Denver Rocky Mountain News staff writer Lou Kilzer reports on the FBI’s polygraph interrogation of Khalid Al Draiby. Excerpt:
A man who claims to be from Denver and was identified as a suspect in the Sept. 11 terror attack has passed an FBI polygraph test, his lawyer said Tuesday.
Khalid Al Draibi, in jail near Washington, D.C., will be prosecuted “for immigration misrepresentation charges, but not with anything having to do with the terrorist attack,” said Virginia attorney Drewry B. Hutcheson, Jr.
The U.S. Attorney’s office in Alexandria, Va., declined to comment Tuesday.
The name “Al Draibi” appeared on on a list of 21 suspects in the case that the Justice Department distributed to bankers. Nineteen of the suspects died in the suicide attacks. Another lived in Falls Church, Va. The only other name on the list was Al Draibi.
Twice he has told law enforcement officials he is from the Denver area. In one case he presented a driver’s license with a Glendale address that did not exist. In another case, he told officers he was from Denver.
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The FBI arrested Al Draibi under a federal law making it a felony for a foreign national to misrepresent himself to federal agents as an American citizen.
When agents searched Al Draibi, they found him carrying identification under the Suleiman alias. They also discovered that the residential address on his newly issued Virginia license was a gas station. When questioned about his birth date, Al Draibi gave them a different date than the one on his license.
Further investigation revealed that, on Sept. 3, Al Draibi had been stopped by a small-town Alabama police chief for a traffic violation. He showed the chief a Colorado driver’s license with a non-existent address in Glendale.
In the days that followed, newspapers reported that Al Draibi had received flight training in Alabama and Kansas City. More than five additional aliases also turned up.
Last Saturday, Al Draibi agreed to take a polygraph test, Hutcheson said.
The attorney did not reveal all the questions asked, but said that Al Draibi passed on the two that were relevant to the case — whether he had anything to do with the attacks or knew of them beforehand.
For the FBI to clear or not clear individuals of suspicion based on pseudoscientific polygraph “tests” is both unfair to the individuals concerned and a danger to public safety, as these “tests” are unreliable and are easily beaten through the use of simple countermeasures that polygraphers cannot detect. See Chapter 4 of The Lie Behind the Lie Detector for details.