huffingtonpost: A Timely Conversation with Donald Rumsfeld

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A Timely Conversation with Donald Rumsfeld
Michael Smerconish
6.21.2005

I was provided with the opportunity interview Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld today, for my Philadelphia based radio program. The interview will run tomorrow, June 22nd. I was anxious to ask him about last week’s Time Magazine “exclusive” titled “Detainee 063, Inside the Wire at Gitmo”. It is a subject that interests me greatly, because I wrote about Detainee 063 in my book, Flying Blind, How Political Correctness Continues to Compromise Airline Safety. Detainee 063 is Mohammed al-Qahtani. Let me give you a little background on him before I tell you what the Defense Secretary had to say, today.

First, in Flying Blind, I tell what I call the real story of United Airlines Flight 93. Remember, there were two things that distinguished Flight 93 from the other three flights on 9/11: First, due to a passenger revolt, it did not complete its mission, crashing instead into a field in Western Pennsylvania; and second, from a terrorist standpoint, Flight 93 was shorthanded. Recall that Flight 93 had four terrorists on board, while the other airplanes each had five. There has been a lot of conjecture over time as to whether there was to have been a 20th hijacker, meaning a fifth person on Flight 93. Well, the 9/11 Commission believed the answer was “yes”, and that the person who was to have been on Flight 93 is al-Qahtani. Why didn’t he make it? Al-Qahtani was stopped when he sought entrance to the United States on August 4 of 2001 at the Orlando International Airport. Then, al-Qahtani was a Saudi national who came before a very alert secondary inspections officer named Jose Melendez-Perez. What caused Melendez-Perez to slow him down? As he told the 9/11 Commission about al-Qahtani, "he just gave me the creeps".

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