department, along with his
photo. Of course, electronic records are easily manipulated. The report states:
�DOS record, NIV Applicant Detail of Ziad Jarrah, Nov. 8, 2001. Jarrah�s
original visa application was destroyed, but an electronic record, including
his photograph, remains in the State Department�s electronic records. A
partly-burned copy of Jarrah�s U.S. visa, recovered from the crash scene of
Flight 93, is attached in Appendix A.�
The report states that a �burned copy� of Jarrah�s visa was
found at the crash scene. However, such a visa would have been the original
visa and attached to a page in Jarrah�s Lebanese passport. The photo clearly
shows what appears to be other passport pages behind the original visa.
There is an interesting footnote to the strange saga of Ziad
Jarrah. Last year, two Lebanese brothers -- Ali Jarrah and Youssef Jarrah --
were arrested by Lebanese authorities who linked the pair to an espionage cell
responsible for the car bombing assassination of Hezbollah military commander
Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus in February 2008. The Jarrah�s were found by the
Lebanese Army in possession of �communication devices and other
sophisticated equipment.�
The Jarrahs arrested by the Lebanese had been recruited by
the Mossad in the 1980s when Israel occupied a large section of Lebanon. And for
a Paul Harvey-like �rest of the story,� they are related to Ziad Jarreh,
the man who was said to have been a close associate and fellow hijacking
planner of Mohamed Atta and whose American visa was found with photo and visa
number largely intact in a field in Pennsylvania on 9/11.
Previously
published in the Wayne
Madsen Report.
Copyright � 2009 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative
journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher
of the Wayne Madsen Report
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