If you’re interested in hearing more inside dope on this month’s cover story about the man who caught Zacarias Moussaoui, we encourage you to tune in to CNN tomorrow at 12:30 p.m.
Our writer, Dean Staley, will be interviewed about the story—just in time for the rumored acceptance of Moussaoui’s guilty plea, also scheduled for tomorrow.
Imitation is the highest form of flattery, they say, so we’re not all that upset that one of our esteemed competitors has appropriated an idea of ours (which we ourselves had appropriated). This kind of thing happens periodically—it is one of the conventions of publishing a periodical. Depending on your frequency, the institutional memory is wiped clean daily, weekly, or monthly. The deep desire for novelty is both fed and mitigated by an impulse to steal good ideas from your competition.
What we continue to be irritated about, though, is the morally indefensible position of doing so little with so much. We don’t normally like to mention names, but here we go. Here’s what we mean: We happened to be having a cocktail a few weeks ago over at the US Bank building when we noticed that MSP’s director of advertising sales, Pat Matthews, was being feted in honor of her retirement. Now one would think that twenty-five years of service in building the powerhouse publishing empire of MSP Communications would be worth quite a lot. Indeed, in the present issue of their flagship publication, MSP crows, “We sell more ads each year than almost any other city or regional magazine in the country.” Surely much of that success is owed to the redoubtable Ms. Matthews.
We felt a warm feeling of vicarious pride—plus we were thirsty—so we asked the bartender for a glass of the same bubbly the MSP crowd appeared to be having to toast Ms. Matthews. “Same as them!” we said with a leer. Our bartender smiled and said, “Are you sure?” We said, “Don’t make us ask twice—and damn the cost.”
He brought a glass of sparkling apple juice, and said one was the limit—if Mr. Deep Pockets was buying, anyway.
The head running slow, churning, moving up a long, steep hill in the last hours of darkness. Already a few early birds, noisy, to keep me company.
Here, take a look at my disaster movie, my shoebox full of footnotes, my personal wasteland. All my sleepless nights. While you are sleeping, while you are dreaming, I am still on my feet, moving from table to table with a pen in my hand, taking orders in a language I can no longer understand.
You’d think the confusion would be condensed, but you’d be wrong. You’d think you’d eventually find your way into some kind of clearing, or perhaps even a long valley with a wide river. You’d think the middle of the night would be the mind’s Big Sky Country. Wrong again. I keep hearing astronauts in my right ear, lost, forlorn, the transmission fractured and breaking up. Sometimes their exhausted sorrow sounds almost like yodeling.
It wasn’t an astronaut, but a truck driver who once told me, “Where there’s gasoline a fella can usually find him some pussy.” I’ve never attempted to corroborate that statement, but I have discovered that where there’s gasoline a fella can usually find him some beef jerky.
My God, I get tired of dinosaurs, stomping all over automobiles and knocking over patio furniture with their tails. Seriously, all I’ve ever wanted is to know my shit.
I cooked a burrito in a microwave oven. There was little pleasure involved in this procedure, very little pleasure. (“Make your own leaps.” —P. Metcalf.) Cue singing of angels. Believe me, I know a little something about neutral objects. I raise rubber children in tiny jars.
No getting around it: you have mostly chosen. Others might find more peace, or consolation, in a revelation like that, if, in fact, you’d like to call it a revelation. They keep making the hole bigger, so you can swallow more, so you can bury more in the hole. There are moments when you can literally feel the earth tilt beneath you, your heart swaying dully in your chest like an empty bell. Ladies and gentlemen, I am not going to stand here and sugarcoat it. I am simply unable. I can find nothing positive whatsoever to say about recent events in the region. I’m afraid it’s the same old story: lame fucking white men, many of them grossly overweight, swinging sledge hammers.
There it is, there’s the familiar thump of the newspaper at the front door.
Something crippled and almost recognizable creeps towards you with the first bruise of light from the east. Come on now, kiss your fat little fable goodnight and let’s just see if it wakes up still resembling truth.
