12/31/09 – Kurt Haskell – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
We're going to start off the first hour though with our first guest today, Kurt Haskell.
He is, uh, I guess becoming semi-famous here as, uh, the guy that, uh, saw something that is for some reason, something seemingly quite important that's, uh, obviously or apparently being left out of the, uh, typical narrative of the attempted bombing, uh, of the, uh, airplane over Detroit on Christmas day.
His name is, uh, Kurt Haskell and he's a lawyer, I believe in Detroit.
Is that right, Kurt?
Welcome to the show.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Uh, I'm, I'm an attorney in a Detroit suburb.
In a Detroit suburb.
Okay.
Correct.
And, uh, I guess it's important that you're an attorney because, um, I guess that shows you passed the bar and the other attorneys let you be one of them and that kind of thing.
Right.
So there's some kind of, uh, some level of credibility that goes with that.
I don't want to overstate it, but there's, you know, you're, you're a professional and you're putting your professional reputation on the line in that sense.
That's correct.
We have an ethical code we have to go by from the state bar administration too.
But yes.
Which means that if, uh, you go fooling around off topic on something like this, uh, but what you're doing is dishonest that you could get in trouble with the bar for that.
Is that what you're saying?
I could have my license removed.
That is correct.
Even for something that is not actually part of, you know, like misrepresenting one of your clients or something like that.
Absolutely.
Any act of dishonesty.
Okay.
Well, uh, so, you know, that is what it is.
People can take that as weighing whatever they think it weighs.
Uh, and that's fine.
And, uh, I'm glad I had a chance to let you, uh, you know, explain how that works.
Um, so let's get to the controversial part of this story.
Uh, I'm looking at M live.com.
Uh, one of their articles, uh, anyway, here is called a report.
Customs says second person detained after flight two 53, for reasons unrelated to attack.
And this is an update.
This is, I guess, uh, the official response to, uh, what you told M live.com, which was that, uh, you saw someone, a second person arrested, uh, in Detroit at the airport in Detroit, after the plane landed safely, uh, in connection with the attack.
And I guess they're saying, uh, I guess they arrested somebody that had nothing to do with that.
Uh, is, do you have any way of knowing whether that's right?
Or how certain are you that the guy who was arrested was arrested in, uh, somehow in connection to, uh, the attempted bombing there?
Uh, first of all, thanks for starting on this topic, because this is exactly where I wanted to go with the show today.
Uh, I'm chomping at the bit to respond to this one.
Um, let's start with, uh, the official response.
Well, first of all, as anyone has seen in any of my interviews or, uh, blogs or anything, I've been talking about the, the man dressed in orange that was arrested when we were being held in customs, uh, shortly after we, uh, got off the plane in Michigan, about an hour later.
And what happened was, uh, about an hour in, into our detention, bomb-sniffing dogs were brought in.
One of the dogs sat down near a carry-on bag, uh, of the man in orange.
Uh, a law enforcement officer immediately came over, took the man back into a room for interrogation.
He was gone approximately an hour, not handcuffed at this time.
I saw him come out of that room about an hour later.
He was handcuffed and taken away.
Shortly after this, uh, a, an FBI agent came up to the group of the rest of us passengers inside the following.
You're being moved to another area.
It's not safe here.
I'm sure you all saw what happened and can read between the lines and why you're being moved.
We were then escorted out of this large area.
We ran into a small, longer hallway.
Well, what did you read between the lines?
Well, to be clear, it sounds like he thought it would be obvious that you would all conclude, uh, the same thing of what he was talking about, but what was that thing that you all concluded?
Well, again, you know, again, I've been trying to keep my opinion out of, out of, uh, you know, the shows I've done and, and try to think.
What I want to know is not what you think now.
What did you take that to mean when he asked you?
When, when he asked you?
Or, I'm sorry, when, when he said read between the lines, you know what I'm talking about.
What did you take that to mean at the time?
My opinion of that was the man had a bomb in his carry-on bag.
Now, mind you, you believe now that that's what the officer was attempting to imply there?
Absolutely.
100%.
Now, mind you, this is a man that walked off the plane in my group and I never lost contact with him.
The entire time we were being held, he was standing approximately 20 feet away from me.
This man was on our plane.
