Freedom Of Jihad
My old pal Richard Reid,* aka Federal Inmate No. 24079-038, popularly known as the “shoe bomber,” is suing for his right to communicate and pray … with a bunch of other al-Qaeda types. Debra Burlingame at the Wall Street Journal explains how Reid’s lawsuit and a better-liked DOJ seems more amenable to allowing him to share the company of other man-caused disaster enthusiasts, possible outside of their current restrictive supermax environment.
* I always feel a sense of … kinship isn’t the right word, let’s say familiarity … with the shoe bomber. I was working the night the flight he tried to blow up with his sneakers, Ameriican Airlines Flight 63, was diverted into Logan International Airport, and interviewed one of the passengers who tackled him and restrained him. You remember the famous shot of what he looked like after that.
Ouch! Here’s his mugshot. Reid was a neighbor of mine for a couple of years, a few miles down the road in the Plymouth County House of Corrections, where some friends and neighbors in the Plymouth County Sheriff’s Department watched over him. I recall one saying he was a nice enough guy as jihadi wackjobs and prison inmates go. But very much a jihadi wackjob.
He does have a disarming, goofy sort of Ringo Starr thing going on.
But don’t be fooled. Not only did he get past the French with his C4-packed sneakers, and do his damndest to blow that plane out of the sky, he’s been a real headache for the feds, staging hunger strikes and nuisance lawsuits.
Here’s my Boston Herald story from December 2001:
The passengers on American Airlines Flight 63 had finished a quiet lunch and were settling in for the long Atlantic flight faced with nothing more exciting than a movie when a flight attendant cried out for help yesterday.
French TV journalist Thierry Dugeon, 36, was 10 rows behind the fracas in coach.
“Suddenly, I heard a female voice, `I need some help! I need some help!’ ” Dugeon said.
Instinctively, he ran up the narrow aisle to join the group of passengers in a desperate struggle with a man believed to have a bomb.
“It’s three months after September 11th. Of course the first thing you think is something like terrorism,” Dugeon said. “Ten rows in front of me it looked like a fight. I joined the fight . . . It’s pure instinct. It goes so fast. It was my ass as well as the others. You hear a stewardess screaming on an airplane, what do you do? You fight!”
Dugeon was one of 185 passengers aboard the Miami-bound Boeing 767 that landed safely, under fighter jet escort, at Logan International Airport. He spoke with the Herald after being questioned by police and before boarding another plane for Florida.
Dugeon described the melee that lasted long minutes. “Everybody was trying to hold whatever part of the body he could. He was a powerful man. You could feel him resisting,” he said.
The fight took place in a crowded, narrow economy class aisle. Shortly after a woman left her seat, the culprit by the window of Row 29 lit a match, drawing a reprimand from a flight attendant. Minutes later she caught him trying to light the tongue of his black, suede high-topped basketball shoe. When she tried to take the matches away, he bit her on the hand, other passengers said.
“The nearest passengers saw it and grabbed him and tried to put him in his seat, put him under control . . . He was struggling. He was real powerful. But we were like five or six,” Dugeon said.
The struggle, he said, was a blur as passengers tried to subdue the 6-foot-4 suspected terrorist in his seat. They finally had him immobilized.
“After that, we tied him up with everything we had,” Dugeon said. Passengers gave up their belts, strapped a seatbelt around the man, and someone else produced several plastic zip-ties, anything they could get to restrain the unruly man.
A member of the flight crew threatened to blast the man with a fire extinguisher if he moved.
Two doctors on board the Paris-to-Miami flight appeared with syringes and administered sedatives while a flight attendant began questioning him. Passengers rifled his pockets.
“A flight attendant said, `Are you French?’ He said no,” Dugeon said.
Searchers found a passport in the name of Richard Reid.
“When we found the passport, the flight attendant said, `Are you British?’ He said, `No, I’m Jamaican,’ ” Dugeon said.
The journalist said despite the tumultuous, life-and-death fight, the plane settled into a stunned silence almost immediately after its end. Some passengers spoke quietly of fears that there might be a bomb in the cargo hold.
There did not appear to be fear of other assailants nor a search for possible accomplices, Dugeon said.
“Nobody panicked. The crew was very efficient. Everybody kept sitting. Nobody was saying anything . . . Everybody was really quiet,” Dugeon said.
Flight attendants used the public address system to ask passengers to remain seated and assured them the plane was secure and they were now being diverted to Boston.
Only as the flight neared its new destination did the captain take up the microphone to again reassure the passengers and to warn them they might see F-15 fighter jets escorting them.
The final hours of the flight were filled with the scheduled showing of the goofy comedy “Legally Blonde,” which is based in Boston.
“Bad luck!” Dugeon joked.
When asked if he was proud of what he and others had accomplished, Dugeon answered, “Proud? No. It is basic, I think.
“It was like everybody knew not what they had to do, but what they needed to do,” Dugeon said.
Here’s a 2006 NY Post article on his time in Plymouth, his thoughts about blowing hundreds of innocents out of the sky, and his resignation to Allah’s will re his failure in that endeavor:
Shoe bomber Richard Reid, serving a life sentence for trying to blow up a U.S.-bound jet, has no regrets about his evil plot, which nearly killed 198 people.
“I am not crazy as they suggest, but I knew exactly what I was doing,” the Muslim fanatic told a lawyer hired by his mother.
“Of course I would have been sad to have those people die, but I knew that my cause was just and righteous. It was the will of Allah that I did not succeed,” he said.