I’m not even going to bother to try to reconstruct the haywire play-by-play from the last four games. I was intending to go back over the game logs at some point tonight, but the prospect is frankly just too exhausting at the moment. All I know for sure is that I saw more variations of ugly than you’re likely to see this side of the Deliverance wrap party. Somebody out there will know how many times the Twins had the bases loaded over that stretch, and how many runs they managed to get out of those situations. I’ll just take a wild stab for the hell of it: the Twins had the bases loaded twenty-five times and scored one run. I think that’s right.
This I do know, though, because all I have to do is look at the boxscores: Four games, thirty-seven hits, fifteen walks, thirty-eight runners left on base, nine double plays hit into, eleven runs scored, and a 1-3 record. Folks, I know it’s a difficult game, but it’s hard to do what the Twins have been doing (or hard to not do what the Twins haven’t been doing?). Something like that.
Look on the bright side, though. Seriously, have you looked at the pitching numbers for Johan Santana specifically, and the pitching staff in general? Johan has now struck-out thirty-seven batters while walking two. Those are Dennis Eckersley numbers, from when Eckersley was a reliever. It’s unreal. And it’s not just Santana. The entire staff has walked sixteen and struck-out ninety-four. Juan Rincon’s strikeouts to innings pitched ratio has got to be inching up there close to Santana territory. (Okay, I just looked: Rincon’s K/9 –15.00– is actually better than Santana’s –13.50.)
I don’t know how to explain all the home runs Johan’s given up so far, other than just to remember that it’s still early, he was lousy for the first month or so last year, and the league’s got a much better idea of how he operates. There’s also the Joe Mauer factor. Henry Blanco was a very good signal caller, and the pitchers raved about him all last season. I don’t know how long it’ll take Mauer to get a good handle on the batters around the league, and maybe right now they’re calling most of the pitches from the dugout. I don’t think so, though. All I know is that if you could throw back half the homers Twins starters have allowed –and there have been a lot of two- and three-run shots– we wouldn’t even be talking about all those stranded runners and double plays.
Well, we’d probably still be talking about them, or bitching about them, but we’d pretty much be nit-picking. I’m not going to do too much bitching tonight, however, consternated as I am, because I got an earful all night from my pal Jumbo, and I know only too well how tiresome it is to listen to somebody piss and moan. I actually got up and switched seats in the middle innings because I’d had enough of his bellowing. I’m sure you’ll hear all about it on Friday.
Tomorrow I’ll give you the rundown on the tunes that escort each of the Twins from the on-deck circle to home plate, most of them personal selections. I’ll also, finally, assign an artist and a title to that damn song they played for Cristian Guzman the last couple years he was here. I think you know the one. I’m pretty sure, in fact, that you could hum it right now.
–J.A. Whipple, early daguerreotype of the moon. February 26, 1852. From the Harvard Daguerreotype Collection.
People who frequent low drinking resorts eight nights a week are liable to get –vulgarity says it best– they get fucked up. They are assaulted by too much truth and, at the same time, too many lies; they lose their sense of proportion, of balance; their vision of reality is chronically blurred by alcohol and elation and hangover and depression; they get manic, they are at turns garrulous and quarrelsome, their dispositions sour, they fight among themselves over imagined slights and shadowy suspicions; in the dark of their minds they brood upon mortality and, worse, upon the death of love. A dreadful affliction, all in all….
—Ed McClanahan, Famous People I Have Known. 1986, Penguin Books
While we ate we talked. People say that conversation is a lost art: how often I have wished it were.
American girls are getting larger all the time, and she was a woman of the future.
—Randall Jarrell, Pictures From An Institution. 1954, University of Chicago Press
In the mid-centre of America a man can go blank for a long, long time. There is no community to give him life; so he can get lost as if he were in a jungle. No one will pay any attention. He can simply be as lost as if he had gone into the heart of an empty continent. A sensitive child can be lost too amidst all the emptiness and ghostliness. I am filled with terror when I think of the emptiness and ghostliness of mid-America. The rigors of conquest have made us spiritually insulated against human values. No fund of instinct and experience has been accumulated, and each generation seems to be more impoverished than the last.
It is of little use trying to suppress terrorism if the production of deadly devices continues to be deemed a legitimate employment of man’s creative powers. Nor can the fight against pollution be successful if the patterns of production and consumption continue to be of a scale, a complexity, and a degree of violence which, as is becoming more and more apparent, do not fit into the laws of the universe, to which man is just as subject as the rest of creation.