There's not a shred of a doubt in my mind that he was.
I know for a fact he was.
And also, mind you, we were in such a restrictive state at this time.
We could not drink water.
We could not eat.
We could not use our phones.
We could only go to the bathroom one at a time with an FBI agent.
Not a single person was on the floor.
We were in the floor we were in, in the baggage claim area.
There weren't any other flights coming in.
There were no employees at all, strictly law enforcement personnel, and the passengers of our flight.
Not only that, any other plane that landed after ours, the passengers were held in their planes on the runway for several hours and not allowed to get off the plane.
So I'm pointing this out because, first of all, for four days, the FBI denied the existence of this man at all.
And then the FBI amazingly came out yesterday morning and said the following, yes, another man was arrested from that flight, but he's being held on immigration charges indefinitely.
We've had him held the entire time.
Okay, well, why didn't this come out in the four days before?
And the explanation for that is because several of my other passenger mates came out and backed up the story that I've been saying all along about this man.
And there had to be some official response from FBI.
Well, that's detailed in the MLive story today.
They have links, they provide links to a man named Daniel Housiniga, Housiniga, something like that.
Sorry, Daniel, who told this to MSNBC.
And then, of course, there was a guy named Roe Rosenblith, who actually wrote a piece of his own for the Huffington Post, who also saw this guy being arrested.
And that forced them to come out and make these statements.
But the bombshell of this is what happened later last night, early last evening, and which has made me extremely angry over this.
And it's pointed out something very obvious to me.
And that's what I'm going to tell you right now.
Mr. Ron Smith of Customs came out and clarified their position last night.
By the way, this is now their third story of this event.
First of all, he didn't exist.
Second of all, has been and is being held indefinitely on immigration charges.
And then number three last night is the kicker of them all.
He wasn't on our plane ever.
It's such a blatant lie by Mr.
Ronald Smith that I am calling him out to get out of his cubicle and come out and debate me anywhere, any place on this, that this man was not on our plane.
This man was, without a shred of a doubt, on our plane the entire time.
He stood by me.
He never left any area I was in.
There is no question in my mind he was on our plane.
And read into that what you want, but there's only, in my interpretation, one explanation of why Mr. Ronald Smith would dare you to come out in the public and debate me on why you made such a blatant lie.
And I'm live.
Well, you know, that's a pretty strong challenge by you.
And I don't know if this show has the prominence to, you know, propel that forward.
But, you know, I certainly hope this continues to develop.
And I guess I don't want to get too far off the details of the story.
But, well, I mean, frankly, this does seem to be quite significant that, you know, as we've talked about here, we have, I mean, you sound to me like a credible witness with no obvious reason to be making up any of this stuff.
We have cooperation from two other witnesses of at least part of your story here.
And yet, and in fact, you know, from Googling around a little bit, it looks like you've been on National Public Radio.
You've been interviewed by some pretty mainstream sources, I guess.
And yet, I'm not so sure this whole, there were a couple Indian guys around, is making it into the kind of official narrative of what happened here.
TV is not saying anything.
And I'd like to get to the details of the other guy that you say you saw help put this guy on the plane in the first place.
But, you know, TV is saying, well, it was some guys that we let out of Guantanamo Bay who put him on the plane, where they have their whole narrative.
But it seems like your part of the story is not being included in it.
Do I have that right?
Mm hmm.
Yeah, apparently, it's hard for them to admit the truth.
And by the way, the FBI, two FBI agents stopped by my office yesterday, also with a series of photos.
One of the photos appeared to me that what I would call to be the man in orange.
And I looked at the photo.
And I looked up to them, because I couldn't believe the audacity of them to show me this photo, knowing what I had said to the media, knowing that they've been not admitting that this man exists.
And I said, you know, isn't this a picture of the man that you arrested in customs with the apparent bomb in his bag that you've refused to admit exists up to this point?
And I looked at them straight in the eyes, and they had no comment.
They just didn't answer you at all?
No answer, no, no response.
But this is the kind of treatment I've been getting from the FBI all along.
Well, I've been trying to stay neutral on it.
But with this story by Mr. Ronald Smith yesterday, I'm getting a little irritated.
