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| Johnelle Bryant's Yarn About Mohamed Atta's Agriculture Loan Application |
| 2004-07-28 |
| Following up yesterday's thread, some of which discussed an ABC interview with Johnelle Bryant on June 6, 2002. From Xymphora, June 9, 2002 Mohamed Atta apparently visited a U. S. government office (Department of Agriculture) to apply for a $650,000 loan to buy a cropdusting airplane. An interesting point is that he is supposed to have visited the office in the spring of 2000, about 17 months before September 11, 2001, i. e., the end of April (or perhaps May), but he is officially supposed to have arrived in the United States in June 2000! While discussing this doomed mission with the loan officer who turned him down because it did not make sense, Atta made many odd statements, all of which are an obvious attempt to leave the impression that he was really and truly a crazed fundamentalist Islamic terrorist. He lays it on so thick, I don't know how he managed to keep from laughing: * He almost refused to deal with her, because she is a woman. * He admired a picture of Washington, D. C. that she had hanging on the wall of her office to a ridiculous degree, pointing specifically to the White House and the Pentagon, and then offered to buy it with theatrical flourish by throwing a wad of money down on the desk. When she refused to sell it to him she recounts: "I believe 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?" This is very weird, as Atta is supposed to come from Egypt, where cities haven't been destroyed for a long time. * He gave her evil, terrorist looks with his 'very scary' black eyes. * She said he referred to a safe in her office and she recounts: "He asked me what would prevent him from going behind my desk and cutting my throat and making off with the millions of dollars in that safe." * He talked of the massive size of the chemical tank he wanted to install, filling the whole inside of the plane except for the pilot's seat. * He became 'very agitated' when he found out that there was an application process and she presumably wouldn't just hand him $650,000 in cash there and then. * He asked her about security at the World Trade Center and what she knew of Phoenix, Chicago, Seattle and Los Angeles, and was particularly interested in open-topped Texas Stadium. * He mentioned Osama bin Laden, who she had never heard of, and said that bin Laden "would someday be known as the world's greatest leader." Of course, seeing as he was in the United States on a student visa, how he ever thought he would be entitled to such a loan is beyond belief. He knew he wasn't allowed to stay to ever be able to use the airplane for any plausibly legitimate purpose. Even if he mistakenly thought he could get away with this, what was his reasoning for sending three other terrorists to the same office on the much the same mission? In one case, he put on glasses as a disguise and pretended to be the accountant of one of the other hijacker-applicants, another obvious attempt to draw attention to himself. The whole thing must have sounded like a Monty Python sketch (it reminds me of the Dead Parrot sketch when Michael Palin puts on the fake mustache). The ridiculous overacting left the bureaucrat completely unsuspicious. I imagine if he had asked her if it would be OK for him to fill the plane full of explosives and fly it into the World Trade Center, she would have replied that she would strongly object to that as blowing up the collateral would be a breach of one of the terms of his loan agreement. .... -------------- From Antiwar.com, from an article titled "The Age of Malarkey," dated June 12, 2002 The news that Mohamed Atta and friends paid a visit to the Department of Agriculture in order to apply for a government loan — after all, terrorism on the scale he imagined didn't come cheap — goes waaaay beyond bizarre, all the way to phantasmagoric. How else can we describe Johnelle Bryant's story of her close encounter with Atta, in which the terrorist mastermind walked in demanding a $650,000 government loan to fulfill his "immigrant's dream" and start a crop-dusting business? He wanted to finance a twin-engine six-passenger aircraft 
and remove the seats. He said he was an engineer, and 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. According to Bryant, a 16-year veteran of the department, her weird run-in with Atta occurred "sometime between the end of April and the middle of May 2000," and there were several aspects of the interview that made it, uh, memorable — although it's only now that she decided to report it. Bryant tells us that, initially, Atta refused to even speak with her, disdaining her as "but a female." After she assured him that she was, indeed, in charge, he relented, but still kept insulting her. But that didn't stop the ever-helpful Bryant from trying to help him in any way possible. After he explained his "immigrant's dream," Bryant told him about the application process, and he became "very agitated." It seems that Atta, the devilishly clever ringleader of the most successful terrorist plot in modern times, "thought the loan would be in cash, and that he would have no trouble obtaining it to purchase an aircraft." If this expectation seems slightly puzzling, then Atta's crazed behavior during the interview seems calculated to draw attention to himself as a dangerous nutball. At one point, he noted that the building seemed to lack security. Bryant says he pointed at the safe behind her desk, and He asked me what would prevent him from going behind my desk and cutting my throat and making off with the millions of dollars in that safe. As to why Bryant didn't call security — such as it was — then and there is beyond me. Instead, she explained that the safe contained no money, the Department of Agriculture is not a bank — oh, and by the way, I'm "trained in karate." After this little dust-up, however, all was forgiven, apparently, and they got back down to business. Bryant tells us he asked questions about how he could get training, and whether his travel plans — "I think he said he needed to go to Madrid, and somewhere in Germany, and then there was a third country" — would interfere with the application process. Bryant turned down Atta's application — not because he said scary things, or because he had "scary eyes," black and intense, but on the