St. Petersburg Times (Florida)
July 4, 2004 Sunday 0 South Pinellas Edition
Of fact, fiction:
Bush on 9/11
BYLINE: SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
SECTION: NATIONAL; Pg. 1A
DATELINE: SARASOTA
EXCERPT
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Was the president ever in danger while in Florida on 9/11?
In the days and weeks after the terror attacks, news organizations in the Sarasota area reported several incidents suggesting he was. But like so many things that day, rumor often superceded reality.
One of the most tantalizing stories appeared Sept. 26 in the weekly Longboat Observer, which said Longboat Key fire Marshal Carroll Mooneyhan had overheard a "strange exchange" between a receptionist at the Colony and a security guard.
As related by Mooneyhan, a van occupied by men of Middle Eastern descent had pulled up to the Colony about 6 a.m. on Sept. 11 and said they had a "pool side" interview with the president. The Secret Service said it had no record of an interview and turned them away.
To conspiracy buffs, the incident bore an eerie resemblance to a successful ruse used 8,000 miles away in Afghanistan. On Sept. 9 - two days before the U.S. attacks - Ahmed Massoud, the pro-American leader of the Northern Alliance, had been assassinated by two men posing as journalists and carrying a bomb disguised as a TV camera.
Were the men on Longboat Key planning to kill Bush in similar fashion? The problem with this theory is that Mooneyhan denies he ever told the Observer about any men in a van seeking an interview.
"How did they get that information from me if I didn't know it?" Mooneyhan asks.
The Observer sticks by its story. All the paper and Mooneyhan agree on is that he chatted with a reporter -- he says they were friends -- and that both were questioned by the Secret Service after the story appeared. (The agency wouldn't comment.)
The Observer also reported that two Middle Eastern men who lived in a Longboat Key mobile home park left shortly before 9/11, saying they were going to a wedding but never came back. That aroused suspicion because "wedding" is sometimes a code word for an al-Qaida attack.
But Martin Sharkey, the deputy Longboat Key police chief, recalls that the men really had gone to a wedding in Jordan and returned "to find their names or something on TV. They called the FBI and said, "We're not involved in anything.' I remember that was checked out and those people were back here working."
A Sarasota TV station reported another incident: Omer Zainelabden called Sarasota police on Sept. 10 to say that a friend named "Gandi," who had made threatening remarks against the president in the past, had just arrived in town. Zainelabden, a Sudanese, then disappeared -- perhaps nabbed by immigration authorities in a post 9/11 sweep of Muslim men.
But records show Zainelabden called police Sept. 11, hours after Bush left town. And Zainelabden, who had a history of heavy drinking, was still in Sarasota months later, other records show.
But while many reports were questionable at best, it soon became known that some of the 9/11 hijackers had spent time on the west coast of Florida and taken flight lessons there. That lends credibility to the account of Darlene Sievers, a longtime bartender at the Holiday Inn on Longboat Key.
Sievers was watching TV after the attacks when she was shocked to see a photograph of lead hijacker Mohamed Atta -- the man she swears had been in the hotel's lounge just a few weeks before.
Atta, she recalls, came in during happy hour, sat down by himself at the bar and ordered a $4 rum and Coke. A few minutes later another man, wearing a brown, aviator-style jacket, sat down next to Atta. He didn't speak English and didn't want anything to drink, so Atta asked for the check, left a $20 bill, and the two men walked out together.
"I was sort of dumbfounded he left me a $16 tip with no conversation," Sievers says. After seeing Atta on TV, Sievers told her son, who called the Sheriff's Office, which notified the FBI.
"They called me twice and did spend some time out at the Holiday Inn -- I felt they were taking it seriously," she says although she never heard anything more.
The dining room manager and a waiter at the hotel, which has since been torn down, said they too had seen Atta on other occasions. It is certainly possible - Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, who piloted the second plane to hit the World Trade Center, trained at a flight school in Venice, just a half hour away by car.
What were the two men doing at the Holiday Inn that evening? Were they making final plans for the attacks that would transform the president's routine day in Florida into one that would forever alter his presidency?
Sievers doesn't know. But she remains convinced that one of the men was Mohamed Atta.
"I can remember people's drinks," she
says, "and I'll never forget those piercing black eyes."
-- Times researchers Kitty Bennett and Cathy Wos contributed to this report,
which also contains information from "An Interesting Day" by Paul Thompson at
the Center for Cooperative Research.
-- Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at
susan@sptimes.com