[iwar] [fc:Mohammed.Atta.and.his.federal.loan.officer]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-06-22 14:32:10
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Sat, 22 Jun 2002 14:32:10 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:Mohammed.Atta.and.his.federal.loan.officer]
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Mohammed Atta and his federal loan officer
National Post (Toronto) | June 10, 2002
Mark Steyn

Mohammed Atta and his federal loan officer.  No matter how dumb he was, 
officialdom was always dumber.

When last in this space, 10 days ago, I was writing about whether political 
correctness kills. This was apropos the 9/11 nutters: "Everything they did 
stuck out. But it didn't matter. Because the more they stuck out, the more 
everyone who mattered was trained to look the other way."

I didn't know the half of it. The other day, Johnelle Bryant, an official 
with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, gave an interview to ABC News in 
which she revealed that Mohammed Atta and three other September 11th 
terrorists had visited her Florida office seeking government loans. 

America, it seems, came this close to having the World Trade Center 
incinerated at the taxpayers' expense.

Mr. Atta swung by in May, 2000, and Ms. Bryant remembers quite a bit about 
it. "At first," she says, "he refused to speak with me," on the grounds that 
she was, in his words, "but a female." After he'd reiterated the point, she 
pulled rank: "I told him that if he was interested in getting a farm-service 
agency loan in my servicing area, then he would need to deal with me."  
Throughout the hour-long interview, he continued to dismiss her as "but a 
female."

Ms. Bryant says the applicant was asking for $650,000 to start a crop-dusting 
business. His plan was to buy a six-seater twin-prop and then remove the 
seats. "He wanted to build a chemical tank that would fit inside the aircraft 
and take up every available square inch of the aircraft except for where the 
pilot would be sitting."

Hmm.

When she explained that his application would have to be processed, Mr. Atta 
became "very agitated."  He'd apparently been expecting to leave the office 
with cash in hand. "He asked me," recalls Ms. Bryant, "what would prevent him 
from going behind my desk and cutting my throat and making off with the 
millions of dollars in that safe." Try this with your Royal Bank loan officer 
-- I find it works every time.  But Ms. Bryant replied politely that there 
was no money in the safe because loans are never given in cash, and also that 
she was trained in karate.

His fiendish plan stymied at every turn, Mr. Atta then spotted an aerial view 
of Washington hanging on the wall behind her.  He told her he particularly 
liked the way it got all the famous landmarks of the city in one convenient 
picture, pointing specifically to the Pentagon and the White House. "He 
pulled out a wad of cash," says Ms. Bryant, "and started throwing money on my 
desk.  He wanted that picture really bad."

She told him it wasn't for sale, but he only tossed more dough at her.  "His 
look on his face became very bitter at that point," Ms. Bryant remembers.  
"He said, 'How would America like it if another country destroyed that city 
and some of the monuments in it, "like the cities in his country had been 
destroyed?"

Hmm.

Mr. Atta then moved on to other prominent landmarks in other American cities, 
and enquired about security at the World Trade Center.  Ms. Bryant had a 
Dallas Cowboys souvenir on her desk, and he asked her about their spectacular 
stadium and, specifically, the "hole in the roof."

At that point, the chit-chat turned to Mr. Atta's own country, which he 
claimed was Afghanistan.  "He mentioned Osama bin Laden," she says. "He could 
have been a character on Star Wars for all I knew."  So Mr. Atta helpfully 
explained that this bin Laden guy "would someday be known as the world's 
greatest leader."

Alas, the interview ended badly from the terrorists' point of view when Ms. 
Bryant informed her visitor that the loan program is for farm-based projects 
and a crop-dusting business did not qualify.

A few weeks later, another September 11th killer showed up, Marwan al- 
Shehhi, seeking half-a-million bucks supposedly to buy a sugar-cane farm.  
Accompanying him was Mr. Atta, but he was cunningly disguised with a pair of 
glasses and claiming to be someone else entirely, attending in his capacity 
as Mr. al-Shehhi's accountant.  Sportingly, Ms. Bryant went along with the 
wheeze.  I'm reminded of the time my sister tried to wangle her boyfriend a 
day off work.  She called up the receptionist and, adopting a fake accent, 
told her that she was the dentist's secretary and he needed to come in 
immediately for critical dental work.  "My God, that's terrible," said the 
receptionist.  "I'll tell him at once."  She then buzzed through to the 
boyfriend: "Stewart, Karen just called pretending to be the dentist's 
secretary.  Do you think she needs to see a doctor?"

But Ms. Bryant didn't think Mr. Atta was sick.  The safe-breaking, the 
throat- slitting, the fake specs ... why, he was just being charmingly 
multicultural!  "I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the 
country that he came from," she says.  "I was attempting, in every manner I 
could, to help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I 
could."  Unfortunately, his imaginative business plan for a crop-duster 
capable of crop-dusting Texas was frustrated by the unduly onerous 
restrictions and bureaucratic torpor of the USDA program.  By late summer, 
Mr. Atta and his chums had concluded the government was never going to buy 
them their own twin-props and they'd have to make do with the aircraft that 
were already up there.  So they switched their flight training courses from 
small planes to large jet simulators, and told their instructors to skip all 
that takeoff and landing stuff.

Ms. Bryant has come forward now because she thinks "it's very vital that the 
Americans realize that when these people come to the United States, they 
don't have a big 'T' on their forehead."  No, indeed.  In some cases, they 
have a big "T-E-R-R-O-R-I-S-T" flashing in neon off the end of their nose. 
Ten days ago, I pointed out that these fellows made virtually no effort to 
blend in.  They weren't in "deep cover," they were barely covered at all.  
Atta was the brains of the operation, and he did a marginally better job of 
it than Leslie Nielsen would have.  His one great insight into Western 
culture was his assumption that he could get a government grant to take out 
the Pentagon.  Yet no matter how dumb he was, officialdom was always dumber.

"If they watch this interview and they see the type of questions that Atta 
asked me," Ms. Bryant told ABC News, "then perhaps they will recognize a 
terrorist, and make the call that I didn't make."  Meanwhile, here are some 
signs to look for:

 

1) He threatens to cut your throat. 

2) He talks about the destruction of prominent landmarks. 

3) He enquires about security at said landmarks. 

4) He hails Osama bin Laden as a great leader. 

There'll be more of these stories, tales of men virtually screaming their 
intentions but up against a culture sensitivity-trained into a coma.  A 
stump- toothed Appalachian mountain man would get slung out on his ear if he 
was that misogynist and abusive in a government office. In a Hollywood movie, 
the guy refusing to deal with the little lady and demanding to see the real 
boss would be a sexist Republican Congressman.  In the new motion-picture 
blockbuster The Sum Of All Fears, the Islamic terrorists of Tom Clancy's 
novel have been replaced with neo-Nazis -- a safe villain that won't offend 
our delicate multicultural sensibilities.

The good news is we're up against idiots.  The bad news is we're also up 
against the suppler idiocies of current Western orthodoxy.  Thus, the U.S. 
government's new plans to photograph and fingerprint visitors from countries 
"believed to harbour terrorists" have already been attacked by Mary Robinson, 
the UN Human Rights honcho who's never met an Arab dictator she didn't like.  
Islamists want to kill us in the name of Islam.  Regrettable, but there it 
is.  If we pretend otherwise, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the 
Canadian Islamic Congress and the Islamic Society of Britain might be nice to 
us.  But, speaking personally, I can't say I care.  If Islamic lobby groups 
throughout the Western world really want to hitch their star to a bunch of 
psychopathic morons, good luck to them.  It's a free country.  Hey, we'll 
even give you a government grant to tell us how racist we are.

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