Death in Venice (Florida) : Flight School Owner Has Shady Ties

Death In Venice
Death in Venice (Florida)

by Daniel Hopsicker
Flight School Owner Has Shady Ties

EXCLUSIVE--Venice, Fl. Authorities are probing the European business associations of a Venice flight school owner, whose school at the Venice airport trained the nucleus of foreign national terrorist pilots, looking for possible links to international organized crime groups, reported by the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday to be laundering large sums of drug money for major terrorist organizations. Organized crime said to launder billions for terrorists. Three of the airliners involved in the September 11th terrorist attacktwo in Manhattan, and one wrested to the ground over Pennsylvaniawere piloted by terrorists who had trained at two flight schools at the Venice, Florida airport. Dekkers was widely interviewed on television after the disaster expressing outrage over the terrorist attacks, and disclaiming any responsibility for the actions of former students. But he may have been lying in his portrayal of his association with the men who became eventual terrorist pilots, when he repeatedly stated they were people who had just basically "walked in" off the street into his school at the tiny Venice airport. Instead, Rudi Dekkers was actively marketing his flight school in Germany at the exact same time Mohamed Atta and his terrorist cell left Hamburg and moved to Florida, where several immediately enrolled in his school. Both ringleaders, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehri, each believed to have piloted a plane into the World Trade Center Towers, learned to fly at Huffman Aviation flight school in Venice, Fla. Two years ago Dekkers began an aggressive European marketing campaign, just after purchasing the flight school, reported the local Venice Gondolier at the time. "The world is my working place," Dekkers boasted to the paper. "I won't forget Venice, but I'm going to market throughout the world, Germany, France, Belgium. That's our goal, to get people to come in here from all over the world." New owners of Huffman Aviation have global presence His plans were so successful that they had soon changed the entire makeup of his flight school. Foreign nationals came to account for over 80 per cent of the student pilots enrolled with him. Rudi Dekkers' flight schools (he has another down the road in Naples) are training four hundred foreign nationals a year. According to German prosecutors, after Atta moved Rudi Dekkers trains 400 foreign nationals yearly from Germany to train with Dekkers' flight school in Venice, at least four other members of the same terrorist cell moved there to train as pilots as well. Could Atta have recruited by Dekkers, and not the other way around? Officials involved in the September 11th investigation said early this week that the key to unraveling the plot might lie in Germany, not the United States. Daniel Hopsicker is the author of In press interviews, Dekkers has "Barry & the boys; inferred that students pilots were The CIA, the Mob & just showing up at his flight Americas Secret school and thrusting fistfuls of History." dollars (10,000 of them) across his counter. But what if it was the other way around? What if Mohamed didnt go to the mountain, but that the mountain, in the guise of the portly Dekkers, came to Mohamed? If Dekkers was actively marketing in Germany when the terrorists moved to the U.S., he bears closer scrutiny... In press accounts of Dekkers business dealings, prior to the September disaster, he is revealed as a fast talking con man. And in the first mention of him afterwards his hometown paper, the Venice Gondolier, ran a headline saying Huffman Aviation no stranger to headlines. "Huffman Aviation Inc. has had problems in the last few months with the city of Venice, Sarasota County and the state of Florida, but the school keeps flying," the paper reported. Rudi wasnt paying his rent out at get FREE news alerts the airport. from the Huffman rent is late again, the MadCow Morning News paper headlined on May 12th. "When Huffman Aviation paid three months of overdue rent last Friday, company president Rudi Dekkers said the rent wouldn't be late again. "No, we won't have this any more," he said during an interview last Friday." Headlines in the Venice Gondolier about Dekkers grew even less flattering as time goes by. City threatens lessee with eviction, again. "Huffman Aviation Inc. is again on notice from the city to catch up on its rent payments or face eviction from the airport," the paper wrote on June 9th.
