FAA Sends Newsletter to Hijacker

Wed Apr 10, 1:10 PM ET

By CORALIE CARLSON, Associated Press Writer

MIAMI - The Federal Aviation Administration (news - web sites) mailed its regional pilots newsletter to one of the Sept. 11 hijackers just last month.

Kathleen Bergen, an FAA spokeswoman in Atlanta, said Wednesday that she did not know why Ziad Samir Jarrah's name had not been removed from the mailing list earlier.

The incident came to light just weeks after it was disclosed that the Immigration and Naturalization Service sent official notice to a Florida flight school six weeks after the attacks that two of the other hijackers had been approved for student visas. The episode embarrassed the INS and prompted a shake-up at the agency.

Jarrah, a 26-year-old from Lebanon, was believed to have piloted United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, apparently after the passengers fought back.

The quarterly newsletter addressed to Jarrah was sent to his former apartment near Fort Lauderdale.

The issue happened to contain an American flag and an editorial about the World Trade Center attack that said: "We hope for justice to be served to those individuals who horrified our great nation."

The newsletter comes from the agency's Oklahoma City office and is mailed to pilots in five Florida counties, Bergen said. It typically contains reports on local crashes and the lessons to be learned from them.

"It's something completely innocuous," Bergen said of the mailing, which is also available online.

Jarrah is the only one of the 19 hijackers known to be on the mailing list, Bergen said. The FAA's mailing list for its regional newsletters includes the nation's 625,600 pilots, she said.

-- (stupid@white.men), April 13, 2002

Answers

Is this surprising? Private enterprise, which as we all know is a paragon of non-bureaucratic super-efficiency, can't seem to get me off their mailing lists in less than a year, even though I am very much alive and pleading with them to stop sending me their junk mail.

Should we expect the FAA to outdo Pottery Barn in this regard? Even when Pottery Barn is in the business of maintaining mailing lists as the very lifeblood of their business, while the FAA newletter is probably a very low priority at the FAA?

IOW, dog bites man... a yawner.

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), April 13, 2002.

Pottery Barn is soooooo "yesterday".

-- (Algernon C. Braithewaite@Cambridge.MA), April 13, 2002.