—E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful. 1973, Perennial Library
The council, which assembled on this occasion, was conspicuous for the absence of the essential thing known among the common people as common sense. In general, we somehow don’t seem to be made for representative assemblies.
…after organizing some charitable society for the benefit of the poor and subscribing a considerable sum, we at once gave a dinner to the prominent dignitaries of the town in honor of so laudable an undertaking and, needless to say, spend half of the subscribed funds on it; with what is left of the money we at once rent magnificent offices with heating facilities and porters for the members of the committee, and all that is left for the poor is five and a half rubles, and even over the distribution of this sum the members cannot agree.
—Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls. 1842, Penguin Classics
Fortunately, or unfortunately as the case may be, most chimpanzees, in fact all that have been observed, persist in being good chimpanzees, and do not become quasi-human morons. Nevertheless I think that the average psychologist is rather longingly hoping for that chimpanzee who will disgrace his simian ancestry by adhering to more human modes of conduct.
—Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings. 1950, Avon/Discus
What a country calls its its vital economic interests are not the same things which allow its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Gasoline is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.
—Simone Weil, The Need For Roots. 1949, Beacon Press
I’m not sure exactly why, but the election of the new Pope made me think, of course, of Alexander Pope. But then I thought a bit more of what this Pope will have to do, and that reminded me of Milton, and his objective in writing Paradise Lost.
To millions of English majors, that objective has no doubt been: to bore the hell out of us. But Milton himself had loftier goals: “To justify the ways of God to men.” Good luck Benedict.
OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav’nly Muse,that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos: Or if Sion Hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s Brook that flow’d
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th’ Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.
And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th’ upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know’st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad’st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumin, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justifie the wayes of God to men.
If you want to continue reading the most unread poem in the history of English majordom, click here.
It’s hard to understand the hubris that allows Tom DeLay to more or less demand all-encompassing power over every living being. We guess it comes from having a strong sense of one’s own innate divinity. Why is it so difficult for Delay and his supporters to understand the concept of checks and balances? In a nice editorial in today’s New York Times, Adam Cohen suggests that members of congress seem to believe they have the highest billing in government because they hold elective offfice, whereas federal judges are appointed more or less for life. (Never mind the cult of party, which would normally defuse this problem—Republicans have for so long genuflected at the golden calf of Ronald Reagan, it’s a wonder their adoration does not extend indefinitely to every decision and judicial appointment the Gipper ever made.)
Any depraved high school student who manages to stay awake for ten minutes of civics class understands the simple idea: the arrogance of any one branch of government is abrogated by the arrogance of the other two, and the promise (or rather the threat) to “unset” what Congress has “set-up” (that is, the courts) is not going to come as welcome news to most red-blooded Americans. As Cohen makes clear, the present GOP monopoly will not be complete nor satisfied until it has also overrun the judiciary, and the battle-cry against “activist judges” should be translated into simpler terms—”we will have the judges and the laws that best serve our party, and opposition and dissent do not serve our party.”
All we can say is pride goeth before the fall, and present Republican leadership’s slash-and-burn approach to politics will not only do permanent violence to the Plain People of America and their great-grandchildren, it may insure a permanent place as the minority party for another one hundred years. FDR had a war and a depression to thank for his visionary heroism. The next great president will have neo-conservatism to thank.
You know, we fought and won a bloody war once to rid ourselves of the Royal Imperative, and despite our short memories and attentions spans, Americans tend to remember that at important historical moments.
Newt Gingrich was just a salty-sour appetizer. Tick-tock, Mr. Delay. Tick tock.
Well, we’ve been following Kiefer Sutherland’s “24” each week, and last night they really stepped in it. The usual disclaimer at the beginning of the show might have warned not only that the show would be too violent for viewers without discretion, but that it would depict Americans committing odious, unamerican acts. See, here’s the problem—after the first few episodes, we mentioned that the show felt like a suicide note from a nation on a steep depressive decline. What we meant was this: You are either against torture, or you are for it. This is not an area that admits a lot of gray area. The cliff-hanger structure of the show has allowed the writers and producers to suggest over and over again that the ends justify the means. Well, I mean, really—if your choice is between breaking a (guilty) terrorist’s thumbs or a nuclear warhead being set off in a major American city, it’s pretty obvious what should be done, no?
