At Least Someone Had a Brain

I read a great story on CNN today about how a flight instructor at the Minnesota flight school where Zacarias Moussaoui was training for 9/11, received $5 million from the state department for his tip that Moussaoui was suspicious. Based on his tip, Moussaoui was put in jail on the grounds of his expired French passport and could not participate in the attacks as the 20th highjacker. To this date, he is the only 9/11 co-conspirator charged with a crime. The fact that this man had the foresight to be suspicious in a pre 9/11 world is pretty fantastic. It's money very well-deserved and I hope he enjoys it.

Among the things the instructor found suspicious, that his superiors chose to ignore:

- Moussaoui payed the $6,800 for his training in $100 bills, a fact that at first, his bosses did not question.

- Moussaoui was learning how to operate a 747 with only 50 hours of flight training behind him. Normally, the school taught pilots with 500-600 hours of flying time behind them, mostly of whom were commercial pilots training so they could be paid more at their airline jobs.

- Wanting to learn more about Moussaoui before teaching him further, the instructor asked him if he was Muslim, to which Moussaoui yelled, "I am nothing!" Note, that in this post-9/11 world this seems much more menacing that it would at the time, so to note the strangeness of this answer in a pre-9/11 world makes this man all the more a hero.

- To keep Moussaoui engaged in his lessons while his bosses finally consented to bring in the FBI, the instructor let him sit on other students' flight simulations but did not allow him to do his own.

The man noted in Moussaoui's trial that while he thought Moussaoui strange, he did just want to make sure that he wasn't training a hijacker. Obviously, he could not have known what kind of hijacker Moussauoi was training to be, but by simply listening to his gut, only God knows how many additional lives this man saved. It is believed Moussaoui planned to highjack a JFK-bound plane from Heathrow airport.