grounds that, as a foreign national, he "didn't meet the basic eligibility requirements." Which just goes to show that you can appear to be a homicidal maniac, and still get a government grant, provided you're a citizen of this great country. Isn't America wonderful? Don't let anybody tell you different. Oh, but here's my favorite part of this ABC News "exclusive": Being turned down for the loan altered the hijackers' plans. According to law enforcement officials, packing twin-engine planes with explosive chemicals, making it a flying bomb, had been the terrorists' plan since the mid-1990s. When Atta reported to his group that he could not get a loan to buy smaller planes, the plan was switched to hijacking passenger jets, according to what Abu Zabaydah, a top lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, has told American interrogators since his capture. So in the fall of 2000, the hijackers who had been learning to fly small planes began to seek simulator training in the large jets they would fly into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Get outta here! So now they're telling us that the fabulously wealthy Osama bin Laden, with all the resources of a worldwide terrorist empire at his disposal, was too cheap to put up a mere $650 thousand? Given all the long-range planning and additional resources he poured into the preparations for the 9/11 attacks, this hardly seems possible. Even more unbelievable is the idea that the hijackers had been counting on that government loan to finance their plans, and, when they didn't get it, had to radically shift course. What a load of malarkey! If true, that would have to mean that, on 9/11, myriad agencies of the US government were outfoxed by terrorists who are total retards. While we're on the subject of total retards — Bryant also tells us how, before leaving, Atta became "fixated" on a photo of Washington, D.C., as seen from the air, hanging on the wall: 'He pulled out a wad of cash,' she said, 'and started throwing money on my desk. He wanted that picture really bad.' Bryant indicated that the picture was not for sale, and he threw more money down. 'His look on his face became very bitter at that point,' Bryant remembers. 'I believe 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?' Oh, and which country is that? There is considerable controversy over Atta's nationality, and the mystery has yet to be cleared up as far as I can tell, but most speculation places him somewhere in North Africa: possibly Egyptian, or Algerian. We know he studied architecture in Cairo. Only one North African country has had its capital city "attacked" by the US, and that is Libya, in 1986, when Tripoli was bombed — but the city was hardly "destroyed." Atta's exit speech is the kind of extravagant touch one might expect in a cheap paperback thriller: indeed, this whole narrative has a pulp-novelistic feel to it, like bad art imitating life. Conveniently, Atta also launched into a rant about Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, and "boasted about the role they would play one day." Of the latter, according to Bryant, "he said this man would someday be known as the world's greatest leader." It's stories like this that make one wonder if the Office of Strategic Influence — remember them? — really disbanded after all. Or was that just their way of strategically influencing us? The only believable aspect of this tall tale is Bryant's claim of complete ignorance: I didn't know who Osama bin Laden was 
He could have been a character on Star Wars for all I knew. That I believe. As for the rest of it
. ------------- From EdwardJayEpstein.com, an article titled Fictoid 11: The Terror Crop Dusters On September 23, 2001, at the request of Attorney General John Ashcroft, the government grounded all the crop-dusters in America — over 5,000 planes that ordinarily spray pesticides on crops. The FBI then issued an ominous nationwide alert citing the possibility of a terrorist crop-duster attacks. The next day, before the House Committee on the Judiciary, Ashcroft testified that he had ordered these actions based on information the FBI received that these crop-dusting aircraft could be used "to distribute chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction." .... As it turned out, all these news stories, as well as Ashcroft's information about Atta, were based on the recollections of two people — Johnell Bryant and James Lester. Johnell Bryant, a loan manager in the Department of Agriculture's Florida Farm Service Office, recalled after September 11th that Atta came to her office to get a $650,000 cash loan to finance a twin-engine, six-passenger airplane (not a crop-duster.) She said that the man had told her that he intended to build a tank in the passenger plane so he could also use it for crop-dusting. She said that the meeting had occurred in 2000, between "the third week of April to the third week of May of 2000." She was able to fix the date because the Far Service subsequently moved their office to Florida City. While no doubt some Arab-looking man made an inquiry about getting a loan during this period, Mohamed Atta was in Germany during that time period, applying for his visa to come to the United States. He did not arrive in the United States until June 3rd 2000. If so, the person who came into Bryant's office to get a loan to buy a passenger plane in April or May 2000 could not have been Mohamed Atta. ... When these conflicts in dates became apparent after the FBI re- interviewed the two witnesses, the Department of Justice decided to drop the terror crop-dusters from its case. On June 25 2002, it replaced the previous indictment with a new one that omitted the claim that "Mohammed Atta made inquiries regarding starting a crop dusting company," any other references to"crop dusting" encounters by anyone alleged to be part of the conspiracy. The terror crop-dusting planes, a fictoid initially of Ashcroft and the Justice Department, is now only a fictoid of the media. |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |
| #1 How insensitive and western-centric for Ms. Bryant to force Mr. Atta to undergo the humiliation of actually looking at her uncovered face. A truly compassionate government would have given Mr. Atta at least $1,000,000 in small unmarked bills so he can make his American dream come true. |
| Posted by: ed 2004-07-28 11:14:21 PM |