Last night, though, the show went one step further and made “Global Amnesty”—a transparent stand-in for Amnesty Internation, duh—the dupes of Marwan Habib, the evil overlord of terrorism on the show. (When one ofhis operative is caught, he calls Amnesty and dispatches a lawyer and federal marshall to prevent any, um, aggressive questioning.) We appreciated the gesture toward that yellowing old rag we call the Constituion, when the president sided with the lawyers and suggested that due process was in order—and which instantly puts Jack Bauer outside the law. But by now, we all know who the hero of this story is, and any moral qualms we might have about his M.O. evaporate in the overwhelming evidence against his nemeses.
Now, one can feel slightly propped up by the realization that this show is really just a high-grade motion-picture comic book on steroids. But if there is something to be even more troubled about than the implication that due-rpocess, civili-rights—lovin’, glue-sniffin liberals are nothing but an impediment to justice—it is a certain aspect of the show’s intense realism.
What we mean by that is the relative ease with which terrorists on the show have arranged just about every major attack its writers and producers could conceive after what must have been several potfuls of strong coffee. It was not enough to kidnap the Secretary of Defense and his daughter. That was a plot designed merely to overload the Internet, to allow the covert transfer of information allowing Marwan to gain access to every nuclear power plant in the country. But that was just a diversion to allow Marwan to hijack a stealth bomber to shoot down Airforce One. But that was just a convenient way to get his hands on “the football”—the president’s briefcase with all nuclear ballistics codes and locations.
See, now taken as a quick synopsis, doesn’t that seem ridiculous? Problem is, we wonder just how unrealistic it really is. In last Sunday’s Times magazine, former CIA agent Melissa Boyle Mahle comments on the crossroads of intelligence and politics. She poses the interesting question: What if we caught Osama bin Laden and didn’t tell anyone? If we were really worried about security in a concrete way—preventing terrorist attacks with or without taking public credit, you know, speaking quietly and carrying a big stick— the most brilliant move would be to hold him in secrecy and let the rest of al-Qaida come looking for him. But political expediency would absolutely demand that the sitting administration crow from the highest tree in its loudest voice. We hate to be cynical about it, but it’s not hard to believe that some of the adminstration’s more enthused partisans would put the GOP ahead of the safety of Americans—half of whom are godless John Kerry lovers, after all.
As Tom Friedman makes clear in this recent column, we should not assume that just because there has been no terrorist attack in the US since September 11th that it’s because of anything we might have done to shore up security. The present administration seems far more interested in the politics of security than the realities of security, and we sincerely hope that Friedman is wrong about the dark days ahead.
–Ralph’s Barber Shop, Okmulgee, Oklahoma
–Bateman Park, Okmulgee, OK
—On the tube in Ralph’s Barber Shop, Okmulgee, OK: Twins clinch 2004 Central Division title
It shouldn’t be possible for nine hits, seven walks, and a hit batter to add up to four runs. That’s the sort of line the Twins regularly threw up last year when they were scuffling to score runs.
Compare the runners left on base for the White Sox tonight (one) with the number of stranded Twins (ten) and you pretty much have the story of the game. It didn’t help, of course, that Kyle Lohse gave up a couple of two-run homers and a solo shot.
It’s actually more frustrating for me to watch Lohse right now then it was last year, when he was so clearly battling himself and his coaching staff. This year I think we’re seeing a guy who’s doing his damnedest to get with the program and really learn to pitch, but after years of refusing to see himself as anything but a fastball/slider power pitcher, Lohse’s attempts at an on-the-job transformation to a four-pitch guy are probably going to hit some pockets of turbulence in the early going.
Lohse was obviously trying to mix in his curveball and change-up tonight, but you can tell the confidence isn’t quite there with either pitch yet. As Bert Blyleven could tell him (and Carl Everett, for that matter), the curveball can be a very effective pitch, but if you hang one it’s generally going to get mashed. You’ve got to learn to forget those mistakes in a hurry. Late last season, those hanging curveballs that got knocked out of the park made a pretty dark impression on Lohse, and he went through an angry stretch where he was stubbornly resisting Rick Anderson’s attempts to get him to alter the approach that had helped him to win 27 games between 2002-03.