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Nothing had changed by mid-summer. Huffman rent late, again, the paper reported in mid-July. "For the sixth straight month, Huffman Aviation Inc. has failed to pay its rent to the city on time." A month before the September 11th tragedy, Huffman finally paid the rent. Huffman pays rent. What makes this airing of Rudi's dirty linen of note is that while Dekkers was receiving this humiliating deadbeat coverage he was simultaneously launching a commuter air taxi service in Florida (Flair Starts Service) a venture for which he had been provided both planes and pilots by a Gig Harbor, WA man linked to current Mob activities in Portland, Oregon. Richard Boehlke "owns" Harbor Air, or what's left of it, and he was simultaneously actively involved in a massive looting of workers pension funds in Portland, Oregon. Hardest hit ($60 million) was the pension fund of the Laborers, called the biggest Mob-run union in America. Labor Leaders Troubles Follow History of Union Woes While supplying both the planes and the pilots for the new Florida Air, Boehlke's Harbor Air was simultaneously going bankrupt. So were two other of Boehlke's companies, Crossings Aviation, and Crossings Development, a Portland condo deal for which Boehlke borrowed $17 million, mostly unpaid, through Capital Consultants, a pension fund management company that was in the midst of somehow "losing" $320 million dollars. Worst-hit were the pension funds of laborers and secretaries. Some were so badly looted that experts thought some workers would have to extend their careers by another decade to receive the level of benefits they'd have had if their money not been made to disappear in ludicrously bad deals like Richard Boehlkes. Playing Catch Up in Retirement. "Boehlke would do anything for money, he was so desperate," said an aviation executive who had witnessed Boehlke's descent. "Im surprised he hasnt skipped the country by now, what with all the trouble hes gotten himself into farting around with those Mafia boys down in Portland." Another recipient of the pension fund largesse is Alvin Malnick, whom Readers Digest once called "Meyer Lanskys heir as head of Organized Crime." If one is looking for "international organized crime groups," they don't get much bigger that the Mob. Firm Linked to Reputed Mob Figure Got Loans. Little known, and even stranger, is the fact that Alvin Malnick, who avows only to being a Jewish lawyer from Miami, has extremely close tiesfamily, ties, actuallyto a leading Prince of the Saudi Royal Family. In fairness it must be stated: whether any of these associations is germane to answering questions about Dekkers' role in recruiting and training foreign national pilots is at this point unknown. But its a brand new world we have all been living in since September 11, 2001. No one is immune from pointed questions that lead to answers about an international network helping the terrorist cadre that was able to move so freely in our midst. When President Bush said all evidence pointed to bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda organization as responsible for the attacks, he also equated the Islamic group to the Mafia, stating "Al-Qaeda is to terror what the Mafia is to crime." Our question is, do the two ever meet? NEXT: Who owns Rudi Dekkers?
Daniel Hopsicker is the author of Barry & 'the boys: The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History. email the author
http://www.madcowprod.com/index.x.html [29-10-2002 8:35:11 PM]
Organized crime said to launder billions for terrorists / Money for groups has risen sharply in past decade
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Organized crime said to launder billions for terrorists Money for groups has risen sharply in past decade
Frank Viviano, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, September 23, 2001
Paris -- For the United States and its allies to wage a global war on terrorism, and not merely on those responsible for the attacks on New York and Arlington, Va., they must target an international partnership whose financial means far exceed those of Osama bin Laden. The partnership, say law enforcement experts in Europe, involves international organized crime groups working hand in hand with major terrorist organizations, using banks, stock markets and brokerage houses to launder more than $900 billion a year in secret or illicitly acquired funds. "The nerve center of war is money," said Renaud Van Ruymbeke, France's chief financial crime prosecutor, who leads a European Union team investigating the connections. "Without money, terrorist networks do not exist. They can't finance their operations overseas or purchase arms." The money has grown at a spectacular rate since the forging of an alliance a decade ago between the criminal underworld and fanatical religious and ethnic "liberation movements," say investigators. In both the Middle East and Europe, says Hikmet Sami Turk, Turkey's minister of justice, a rising tide of illicit activities are being "organized by criminal and terrorist gangs who have international networks." Benefiting from this vast wealth are Islamic