Reid made his chilling comments to lawyer Peter Herbert at a Plymouth, Mass., prison in 2002 - but the attorney kept them confidential until they appeared in The Guardian newspaper in Britain yesterday.
Reid, now 32, boasted of al Qaeda’s bright future, saying the imprisoning of suspected terrorists only helped its cause.
“Guantanamo Bay will provide us with thousands of recruits the longer it is maintained,” he said of the U.S. jail in Cuba.
Reid was caught on a Paris-to-Miami flight in December 2001 when a flight attendant spotted him fumbling with matches and trying to ignite a bomb hidden in the hollowed-out sole of his shoe. Other passengers bravely tackled him and saved the flight from destruction.
A second plotter, who was to attack the plane along with Reid, backed out at the last minute.
The incident led to new security precautions that required air travelers to take their shoes off for inspection before boarding.
The only regret Reid expressed was that his mother, who lives in London, would have to visit his prison if she wanted contact with him.
“I do feel sorry for my mum having to see me here,” he said. “I had not wanted to see her, to protect here from all this. But I will see her if she travels to see me.”
Herbert, the lawyer, said he got involved in the shoe bomber’s case shortly after his arrest when Reid’s mother asked for help in handling the media attention focusing on her and her son. She also asked if he would check on the terrorist’s prison conditions.
When he met Reid in jail, the prisoner was wearing an orange jumpsuit and moved awkwardly because he was wearing leg irons as a security measure.
“The man before me seemed so different from the picture of him issued after the arrest, in which he looked almost deranged and unbalanced,” Herbert told The Guardian.
“He was tall, lean and bearded and came across as calm, speaking softly with a south London accent,” he recalled.
Despite Reid’s jihad-fueled fanaticism, he said he was being well treated in the Plymouth penitentiary. He said he dealt with threats of violence from other inmates by telling them “not to mess” with him because he had nothing to lose.
Reid, who had a troubled childhood, learned the skills that allowed him to survive behind bars when he served time in a youthful offender’s prison in west London, Herbert said.
Reid said he was motivated by hatred of U.S. foreign policy and he compared himself to the suicide bombers of Hamas. “What do you expect people to do?” he said.
During their talk, Herbert said he tried to avoid discussing Reid’s crime because he suspected U.S. authorities were listening in. But he said Reid discussed his fate freely.
“I have to accept that what has happened is set,” he said.
Reid has been described as poorly educated. But Herbert said, “He was able to express himself and came across as someone who had passed through the state education system and then supplemented his knowledge with a large amount of self-teaching through reading books.”
He said when they met, the first thing on Reid’s mind was getting a British consular official to locate books on Islam, politics and the United States that he could read behind bars. He had a list of books and knew of a New York bookstore that might have the titles.
When Herbert got up to leave, Reid gave him a clenched-fist “respect” handshake.
Herbert added that although anti-terrorism officials knew about his talk with Reid, none has ever asked him about their conversation.
HEEL: Richard Reid, who was foiled trying to blow up a U.S.-bound plane in ‘01, said, “It was the will of Allah that I did not succeed.”
I guess my underlying thought, as my old pal the shoe bomber resurfaces briefly, is what a weird world this has become since Sept. 11, 2001, where these kind of extreme and bizarre occurences … murder plots so close to home, an almost banal sort of evil, war and its toll among friends … have become almost normal. Part of the world we now live in. I think about it from time to time. It has consumed my own life for eight years now, changing everything as I found myself reborn into this world of war, no longer the person I was before. I know that’s true for a lot of people. Small case in point: Today, I’m doing a brief interview with WGBH’s Greater Boston, which is interested in my thoughts on a University of Alaska plan to embed journalism students with combat troops in Diyala. That’s different. More on that later.
But back to the matter at hand. Apparently, the evil is so banal that some people have forgotten how evil and dangerous it actually is.
Topics: GWOT, Obama, al qaeda, explosives, moronocy
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:25 am on Thursday, July 30, 2009
6 Responses to “Freedom Of Jihad”
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July 30th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Dugeon said. “Ten rows in front of me it looked like a fight. I joined the fight . . . It’s pure instinct. It goes so fast. It was my ass as well as the others. You hear a stewardess screaming on an airplane, what do you do? You fight!” Thierry Dugeon, and the other passengers, and stewardess, who subdued this enemy are heroes. (Based on that, I vote for Thierry Dugeon as French Ambassador to the US). Good to remember what they did.
I’m with Debra Burlingame on this, but my thoughts on what to do with “Reid” are along the lines of what we did with Skorzeny’s men in the BOTB. a href=”http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=36c8d7eef162775e&q=firing%20squad%20source:life&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dfiring%2Bsquad%2Bsource:life%26ndsp%3D21%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26start%3D21″>And the sooner, the better.
Can our administration get even more stupid? Apparently so. Amazing.
July 30th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Oh, shoot.
And the sooner, the better.
July 30th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
…one more time (S.N.A.F.U.)
AND THE SOONER, THE BETTER!
(i give up if this doesn’t work)
July 30th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
[...] Jules rembers him, particularly this part: The passengers on American Airlines Flight 63 had finished a quiet lunch and were settling in for the long Atlantic flight faced with nothing more exciting than a movie when a flight attendant cried out for help yesterday. [...]
July 30th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
I’m with MikeHu. The sooner the better. If only.
July 31st, 2009 at 4:33 pm
[...] Freedom Of Jihad [...]