Well, I guess, you know, I could see that it's as a direct challenge to your credibility when he's saying, well, I guess he's not really calling you a liar or anything, right?
He's just saying you must be confused.
You got it.
You got the guy from the round playing without a shadow of a doubt trying to destroy my credibility intentionally.
And I'm angry about it.
And I call him out.
Come out in the public out of your cubicle.
Mr. Ronald Smith, I want to see who's more credible, you or me.
Yeah, well, and, you know, presumably some kind of cable TV venue would be the place for that.
Let's hope.
Let's hope something along those lines can get done.
Let me ask you this.
And I'd like to give you a chance here, hopefully, if you if you'd like to tell us all about the other guy, the first guy that you saw.
We sort of started with the second part of the story because it's the recent development.
But in both of these cases, I believe you say that they were Indian.
But I wonder how it is that you know that because how many different ethnicities are there from, I don't know, somewhere in southern Central Asia that may or may not be an Indian nationality.
You know what I mean?
Did you hear them talking and it was a Hindi accent or something?
Let me just respond to that real quick.
The man appeared to be Indian to me, but please take no offense if you're Indian, because I cannot tell between a Pakistani and Indian of Bangladeshi, etc.
That was just a phrase that I used.
Southeast Asian might have been a more appropriate term.
OK, because, you know, I think that's important, too, because people immediately start wondering about, you know, implications and so forth like that.
So we should be careful about that.
All right.
So for people who are just tuning in, the guest right now we're talking to on the show is Kurt Haskell.
He's an attorney in, I guess, sort of a small town on the suburbs outside of Detroit.
And he was on the plane on Christmas Day with this attempted bombing by this young Nigerian.
And he's got a part of the story that's been somewhat corroborated, at least in parts, by other passengers that has a couple of guys who don't seem to fit the narrative that we're being fed so far involved with, you know, something to do with this attack.
A man who was arrested after they safely landed, who seemingly or, you know, apparently or quite possibly was arrested and taken away for having a bomb in his bag after they landed.
And then another guy who apparently helped get this guy on the plane.
And this is something else that has been disputed in a sense, although I'm reading here at MLive.com that you're disputing the disputing really quick here.
They're saying, I guess Dutch security is saying that you say he didn't have a valid passport and visa, but yes, he did too.
And then so what's your response to that?
That was never the issue, whether he had a passport or not.
The issue was whether he tried to board without a passport and whether he made it.
You see, the media is trying to cloud what I'm trying to say and discredit me.
I've never said he didn't have a passport.
That was never an important part of my story.
Please take a look at the MLive article and read it and why I explain what I saw and why they're trying to discredit me, where I clearly state, you know, my explanation for that story.
Well, in these two stories, the major footnotes here are commenter says he was aboard NWA flight 253, saw suspected terrorist board the plane.
That's one.
And they basically quote your whole comment that you left here.
And then there's a follow up right where this lady, Sheena Harrison from MLive.com, she went ahead and interviewed you and asked some follow up questions and and then has continued to cover the story there at MLive.com.
OK, so now so tell us the whole story of this thing.
I mean, obviously, obviously you didn't make the case that, you know, he didn't have a visa or passport.
What you were talking about was what you saw at the airport.
Now, how certain are you and how can you be so certain that what you saw was a man attempting to get on the plane in the Netherlands, right on this plane to Detroit without displaying or attempting to use his passport or visa to do so?
OK, I'm going to explain to you what I saw, since that's what I've been repeating all along.
And I don't really want to put my opinion into the story.
I'm going to stick to the facts.
And the facts are as follows.
We were in the boarding area running to getting ready to board our flight, my wife and I. And there were no seats available in the boarding area.
There's a crowded flight.
A lot of the passengers had put various luggage on different seats and there weren't two together anywhere.
So we had to sit on the floor.
And what we did is we took a seat near what I would describe as the final ticket agent, the person that checks your boarding pass right before you get on the flight.
And we were approximately 10 feet away playing cards.
And, you know, I was just kind of people watching while we're playing cards.
And two men approached the ticket agent that kind of caught my eye.
They weren't acting strangely at all, but just the fact that the two of them were together is what caught my eye.
And let me explain.
The first man looked to me like a poor black teenager.
I thought he was around 16 or 17.