One of the things Anderson talks about a lot is what a challenge it is to get guys who’ve gotten attention since they were in high school for being able to throw ninety miles-an-hour to recognize how effective a 75- to 83-mph offspeed pitch can be. Why should a guy who can throw 93 serve up a 75-mph breaking ball to a major league hitter?
Lohse is learning, it seems to me, and though he’s getting punished for his mistakes you’re not seeing guys just sitting on his fastball and racking up huge innings like we saw so often last year. He still needs to figure out the best situations to throw that offspeed stuff, and to which batters. His book on hitters for the last four years is being essentially re-written series by series, and if he’s going to stick to this new approach and not get frustrated (which so far, anyway, all indications are that he hasn’t), he’s also going to have to recognize that in many ways he’s starting over –or at the very least making some major adjustments and trying to alter the type of pitcher he’s going to be from here on out. The encouraging note so far is that he’s only walked two batters in his first three starts of the year, this after issuing 76 free passes last year. His strikeout totals are also down from 2004, but that’s to be expected as he dicks around with his repertoire.
I still believe Lohse’s going to end up pitching close to 200 innings for the Twins this year, and I just predicted to somebody today that he’ll finish second on the staff with sixteen victories.
During the last homestand Lohse talked about his need to be patient, and I just hope the Twins’ staff will be patient with him in return. At the very least, he continues to have real value to the organization. If some of the arms in Rochester prove to be ready later this summer, Lohse would almost certainly generate trade interest from any number of teams.
Editor’s Note: In May 2005, The Rake ran a story by former KSTP-TV reporter Dean
Staley about Clancy Prevost, the man whose suspicions about his flight
student Zacharias Moussaui led to the apprehension of the “twentieth
hijacker” behind the 9/11 attacks. Before our story hit the street in
print, but after it was posted on our website, the StarTribune, in an
attempt to discredit us and Prevost, (and to take credit themselves for
the story of who caught Moussaui) ran a front page story the day before
our story hit the streets crediting the tip that led to Moussaui to Tim
Nelson and Hugh Sims, colleagues of Prevost at the Pan Am Flight
Academy.
As noted in a Strib story today (January 25, 2008), the State and Justice
Departments gave a $5 million reward for the Moussaui tip to Clancy
Prevost, not to Nelson and Sims. It seems the State and Justice
Departments thought The Rake story had it right, and the Strib had it
wrong. Our story is below.
—Tom Bartel
He wraps his long fingers around his coffee cup, measures me with steady pale blue eyes, the eyes of an airline pilot. He smiles at the absurdity of his story. We are just a few miles down the road from the Eagan flight school where, one month before the September 11th attacks, he tried to teach Zacarias Moussaoui how to fly a Boeing 747.
His name is Clancy Prevost. He is sixty-eight years old, a retired pilot for Northwest Airlines, a lapsed Catholic, and a recovering alcoholic. He shakes his head as he recalls his story publicly for the first time.
The morning of August 13, 2001, was warm and humid, the Minnesota summer nearing its peak. Clancy Prevost left his room at the Spring Hill Suites, his local lodging when he commutes from the East Coast. He jumped on the hotel shuttle and headed for the nearby offices of the Pan-Am International Flight Academy. He wore a blue polo shirt, khakis, and red Converse sneakers.
At 10:30 that morning, Prevost walked into the air-conditioned lobby of the Northwest Aerospace Training Corporation, Northwest Airlines’ affiliated training facility. Here his employer, Pan Am Flight Academy, leases time on a range of multimillion-dollar simulators, including the 747-400 model, which realistically mimics the flight deck of a Boeing 747. There, thirty days before September 11th, he shook hands with the man the government would later call “the twentieth hijacker.”
”He was pleasant, but I expected him to be better dressed. He just was wearing Dockers and they didn’t fit real well, he was a little overweight, and he had this baseball hat, and growth of beard,” Prevost recalls. There was nothing remarkable about Moussaoui. In fact, Prevost’s first impressions of Moussaoui barely registered at all.