fundamentalist groups such as bin Laden's al Qaeda (the Base), along with their counterparts in countries such as Lebanon, Chechnya and Tajikistan. Other "liberation movements" tied into the underworld financial nexus include the Kurdistan Workers Party in Turkey, Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers and the Kosovo Liberation Army. Terrorist groups also have been implicated in an international narcotics trade, directed by organized crime, that the United Nations now puts at $360 billion annually, says judge Thierry Cretin of the European Anti-Fraud Office. Investigators say the organized crime connection ranges from wealthy, old- line "mafias" -- Sicily's Cosa Nostra, Chinese Triads, cartels in Colombia and Israel -- to newer crime clans based in Albania, Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Africa and the Caucasus. The crime families are seen as particularly important for terrorist groups involved in the acquisition and transport of arms. "The expertise achieved by organized crime groups in moving all kinds of goods through borders renders the contribution of these groups invaluable for hidden transactions," said criminologist Vincenzo Ruggiero of Middlesex University in England. In addition to their contraband activities, terrorist groups earn significant amounts of money from graft and extortion rackets directed against ethnic communities overseas. For example, French police say small businesses in Paris serving Kurds, Tamils and Lebanese are forced to pay "revolutionary taxes" to terrorist groups. Vast sums of this dirty money are being laundered each year before re- entering circulation to pay for the travel, housing, planning, weapons purchases and technical backup in terrorist operations like the devastating assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The laundered money is often funneled through the same high-profile sector of financial institutions that were decimated on Sept. 11. It's an area, say investigators, which the United States and Europe have so far been powerless to tackle. "Stock and bond purchases are essentially anonymous," said a German financial official. "If Osama bin Laden wanted to invest money in the stock market, his name would certainly not appear on the purchase ticket. A brokerage house is under an obligation to protect the identity of its clients, not to reveal it." As reported in The Chronicle on Tuesday, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is inquiring into disclosures that shares in United Airlines and American Airlines, whose flights were hijacked by the terrorists, were specifically targeted by a huge stock sell-off, possibly by investors with advance knowledge of the attack. In Europe, reports that bin Laden's financial advisers had sold off huge stock holdings prior to the assault have prompted investigations at banks and brokerages in Switzerland, Italy, Germany, France and Japan. However, laws requiring banks in Europe to disclose the sources of questionable deposits are rare and weak. A panel of European Union magistrates has been at work for several years on a new set of trans-EU financial laws, geared to impede money laundering. So far, they have been frustrated by the governments of EU states unwilling to surrender national control over their own fiscal infrastructures and criminal laws. "The traditional system of judicial cooperation in penal matters, based substantially on deposition and extradition, is . . . inadequate to confront an organized criminality which . . . exploits with great skill the differences that exist among national penal law," says Piero Luigi Vigna, Italy's chief anti-Mafia prosecutor. Another area of cooperation between terrorist groups and organized crime is the spiraling traffic in human beings. (The Chronicle reported extensively on the human trafficking problem last January.) In Italy, for example, as many as 3,000 undocumented immigrants have been arriving in a single week over the past two years. A high proportion are Afghans, Kurds, Iraqis, Lebanese, Kosovar Albanians and Sri Lankan Tamils. Italian authorities say the voyages are a joint venture involving as many as a dozen crime and insurgent groups, employing highly complex planning tools and a carefully monitored division of profits. Adding to the Italian government's problem, say investigators, is the lack of cooperation from other governments. "The Italian police receive only the most minimal cooperation from their European counterparts, much less from corrupt regimes in the Third World," said a senior official at an international law enforcement agency who did not wish to be identified. "The problem is that this is a phenomenon that respects no borders. The organized crime groups and the terrorist organizations are far more attuned to the realities of a globalist century than Western governments are." E-mail Frank Viviano at fviviano@sfchronicle.com. Get 50% off home delivery of the Chronicle for 12 weeks! 2002 San Francisco Chronicle. Page A - 12 Chronicle Sections
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Tuesday, October 29, 2002
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5/29/1999 New owners of Huffman Aviation have global presence