The other man appeared to me, again, to be an Indian or Southeast Asian, wealthy 50-ish man in a suit.
And what struck me as weird that the two were traveling together and I was trying to figure out why.
And they approached the ticket agent about 10 feet away from me.
And only the Indian man spoke.
To this day, I've never heard the black man speak.
And the Indian man said as follows, this man needs to get on the plane, but he doesn't have a passport.
The ticket agent then responded, well, you need a passport to get on the plane.
And the Indian man then responded, uh, he's from Sudan.
We do this all the time.
And the ticket agent then said, well, you'll need to talk to a manager and referred that to them in the hallway to talk to a manager.
And that's it?
Um, I'm sorry.
The, the Indian man never boarded our flight and the black man was the man that later tried to blow up our plane.
Yeah.
Uh, right.
Well, so they say, well, and now we're on the plane where he's in, did you see the fire and all this nonsense actually happening on the plane when he was trying to set off the explosive?
I saw part of it.
He was eight rows ahead of me and I missed the start of it because I wasn't watching, but I had a clear view once I looked up.
Um, you know, I guess I'm glad that you just stick to the facts there.
I mean, I guess I kind of want to go off on a tangent speculating about what that means.
Maybe he didn't want them to see the word Yemen on his passport, even though he did have one or, you know, something like that.
I don't really know.
Right.
There's a lot of speculation that can be made, which I speculated on a couple of my posts on the internet.
Uh, you know, there's a barcode on passports that once it's run through a computer, a wealth of information about yourself comes up and the Amsterdam, uh, airport security came out a few days ago and admitted that this man, the terrorists that tried to blow up our plane did not go through what, and I quote normal passport screening procedures.
That's a quote.
Now, what does that mean?
I would love for the Amsterdam airport security to explain what that means.
You know, what part of the passport checking procedure did he not go through and why didn't he go through it?
I'd love to know the answer to that because that statement seems to corroborate what I'm saying.
I never said he didn't have a passport.
All I said was, you know, what I saw, which you can make your own interpretations from.
Sure.
Yeah.
And it's, and it's very important, of course, that you differentiate the way you do and what you know and what you're speculating about.
But I mean, of course, the problem here is not just the, the, uh, question of your credibility, but, uh, you could have died on this plane too, right?
You're, so you're taking a little personally there that this guy was allowed on the plane somehow.
Yeah.
And I'm, and I'm mad about it and I'm mad.
And just to follow up on my last thought, there is closed circuit TV of this area in question.
Airport security has admitted that there is, they admitted they have been reviewing it.
The FBI has reviewed it.
You know what, where is it?
Isn't it amazing that it's not appearing anywhere when this could corroborate my claim or prove that I'm a liar?
Where is it?
It's easily, it's easily found.
It happened right before we boarded and it was about two to three minutes in length.
It would be easy to pick it out.
My wife and I on the floor playing cards, a black man and a Southeast Asian man approached the counter.
Let's see the video.
Why hasn't, why has this video not come out?
And there's only one explanation I can have.
I'm right.
They don't want to admit it.
And by the way, I expect because I'm calling them out on this too, that they'll do some kind of cut job on this video and show about two seconds of it.
The entire video should be about two or three minutes.
And I'm calling you out FBI and Amsterdam security show the whole unedited video, show what happened, turn the volume up, let everyone make their own decision.
I dare you, but I don't think we'll ever see it.
Well, now, um, I wonder about, uh, your interview, uh, invitations.
Um, it was mentioned before, I guess I brought up that, uh, you were on NPR the other day and I don't know who all you've been interviewed by, but you've gotten some pretty mainstream coverage as we've talked about here, Kurt.
Uh, it, your story is clearly being left out of the official FBI spokesman narrative, but it hasn't completely been left out of the media narrative.
Of course, their tendency is to just go with whatever the FBI spokesman say.
So I guess the, you know, what I want to know is how much momentum is there behind your story?
How many more invitations do you have to come on TV and tell your side of it?
I mean, and in the way that you're saying it now, um, I don't know that.
Uh, and I, I guess, you know, I don't know what all interviews you've done, but have you been calling them out like this, uh, saying, you know, you challenge the FBI to a duel and all these things.
Let me say this.