Prevost expects young pilots to arrive with energy, even nervousness, but from Moussaui, he got nothing. “I guess I wanted him to be a little more alive and comin’ at ya. But there wasn’t much comin’ at ya. It was just, ‘Hello.’”
Prevost wrote off Moussaoui’s timidity to first-day jitters. “It’s understandable since it’s all new. It’s daunting even to the experienced pilots that show up, let alone this guy who’s wandering in to supposedly kill everybody.
Moussaoui’s demeanor may have helped him go unnoticed during the five and a half months leading up to his arrest. He arrived in Chicago from London on February 23 and declared at least thirty-five thousand dollars in cash on his customs form. He traveled to Oklahoma City, and later to Minnesota. Along the way, Moussaoui bought knives and flight-training videos and inquired about starting a crop-dusting company. Not once did he draw the attention of authorities. Not even when he walked into the Pan Am flight school, counted out sixty-eight one-hundred dollar bills, and signed up to learn how to fly a 747. His luck ended the day he met his flight instructor, Clancy Prevost.
At first glance, Moussaoui was the kind of client Prevost had seen before: a wealthy civilian with no ties to the airline industry who wanted to learn how to fly a commercial jetliner. One might be surprised to learn how many “vanity clients” come to flight school, men of means with lots of free time, whose ultimate hope is apparently to impress women with a 747-type rating—bragging rights worth thousands of dollars. (Normally, most of Pan Am’s students are working, commercial pilots who are training to upgrade their ratings from smaller passenger jets. Maybe two or three vanity students turn up each year.) But that first day, Moussaoui would prove unlike any other student Prevost had known.
At 10:45, Prevost and Moussaoui took a shuttle van a mile and a half to the Pan-Am classroom building to start ground school. Michael Guess, a twenty-one-year-old support worker, met them at the reception desk. Guess set them up in a room with a projector and a PowerPoint presentation on the systems of the 747-400. (Guess, an aspiring pilot himself, would die a year later copiloting the flight that crashed and killed Senator Paul Wellstone in the woods of Northern Minnesota.)
The room was not much bigger than a large office. Moussaoui sat down. Prevost drew the blinds. Standing, he projected the PowerPoint presentation onto the white wall. Prevost paged his way through the schematics of the 747-400. Using color-coded charts and graphics, he described the hydraulic systems that power the flight control surfaces: the rudder, flaps, and horizontal elevator at the rear of the aircraft.
Moussaoui repeated some of the technical phrases and asked a few questions. Prevost, who flew 747s for Northwest Airlines, smiles and says, “I knew he wasn’t pilot material, because he’d actually read his manuals and he didn’t talk about pussy.” But over the course of the lesson, an odd pattern emerged. Moussaoui used the correct jargon, but his questions often didn’t make sense or were out of context.
Prevost tried to explain to Moussaoui the complex backup systems that in an emergency mean the difference between life and death. “There are two parts each. You have your engine-driven pumps and the backups to the engine-driven pumps, which are the man (manual) pumps. Two of them are electric. Two of them are air-driven. One and four are air-driven. Two and three are electric. The EDPs (engine driven pumps) are the main pumps and floor systems.”
Moussaoui was plainly bewildered. “So you say stuff like that and he’s sitting there like…” Prevost drops his jaw, gives a blank look. “It’s useless. He doesn’t have any knowledge on anything.” Moussaoui’s reaction exposed him as a man profoundly out of his depth trying to learn to fly a 747. Frustrated, looking for a break, Prevost suggested they get lunch. By 11:30, they were back at the NATCO building.
They sat down to lunch in the cafeteria. Prevost asked Moussaoui what he did for a living. Moussaoui said he worked in the import/export business, that his family was covering for him while he was gone. Though Moussaoui is a French national of Moroccan descent, he never said specifically where he was from. Moussaoui told Prevost he had to get his training done as soon as possible, because there was only so much time his family would cover for him.
Prevost remembers trying to stall, because the training seemed pointless with such an unpromising student. “We’re sitting up there in the cafeteria and I’m thinking, I’m going to stay here for two or three hours because I don’t want to go back to the classroom building and try to teach him something, because you can’t. There’s no awareness of anything.” Moussaoui seemed equally discouraged. He had good reason.