Mohammed Studied Engineering in U.S.

Date: Tuesday, March 04, 2003 2:08 PM

H-1B and JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER

www.ZaZona.com

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed used a J-1 student visa to study engineering in
North Carolina. The rest is history but there are some important things
that this article doesn't mention. Many J-1s are hired by companies and
then get their visa converted to H-1B visas. American workers are never
even considered for these positions because the J-1 visa holder already
has the job. Terrorists and other aliens that mean to harm the United
States are taking entry level engineering and programming jobs from our
kids but companies continue to hire them because they are viewed as
cheap labor.

The article below says that after graduation many of the students
returned to their homes in the Middle East. What this article lacks is
a critical look at the ones that didn't return. They displaced American
workers that needed jobs and worse yet, they are still working in the
United States. That may not bother pro H-1B newspapers like the Wall
Street Journal, but it should bother Americans that are worried about
jobs and national security.

March 4, 2003

WAR ON TERROR

SPECIAL PAGE

For continuing coverage, see War on Terror3.

Before al Qaeda, Mohammed
Studied Engineering in U.S.

By KELLY GREENE and CHAD TERHUNE
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The two schools weren't particularly prominent. The neighboring towns
were struggling. But in the mid-1980s, Chowan College in Murfreesboro,
N.C., and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in
Greensboro gave Khalid Sheikh Mohammed his first close look at America.

Almost 20 years later, school officials and acquaintances of Mr.
Mohammed, a top al Qaeda operative arrested Saturday, recalled a young
man who appeared to be looking for little more than what the colleges
and communities were able to offer: a grounding in engineering, quiet
surroundings and the chance to live and study with other students from
the Middle East.

Mr. Mohammed "wasn't different" from other students, said Garth Faile,
chairman of Chowan's science department, who taught chemistry to the
young Kuwaiti native in 1984. Rather, Mr. Mohammed was one of a crowd;
of the 27 students in that particular class, "maybe 20 to 21 were
Arabic," the professor recalled.

"He wasn't a radical," Dr. Faile said. "He wasn't someone who would
bring undue notice to himself."

Monday, the White House said intelligence officials continue to study
the equipment -- computers and cellphones, primarily -- found in the
house in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, where Mr. Mohammed was arrested. In
North Carolina, meanwhile, after almost two decades, associates of Mr.
Mohammed pieced together a more prosaic portrait of the man and his
labors.

In January 1984, Mr. Mohammed enrolled at Chowan College in
Murfreesboro, an eastern North Carolina town near the Virginia border.
Chowan at that time was a two-year junior college affiliated with the
North Carolina Baptist State Convention. The school had recruited
Middle Eastern students through embassies for more than a decade by the
time Mr. Mohammed arrived, Dr. Faile recalled.

Despite its Baptist tradition and remote location from larger cities
with Muslim communities, the school -- the centerpiece of which is a
white-columned antebellum mansion -- did hold a few attractions for its
Middle Eastern students. It didn't require English-language
proficiency, and it offered a pre-engineering program through which
foreigners could beef up their math and science skills before
transferring to four-year schools.

"Math is an international language," Dr. Faile said. He recalls
learning a few Arabic phrases, including the translation for "under the
hood," to help Middle Eastern students struggling with English get
through their chemistry lab each week.

Dr. Faile taught Mr. Mohammed in his second-semester chemistry class in
1984 and remembers him as a "B-type" student. "I had no way of knowing
that he would become a radical. I had other students from Iran who I
thought would be," Dr. Faile recalled. "One student, in 1978-79, was
kicked off campus because of his behavior." Most of the Middle Eastern
students at that time lived in a dormitory called Parker Hall, where
they would gather for dinners, socializing and prayer, recalls one
classmate.

In the summer of 1984, Mr. Mohammed enrolled at North Carolina A&T, a
historically black college that numbers the Rev. Jesse Jackson among
its graduates. David Klett, a mechanical engineering professor at North
Carolina A&T, said the university's engineering students of Middle
Eastern descent during the 1980s were a close-knit, quiet bunch that
took religion seriously.

Mr. Klett, who was Mr. Mohammed's student adviser but doesn't remember
him specifically, said some of the students rented an apartment in
Greensboro to use as a mosque because there wasn't one in the city at
the time. Mr. Klett said he never noticed any animosity between the
American and international students.

"I must have spent some time across the desk from him [Mr. Mohammed],
going over what courses he had and what he should be taking," Mr. Klett
said in an interview. "But he doesn't ring a bell."

Mr. Klett said he doesn't know why Mr. Mohammed picked North Carolina
A&T, but he guesses he was referred there by a friend, as was common
during the 1980s. "Once some students got here from the Mideast and
liked it, by word of mouth they would tell their friends back home," he
said. "It kind of snowballed."

During the 1980s, Mr. Klett said, about 30% of the university's
mechanical engineering students came from the Middle East, primarily
from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In Mr. Mohammed's graduating class, nine
of the 28 students were of Middle Eastern descent, Mr. Klett said.

After graduation, many students returned to their homes in the Middle
East. Mr. Mohammed, as extensively reported, eventually joined forces
with al Qaeda. U.S. officials believe he helped plan the first attack
on the World Trade Center in 1993, along with his nephew, Ramzi Yousef,
now imprisoned in the U.S. Government officials believe Mr. Mohammed
was the chief organizer of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and of other
attacks since then.

Write to Kelly Greene at kelly.greene@wsj.com1 and Chad Terhune at
chad.terhune@wsj.com2

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