I've been 100 supportive, 100% supportive of the investigation.
I've cooperated in every way.
Um, I've not gotten angry about it at all until early last evening when my whole temperament changed from this article of Mr. Ronald Smith, because to me, this changes the whole ballgame because Mr. Smith, you know, and I know what the truth is and you know why I'm mad about it, Mr. Smith.
Well, um, and you know what, and if people don't want to have me on their program, because I'm taking this position, you know what I'm taking the same position I've taken all along.
And that is to put the truth out there.
And if, if, if someone doesn't want me on their show for telling the truth, so be it.
All I want to do is tell the truth and that's all I've ever wanted.
It's not my problem that someone else doesn't want to tell the truth.
Well, and you know, I think it's going to be a problem for the FBI if they just want to leave this story out or, or just, um, basically blow it all off with, oh, that guy.
Yeah.
That had something to do with some other plane.
And I guess the quote here is, uh, some reporters said, what was it?
Drugs.
And the cop says, yeah, something like that.
And, uh, like a bomb.
Yeah.
I mean, so in other words, if there's, if there's a pretty, a pretty lame lie and not just you, but your two cooperating witnesses, uh, Daniel who Singa, which actually, uh, have the clip from MSNBC.
I'm going to play here at the end of the interview.
Um, and also this guy, Roey Rosenblith, who wrote for the Huffington post, uh, his story about it.
Uh, it seems like it's going to be pretty hard to say there is no John Doe to this time.
Although then again, they can get away with things like that sometimes.
Hey, you know, I'd be, I'd be pretty embarrassed if I was the FBI to leaving us on the plane for 20 minutes on the runway.
And then later finding a bomb in a carry-on bag, also leaving us, uh, standing by this man for an hour before any bomb sniffing dogs arrived could have been absolutely disastrous.
And obviously, uh, it would be quite embarrassing to the FBI if what I'm saying is in fact corroborated.
Uh, well, so that's what you think the problem is, is that they left you on the plane for that long?
Oh yeah.
You know what?
I called them out immediately when we were on the plane immediately, let us off this plane.
You know what their response was?
Sit down and shut up.
You're not getting off the plane.
Uh, wow.
That's what they said to you.
Sit down and shut up.
You're not getting off the plane.
You know what that feels like after someone just tried to blow you up and you don't know if there's another bomb on the plane.
Well, did you, did anyone try to explain to them that that was the concern that like, Hey man, uh, you know, the problem is that, uh, we don't want to get blown up and we'd like to be away from the plane in case it's going to blow up that kind of thing.
Uh, try and explain something like that away to the FBI.
Uh, yeah, I don't, I don't think that's possible.
Yeah.
Try and talk reason to these people.
All right.
Well, um, by the way, I've been on almost every mainstream TV channel, uh, in the country and I've been on probably 30 to 40 radio stations, uh, all over the world, maybe more than that.
So that's pretty good earlier.
You've asked me that earlier.
So I'm just responding.
So, yeah, it sounds like the momentum, at least so far for getting your story out there is, is going on, I guess has been going pretty strong and we'll just have to wait and see, uh, you know, whether that continues, I suppose.
Um, and, and for the record, I don't care if it continues.
I'm just putting the truth out there.
If anyone wants to report it, uh, I'm not in control of that.
So I'll leave it at that.
Right.
Well, I mean, obviously, uh, obviously you do care whether it gets reported or not, because otherwise, uh, it sounds to me like somebody who there's at least a high chance, a high probability was involved in this, uh, attempt on your life, uh, could get away scot-free.
I mean, that's the, that's what happens when you pretend there's no John Doe too.
It means John Doe too, actually doesn't get in trouble for the terrible thing that he did.
That's true.
All right.
Well, that's the way of things, I guess.
Um, okay.
Well, uh, I can't remember what any more of my awesome questions were Kurt.
So I guess I'll go ahead and let it go with this.
I appreciate, uh, your effort to stick by, uh, you know, uh, trying to get your story out here and, uh, wish you the best of luck.
And hopefully, uh, you know, as we find out more, uh, maybe you can come back on the show and talk about it too.
Hey, I'll be glad to come on the show anytime.
I'll never waver from the truth and they'll never intimidate me.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks a lot.