CLICK FOR A CRIME SCENE!

Al-Qaida figure says bin Laden dropped Asia, West Coast strikes
Sept. 21 -- The former operations chief of al-Qaida has provided details of the plot behind the Sept. 11 attacks. NBC's Rosiland Jordan reports.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, has told American interrogators that he first discussed the plot with Osama bin Laden in 1996 and that the original plan called for hijacking five commercial jets on each U.S. coast before it was modified several times, according to interrogation.CLICK THIS LINK...A CRIME SCENE!
TEACH TRAVEL PRECAUTIONS USING THE INTERNET.

U.S. Tracks Foreign Visitors by Sky, Sea
By SUZANNE GAMBOA, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Foreigners entering U.S. airports and seaports from all but 28 nations began getting their fingerprints scanned and photographs taken Monday as part of a new program Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said will ensure that borders are secure in an era of terrorist threat. AP Photo Ridge was at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport to meet with some of the first foreign passengers from Brazil and Chile to go through the new system. Other top federal officials also planned to be at airports across the nation to help draw attention to the new policy. "We want to keep our borders open. We are a welcoming country," Ridge told NBC's "Today" show. "We want to secure the country as well. We want them to come to the United States to work and to visit and to study. We also need to make sure we have a record of who comes into the country and when they leave." On CBS's "The Early Show," Ridge revealed that during a pilot program that preceded implementation Monday of a nationwide system of such checks, authorities turned up nearly two-dozen people, including some with records as felons, and deported them. "If you are a non-immigrant alien," he said, "we would like to identify you through a digital fingerprint and a photo scan." All 115 U.S. airports that handle international flights and 14 major seaports are covered by the program, under which Customs officials can instantly check an immigrant or visitor's criminal background. Called US-VISIT, or U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology, the program will check an estimated 24 million foreigners each year, though some will be repeat visitors. The only exceptions will be visitors from 28 countries — mostly European nations whose citizens are allowed to come to the United States for up to 90 days without visas. Inkless fingerprints will be taken and checked instantly against a national digital database for criminal backgrounds and any terrorist lists. The process will be repeated when the foreigners leave the country as an extra security measure and to ensure they complied with visa limitations. Homeland Security spokesman Bill Strassberger said that once screeners become proficient, the extra security will take only 10 to 15 seconds per person. Foreign travelers also will continue to pass through regular Customs points and answer questions. Photographs will be used to help create a database for law enforcement. The travel data is supposed to be securely stored and made available only to authorized officials on a need-to-know basis. A similar program is to be installed at 50 land border crossings by the end of next year, Strassberger said. Brazilian (news - web sites) police started fingerprinting and photographing Americans arriving at Sao Paulo's airport last week in response to the new U.S. regulations. Brazil's Foreign Ministry has requested that Brazilians be removed from the U.S. list. "At first, most of the Americans were angered at having to go through all this, but they were usually more understanding once they learned that Brazilians are subjected to the same treatment in the U.S.," Wagner Castilho, press officer for the federal police in Sao Paulo, said of those arriving at Sao Paulo-Guarulhos International Airport last Thursday. The U.S. system consists of a small box that digitally scans fingerprints and a spherical computer camera that snaps pictures. It will be used for foreign nationals traveling on tourist, business and student visas who enter through an airport or seaport. The new system will gradually phase out a paper-based system that Congress mandated be modernized following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

A person whose fingerprints or photos raise questions would not be turned away automatically. The visa holder would be sent to secondary inspection for further questions and checks. Officials have said false hits on the system have been less than 0.1 percent in trial runs. The system was scheduled to begin operation New Year's Day but was delayed to avoid the busy holiday travel period. Congress provided $368 million to produce the system and put it in airports, but only provided $330 million of the $400 million President Bush (news - web sites) requested to put the system in land borders in 2004.
On the Net:

