Actually it’s more like watching three sequels.

2nd Lt. Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani
Ahmed Ibrahim al-Haznawi

In the original story a Saudi Arabian who flew the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 as part of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 helped develop the plot in Florida where he also may have attended flight schools. That’s him on the left.

In the latest sequel just last Friday a Saudi Arabian shot eleven people at a flight school he was attending in Florida, killing three and injuring eight before being shot and killed himself by police. This time it was an officer in the Saudi Air Force who was training at the Pensacola Naval Air Station. That’s him on the right.

Is it just me or should the US intelligence agencies and military be a little more wary of Middle Eastern Arabs training at flight schools in Florida than they seem to be?

I guess we should be grateful that Alshamrani only used a handgun rather than an airplane – especially a military airplane!

Some 62,700 foreign military students from 155 countries participated in such training in the USA in 2018 alone, so it may be that looking for a potential Islamic Jihadist is needle-in-the-haystack stuff.

 
“A person familiar with the program said that Saudi Air Force officers selected for military training in the United States are intensely vetted by both countries.
 

The Saudi personnel are ‘hand-picked’ by their military and often come from elite families, the person said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they did not have permission to speak to a reporter. Trainees must speak excellent English.”
 
Okay, but during all this intense vetting did anyone, especially in the USA, have an extended chat with him about his thoughts on America and the global jihad? Were there any follow-ups to this, especially after he returned from Saudi Arabia when others noted that he had become notably “more religious” than he had been before?I doubt it. Any effort to have done so would have been denounced as “Islamophobic” and would have been career suicide for whoever did the questioning.

Apparently King Salman informed President Trump that the Saudi people “love Americans” and “are greatly angered by the barbaric actions of the shooter...”.  I don’t doubt that many of them, including King Salman, genuinely do feel like that about the shooter as well as having other emotions about him like shame and disgust.

But that’s not the point.

Of the 19 men involved in the September 11 attacks, 15 were Saudi Arabian, and that was a quite deliberate selection by Osama Bin Laden, who wanted to demonstrate to both the US and the leaders of Saudi Arabia that the majority of the nation was on his side, not theirs.

Frankly the jury is still out on that, especially following the arrests of six other Saudis. At best you could describe the Saudi’s as being “frenemies” of the USA. What that’s going to change about the “intense vetting” is anybody’s guess but were I a US military officer working with Saudi nationals I think I’d start asking to be allowed to carry my handgun at all times rather than trusting the higher ups, let alone the “gun free zone” bullshit that actually translates to “you can shoot here and nobody will shoot back until its too late“.

Major Nidal Malik Hasan

The reason for such a precaution is that overlooking the fact that a military officer is a secret Islamic Jihadist has happened before in the USA, with the latest chapter perhaps being a different sequel – this time to the 2009 Fort Hood shootings.

They were conducted by the guy on the left, Major Nidal Hasan, a US Army psychiatrist of all things, who killed 13 people and wounded more than 30 others at the military base.

He was considered a “lone wolf” who supported terror network Al-Qaeda, but he’d left a huge trail of breadcrumbs. He’d been investigated by the FBI after intelligence agencies intercepted at least 18 e-mails between him and an Islamic preacher named Anwar al-Awlaki between December 2008 and June 2009. Even the US Army was informed of the e-mails, but the higher-ups did not see anything worrying about Hasan’s questions to Awlaki. Instead, they viewed them as:

“general questions about spiritual guidance with regard to conflicts between Islam and military service, and judged them to be consistent with his legitimate mental health research about Muslims in the armed services”.

As such he was actually praised and promoted despite alarming people who actually had to work with him, what with all his talk of violent jihad. None of his superiors dared do anything except promote him. They undoubtedly knew that if they questioned him about his loyalties it would probably be they who would face a dishonorable discharge because of “Islamophobia”.

Later of course, numerous former members of the CIA and Homeland Security would say things like:

“E-mailing a known al-Qaeda sympathizer should have set off alarm bells. Even if he was exchanging recipes, the bureau should have put out an alert.”

Well duh! But by then 13 people were dead.

One basic difference this time is that six ten more Saudi’s have been arrested near the base, three of whom were seen filming Alshamrani’s shooting spree, so we likely won’t have to hear any crap about “lone wolves” or it being a “an act of workplace violence“, which was the fantastically moronic take on the Fort Hood shootings by the Obama Administration.

Mind you, even aside from the haystack-needle problem I can see how tough such investigations could be when you look at what this latest Islamic shooter apparently left behind in a Twitter account:

“O American people, I’m not against you for being American, I don’t hate you because your freedoms, I hate you because every day you supporting, funding and committing crimes not only against Muslims but also humanity,”

“What I see from America is the supporting of Israel which is invasion of Muslim countrie (sic), I see invasion of many countries by it’s troops, I see Guantanamo Bay. I see cruise missiles, cluster bombs and UAV.”

That could come from almost any university liberal arts professor, student or Leftist poltical activist in the USA nowadays!