Huffman Aviation Inc., a fixed-base operator at Venice Municipal Airport was sold, pending approval by the Venice City Council, to Ambassador Airways and Aerojet Services Inc., a fixed-base operator at the Naples Airport, for an undisclosed sum. Ambassador Airways owners Rudi Dekkers, 42, Naples, president, and Wally Hilliard, 67, also from Naples, both experienced pilots are enthusiastic. "We've signed a letter of intent, subject to approval by city council," Hilliard said. "We've put enough down to make the deal binding, enough to make it uncomfortable to walk away." The Huffman Aviation company name will be retained, according to the new owners. "Ambassador Airways is delighted to have acquired Huffman Aviation, an organization similar to our own with a flight school, charter operation and aircraft service facility. The acquisition has considerably increased our fleet of aircraft which will enable us to offer our customer base a greater range and selection of airplanes for flight instruction and charter," Dekkers said. Ambassador's fleet of 14 aircraft including the Cessna 152, C-172s, C172XP, Pilatus PC 12, Seminole PA-44 and Barron-55 will be added to Huffman Aviation's fleet of 12 aircraft including the Cessna C-150, C-172, Piper Warriors, Katanas, Arrow and Seminole. Ambassador also operates several jet aircraft including Lear jets. "We are well aware of noise. We will not bring Stage One (older jet aircraft) in here. We have Stage Two and Stage Three aircraft (newer noise suppressed aircraft). The people who live around here won't notice any difference," Dekkers said. Dekkers and Hilliard do not plan any radical changes to the management and running of Huffman Aviation with the exception of extending and improving its corporate jet facility. "We intend to add some hangers and use it as a staging area for other aircraft," Hilliard said. "We want to build a corporate facility. We're going to spend some money." Dekkers also hinted at some cosmetic changes in the grounds. Dekkers said Huffman is a well run business. "We are very impressed with the current personnel and management and the way Huffman Aviation is run. We do plan on hiring additional personnel," Dekkers said. "We are very impressed with the current personnel and management and the way Huffman Aviation is run. We do plan on hiring additional personnel," Dekkers said. The new owners said they will build on Huffman's worldwide reputation and the new company will have an even greater global presence. "The world is my working place. I won't forget Venice, but I'm going to market throughout the world, Germany, France, Belgium. That's our goal, to get people to come in here from all over the world," Dekkers said. "We're going to bring so much business to Venice." Dekkers and Hilliard have hired Nina Harkness as marketing director for Ambassador Airways. "We're going to advertise a lot more extensively in Europe. There'll be a lot more public relations," Harkness said. Dekkers said they plan on spending as much as $60,000 a year in advertising and promotion. Stan Huffman, owner of Huffman Aviation, is out of state and could not be reached for comment. Hilliard and Dekkers said Huffman will serve as a consultant for the new company. Venice City Manager George Hunt said he had not been officially notified of the sale but commented, "We wish Stan well, and we would welcome Ambassador Airways. They have a fine reputation in Naples." Still unclear is what effect the sale will have on a legal dispute Huffman is having with the city. Dekkers could not address that issue. Huffman said through a letter from his attorneys last January that the city incurred liability when the city council approved new minimum standards for fixed base operators at the airport earlier this year. He claimed that the value of his company had dropped between $500,000 and $900,000 due to the changes. Huffman also claimed that the approval of new airport standards denied him equal protection of the law because he was treated differently than other FBOs, and amounted to a taking of his property without just compensation. Venice City Attorney Bob Anderson wrote in his response to Huffman's lawyers: "The city disagrees with your contention that it has incurred liability for any alleged diminution in the value of your client's business as a result of the city adoption of Resolution No. 99-3 (minimum standards) and therefore declines your invitation to engage in settlement discussions." The Gondolier was unable to reach Anderson for comment on the pending sale and what impact it could have on the status of the legal dispute between the city and Huffman. Huffman assumed the Venice Flying Service lease in 1987, which did not meet minimum acreage requirements. In 1995, Huffman negotiated a new lease to include more land, merging the Venice Flying Service and the Ingram Air Venice lease which he also assumed in 1987. By Tommy McIntyre Back to Your Results
2002 All rights reserved. Your Local Internet Service Provider A division of Sun Coast Media Group Inc. Publishers of the Sun Herald newspapers & Venice Gondolier newspapers.
http://www.sun-herald.com/search/search.asp?showarticle=5444 [29-10-2002 8:36:53 PM]
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9/13/2001 Huffman Aviation no stranger to headlines

VENICE -- Huffman Aviation Inc. has had problems in the last few months with the city of Venice, Sarasota County and the state of Florida, but the school keeps flying. On Wednesday, FBI agents confiscated files and a computer from Huffman's offices at the Venice Municipal Airport . Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehhi, two men believed to have participated in Tuesday's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, apparently received flight training at Huffman last year. Huffman Aviation president Rudi Dekkers markets his flight school extensively overseas because of several advantages. Cheaper fuel, plane rentals, housing and instruction cost in the United States makes it cheaper for foreign students to learn here. Beginning pilots also take advantage of good weather and flat ground in Florida. Subsequently, Venice Airport, like many small, local airports across the state, see tens of thousands of takeoffs and landings each year, many by student pilots from Europe. Huffman is currently the only full-service "fixed base operator" at the Venice airport. An FBO sells gas, provides mechanical services and otherwise caters to private aviation at airports. Huffman also provides flight training. The company was late with its rent payments to the city in February, March, April, May, June and July. It caught up its rent only after Venice City Attorney Bob Anderson sent letters threatening eviction. It also paid its Sarasota County real estate taxes late and missed the deadline to file its 2001 Uniform Business Report with the state. Those problems have been solved, and the company is now current with its rent. Huffman president Rudi Dekkers blamed the company's defaults on tight cash flow and his inattention to the business while he tried to start up a new commuter airline. Dekkers bought the company about two years ago. Until late July, his bookkeeper was Charlie Voss. Venice Airport Manager Larry Heath has said the city's relations with the business haven't been the same since Dekkers took over. "We've had to ask for some issues to be brought to us," he said. "I feel that we've had more complaints about service and the cost of fuel." Dekkers contested Heath's statement, saying the city's only complaints were about getting its rent, which he said the city needn't worry about. "I will never let this company go for this kind of money," he said. Heath called the revelations about Venice's connection to the terrorist attacks "absolutely amazing." "I hope it doesn't give us a black eye," he said. You can e-mail Bob Mudge at: bmudge@venicegondolier.com. By Bob Mudge Back to Your Results
News Archive
5/12/2001 Huffman rent is late again

When Huffman Aviation paid three months of overdue rent last Friday, company president Rudi Dekkers said the rent wouldn't be late again. "No, we won't have this any more," he said during an interview last Friday. But this month's rent -- $6,027.04, due May 1 -- has not been paid, according to city officials. That means a 5 percent late fee of $301.35 also is due now. Venice City Finance Director Mike McPhail said the matter is being referred to Venice City Attorney Bob Anderson again. Anderson had sent a letter to Huffman April 19, demanding that more than $36,000 in overdue lease payments be caught up by May 4. Dekkers met that deadline. During the interview he blamed the delay partly on cash flow problems and partly on his inattention to Huffman while he was trying to start up a commuter airline. He added that Huffman was too large a part of his aviation operations to be put at risk. "I will never let this company go for this kind of money," he said. Neither Dekkers nor Huffman manager Dale Kraus was available for comment Friday. Anderson said Friday that he has not yet taken any action on Huffman's latest delinquency. Beyond sending another demand letter, the lease limits the city's options as long as Huffman eventually comes up with the rent, he said. "There's no 'chronic delinquency' provision," he said. There is also no language that puts Dekkers' other airport leases at risk if he is in default on one of them, Anderson added. Huffman is currently the only full-service "fixed base operator" (FBO) at the Venice airport. An FBO sells gas, provides mechanical services and otherwise caters to private aviation at airports. Rent Last week Dekkers said his company is being "raped" by the city under its lease at the Venice Municipal Airport . He said that two FBOs at the Sarasota Bradenton International Airport have about the same amount of property under lease as his company, but pay about a quarter of Huffman's $168,000 annual rent. Venice Airport Manager Larry Heath said, "I don't know that we broke his arm" when Dekkers accepted an assignment of the lease. Huffman's lease with the city was in place when Dekkers bought the company in 1999, Heath said. The lease runs through 2025. Heath also pointed out that Dekkers subsequently acquired additional airport property through an amendment to the Huffman lease and an assignment of another lease. Those deals suggest to Heath that Dekkers was happy at the airport. "Why take on additional burdens?" Heath asked. Heath said that comparing a Sarasota FBO with Huffman is meaningless without knowing all of the terms and conditions of both leases. Because the Huffman lease serves aviation purposes, it isn't subject to review by the Federal Aviation Administration to ensure the city is receiving fair market value. But Heath said the lease payments are in line with the value of other leases at the airport. