Patterico's Pontifications

4/22/2005

BREAKING–Atta was on flight with James Woods

Filed under: General,Terrorism — See Dubya @ 6:54 pm



Remember Annie Jacobsen? And Northwest Flight 327?

In a new column, a DHS agent tells her that Mohammed Atta was on a dry run flight with actor James Woods. And they’re still checking up on the Syrian Wayne Newton.

UPDATE

Patterico tells me he thinks he’s heard this before…and it’s true that the stuff about James Woods witnessing a dry run has been around a while. But what is new here is that Atta was on Woods’ plane, plus now there is confirmation from the government that it was actually Atta on the plane with him. Interestingly, in a New Yorker article by Sy Hersh, Woods says he recognizes two other members of the hijack team but doesn’t mention Atta at all:

On the evening of September 11th, Woods telephoned the Los Angeles office of the F.B.I. and told a special agent about the encounter. In an interview on Fox Television in February, Woods described being awakened at six-forty-five the next morning by a telephone call from the agent. “I said, ‘I’ll get ready and I’ll come down to the federal building,’ ” Woods recounted. “He said, ‘That’s O.K. We’re outside your house.’ ” By then, Woods told me, he was no longer certain of the date of his trip. “The first thing I said is ‘I’m not sure which flight it was on.’ ” But he had a vivid memory of the men’s faces. When he was shown photographs, Woods thought he recognized two of the hijackers—Hamza Alghamdi, who flew on United Airlines Flight 175, which struck the south tower of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Almihdhar, who was on American Airlines Flight 77, which struck the Pentagon. One of the men stood out because of his “pointy hair,” Woods told me, and the other looked like one of the characters in the movie version of John le Carré’s “The Little Drummer Girl.”

Strange, since Atta’s loathsome likeness was immediately circulated after the attacks and his is pretty much the only instantly recognizable face of any of the hijackers. But maybe Atta was sitting elsewhere on the plane.

UPDATE II

The FBI previously denied having proof that any of the hijackers were on the plane. From the same Hersh New Yorker article:

A senior F.B.I. official told me that the bureau had subsequently investigated Woods’s story but had not been able to find evidence of the hijackers on the flight Woods thought he had taken. “We don’t know for sure,” the official said.

UPDATE III, Early Sunday AM: Welcome, Michelle Malkin readers! Regular blog boss Patterico’s got a lot of interesting stuff for you around here, if I do say so my damn self–my own guest-blogging run winds up today. Thanks to Patterico for letting me house-sit.

–See Dubya

5 Responses to “BREAKING–Atta was on flight with James Woods”

  1. Moussawi’s Target: The White House
    And yet Bush, that coward, thought it prudent to stay away from DC until after all planes were grounded. Where did this snivelling yella-belly ever get the idea that the White House might be on a list of terrorist targets?…

    Ace of Spades HQ (1483fa)

  2. Wow. I’d heard the James Woods story before, but the Atta detail is chilling.

    Hondo (5e13bf)

  3. Do you remember Annie Jacobsen?
    Terror in the Skies? Flight 327? I was not aware that Annie has been writing

    Media Lies (11ee8e)

  4. Mohammed Atta’s Dry Run
    There’s a bit of buzz over the apparently new revelation that Mohammed Atta was on a “dry run” flight with James Woods a month before 9/11.
    Buzzing: Ace, Patterico’s Guest Blogger, Michelle Malkin

    Myopic Zeal (739a0c)

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    P is for Please Don’t Make Me Read the LA Times Patio Pundit is also facing blog burnout but before he took a break, he put up some good thoughts on the UN. Your Daily Prescott tells us who the…

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