South Florida played an outsized role in the days leading up to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Several of the hijackers lived and trained at flight schools here, and the mastermind of the attacks, Mohamed Atta, even had a warrant issued for his arrest in Broward County for missing a court date on a charge of driving without a license.
On the morning of the attacks, a woman claiming to be Atta’s wife showed up to the old Broward County courthouse, in an attempt to clear his name for the incident.
Much of the hijackers’ lives in Florida was revealed shortly after the terror attacks.
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But as years went on, journalist Dan Christensen, the editor and founder of the Florida Bulldog, a nonprofit news site, stayed on the case.
Alongside other reporters, Christensen peeled back layer after layer of what really happened in the lead-up to the attacks, and along the way he and his team unearthed evidence and investigative leads that had been left out of the official 9/11 Commission Report.
That included reporting in 2011 that revealed a prominent Saudi family with ties to the hijackers as well as the Saudi royal family had hurriedly left Sarasota just prior to the attacks — and that the FBI had known about this.
He continues to investigate the attacks because "no one else is doing it."
"There's potentially hundreds of thousands of documents that are stashed away inside FBI files all around the country that we have yet to see, and who knows what they say," he said.
Christensen spoke with WLRN for the special program "South Florida Remembers 9/11," reflecting about the terror attacks 25 years after they happened, and the role South Florida played.
WLRN: So how long after the world-changing terror attacks on 9/11 did it become clear that the terrorists who committed these atrocities had deep connections to Florida and South Florida?
CHRISTENSEN: Almost immediately. The FBI began by tracing their credit card use and things like that and it was known where they operated, not just here in South Florida, but other areas of the state and in other areas of the country, in Southern California and in Arizona and Virginia and northern New Jersey.
What were they doing here in Florida?
Well, they were preparing to commit this horrible atrocity. To the untrained eye, you would not see anything more than leading a daily, routine kind of life.
I live in Fort Lauderdale and Commercial Boulevard is one of the streets that I travel on a lot. They used to use that all the time. Back in 2001 I had a couple of young sons and one of the local tire stores where I went to get a new tire, I found out later that both Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, who were the pilots – and I use “pilots” in quotes – of the two jets that slammed into the World Trade Center had been there that same summer. I don't know if it was the same day I was there, but it's kinda spooky when you realize that you had taken your young kids to the same location where these people were.
And they were involved in flight training programs here in Florida. Is that right?
They trained on the West Coast in Venice, and did so for quite a long time in preparation. And as everybody knows by now, they weren't all that interested in learning how to land. They wanted to know how to fly and to maneuver.
Mohamed Atta had been given a criminal violation for driving without a driver's license in Broward County. He didn't show up to court, had a warrant issued for his arrest and then separately he was pulled over, but the police that pulled him over the second time weren't aware of the warrant — and they released him. That history was a big reason for the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, right?
The FBI put all this together at the time. They've created — and they're still out there on the web — some timelines where you can see when they go to use their credit cards at at an ATM or at a Target or something like that. But it wasn't until the actual attack, or attacks, actually occurred that I think the light bulb went off in Washington that they needed to do more to make the traveling public safer, number one, and also prevent these kinds of attacks.
"So why am I doing this? I'm doing this because no one else is doing it. There are still plenty of documents that have not been released."
Looking back through some of the articles that you wrote, I saw a woman saying that she was Atta's wife, who mysteriously appeared at a courthouse in Broward County on 9/11 trying to clear up his traffic ticket record. Did we ever learn what that was all about, who she was, why she was there at the courthouse that day?
I talked to the people that were involved, the clerks and stuff, who remembered it quite vividly, but there were never any answers. Apparently, the FBI took information about it. Whether they have information that hasn't been released, we don't know. But it certainly is interesting that there was a woman here, living here, who claimed to be his wife who showed up at the Broward County Courthouse – the old one – and wanted to try and fix his records on the very day that this was happening.
And you reported in 2011 that a prominent Saudi family fled Sarasota in the weeks before the 9/11 attack, leaving behind a house, cars, clothes, furniture, diapers, food on top of the counter. And the FBI initially told you that the family had no connections to the hijackers, but that turned out not to be true, right? Your reporting is really what made it public.
I was working with an author, a guy by the name of Anthony Summers. He lives in Ireland, and he and his wife wrote a book. Her name is Robbyn Swan. And they wrote a book that year that came out in the summer of 2011 called The Eleventh Day. And, Tony, who I'd known for quite some time, had contacted me and said, uh, "You know, we got this book coming out. We've learned this information about this family of Saudis living in the Sarasota area that had ties to the hijackers. Have you got the time to help me out on it?" And I said, "Yeah, absolutely." And that's how I got involved with this.
We worked on it, developed information about how these folks had been visited in their gated community by Mohamed Atta, who was the pilot of the first jet that hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center. And it turned out other hijackers [had too] – remember, they were all living nearby because they were training in Venice, which is about 10 miles away from the location where this house was.
We found out, too, that the FBI had done an investigation of this. We, Florida Bulldog, filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act trying to get some of the files on this, and we did. Because the very first stories that we wrote were all based upon talking with individuals that knew about this, the FBI blew us off.
So we had to file a lawsuit, and we started getting records, and we found records that showed despite what the FBI had said when we broke the story, that there was nothing to all this, that in fact they had found "many connections" between these Saudis who were living in the Sarasota area and 9/11. And we also found out they had ties to the royal family in Saudi Arabia and a number of other interesting things.
You've been following this closer than almost anyone in the 25 years since the attacks took place. What are the most prominent things that you still would like to know that you're pushing to learn about?
I operate Florida Bulldog, which is a, essentially a South Florida news site. So why am I doing this? I'm doing this because no one else is doing it. The New York Times, The Washington Post, the entities that set the table here for what news is in the United States are not following this. There are still plenty of documents that have not been released.
In our original lawsuit, we were told that there were more than 80,000 pages in the Tampa field office alone about 9/11 — and we got a handful of them, maybe. And that's just one FBI field office. I mean, there's potentially hundreds of thousands of documents that are stashed away inside FBI files all around the country that we have yet to see, and who knows what they say.
