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Cirrus Design
Last Updated: October 13, 2008

Cirrus Designs became the largest manufacturer of small private aircraft in the United States, (and second largest in the world) after it was bought in August 2001 by the First Islamic Investment Bank, now called Arcapita. Six months before the sale, Cirrus, unable to meet production goals, laid off almost two hundred workers; by 2002, its planes were the world’s best sellers in their class and Cirrus couldn’t keep up with demand.

In November 2004, just after Arcapita announced it was purchasing the U.S. company Cypress Communications, a newspaper reported that Arcapita chairman Mohammed Abdul Aziz Aljomaih was listed on the “Golden Chain,” a list of top Osama Bin Laden financiers found by the FBI in Bosnia in 2002. The DHS along with the DOJ and FBI stalled the sale’s approval.

At the time, one of the federal agencies scrutinizing the Arcapita-Cypress deal employed a man named Faisal Gill, a protégé of Grover Norquist, a close political adviser to President George W. Bush. Gill is the former government affairs director at Grover Norquist’s Islamic Free Market Institute, a not-for-profit established to bring wealthy Islamic Americans into the Republican Party. Gill was also spokesman of a now-defunct charity, the American Muslim Council.

The AMC was founded and led by Abdurrahman Alamoudi, and Norquist introduced Alamoudi to President Bush on several occasions in 2000 and 2001. In 2004, Alamoudi pleaded guilty to playing a role in a plot to assassinate the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. He is serving 23 years in prison.

Gill failed to disclose his association with Alamoudi in his security clearance papers when he began his job as policy advisor to the Undersecretary for Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection at the DHS. Gill was forced to take a three-day leave while the Inspector General investigated. He was cleared and later returned to work.

In April 2005, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a panel that scrutinizes business deals for their impact on national security, announced it would review the Cypress deal. Arcapita’s executive director, Charlie Ogburn, claimed that the Aljomaih on the Golden Chain list is the current chairman’s father, who died in 2004.  CFIUS gave its approval in June 2005.

Had Arcapita had tried to purchase Cirrus after September 11th, instead of a month before, the deal most likely would have raised the same red flags that the Cypress dead did. Cirrus is the industry leader for easy-to-fly affordable personal jets (all of which now have parachute devices). It also runs nationwide low-cost flight training programs for beginners, like those attended by 9/11 hijackers Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, as well as Zacarias Moussouai, who was convicted of terrorism conspiracy and claimed to know in advance of the September 11th attacks. Atta and his conspirators had been trying to buy small planes that could be used as crop dusters.

Private planes have become increasingly popular since 9/11, in part because passengers aren’t required to go through standard security checks.

Categories

Homeland Security | Terror Funding

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