http://www.dhs.gov/us-visit

9/11 Panel: Confusion Hindered Response 15 minutes ago Add Top Stories - AP to My Yahoo! By HOPE YEN, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - The terror strikes of Sept. 11, 2001 overwhelmed all immediate efforts at response or even full comprehension, a bipartisan commission reported Thursday, and spread confusion to the point that Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) mistakenly thought U.S. warplanes shot down two aircraft. AP Photo AP Photo Slideshow: September 11 Commission Plays Recordings From Planes (AP Video) The front line civilian and military agencies struggled to "improvise a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never encountered and had never trained to meet," the panel said. "We fought many phantoms that day," Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the panel. He noted that reports of car bombings and other terrorist acts spread quickly — and falsely — in the nerves-on-edge hours after the World Trade Center and Pentagon (news - web sites) were struck by planes hijacked by terrorists. The commission issued its findings as it held the final public session of a momentous review of the worst terror strikes in the nation's history. The panel is expected to make a final report next month into the events that killed nearly 3,000. The commission said efforts to respond to four hijackings that day were plagued on multiple fronts. One plane moved into a gap in Federal Aviation Administration (news - web sites) radar coverage. A single air traffic controller wound up with responsibility for two hijacked planes simultaneously. The FAA failed to notify the military that one of the four planes had been hijacked. The FAA also incorrectly told the military that the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center was still in the air after impact. The report said the military never had more than nine minutes notice from the FAA on any of the four hijackings. Moreover, there was a delay in passing along an order for pilots to shoot down any hostile aircraft. Even so, the commission's report steered clear of any claims that the planes could have been intercepted. "NORAD (North American Air Defense Command) officials have maintained that they would have intercepted and shot down United 93. We are not so sure," the report said. That was the hijacked plane that crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside, evidently after passengers struggled with the terrorists aboard. "Their actions saved the lives of countless others," the panel said. If FAA and NORAD officials were scrambling to deal with the strikes, so, too, were top officials of the government. President Bush (news - web sites) was in Florida, leaving Cheney as the senior official in Washington. On Bush's authorization, Cheney relayed an order for military planes to shoot down aircraft deemed hostile. At midmorning, more than a half-hour after the order had been given, Cheney told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld he thought it had been carried out. "It's my understanding that they've already taken a couple of aircraft out," Cheney said, according to the partial transcript of a conference call that the commission released. The commission session was twice interrupted briefly by protesters. One man, holding an American flag, stood up and shouted, "I'm walking out." He was escorted from the room by police. While it is customary for commission staff to read their report aloud, this one was augmented by snippets of tape recordings made that day as well as graphics demonstrating the flight paths of the four hijacked plans. A particularly haunting transmission came from the cockpit of American Airlines Flight 11, which took off from Boston and was the first plane to strike the World Trade Center. A person believed to be Mohamed Atta, the alleged ringleader of the 19 hijackers, who piloted the plane, is heard saying to passengers: "We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you'll be OK. We are returning to the airport." Later, Atta tells the passengers, "If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane." The report largely blamed inadequate emergency procedures that contemplated more time to react to a traditional hijacking rather than a suicide hijacking. In many cases, the panel praised the actions of government personnel forced to make split-second decisions. In the hours just after the attacks occurred, nearly 4,500 planes in the air had to be landed as quickly as possible. To do that, air traffic controllers first had to reroute about a quarter of them — juggling 50 times the usual number of planes rerouted each hour. "We do not believe that an accurate understanding of the events of that morning reflects discredit on the operational personnel," the report said. The report issued said air traffic controllers realized at 8:24 a.m. on Sept. 11 that Flight 11 was being hijacked, but lost several minutes notifying layers of command — according to protocol — before contacting NORAD. The plane crashed at 8:46 a.m. Controllers, meanwhile, didn't realize American Airlines Flight 77 — which took off from Dulles Airport outside Washington — might be hijacked when it mysteriously started veering off course at 8:54 a.m. The plane then traveled undetected for 36 minutes toward Washington, due in part to a radar glitch. The confusion meant only an unarmed military cargo plane could be diverted to track the plane. The plane located Flight 77 but could do nothing as the commercial jetliner crashed into the Pentagon. The commission is winding down its 1 1/2-year investigation after interviewing more than 1,000 witnesses, including Bush, and reviewing more than 2 million documents. ___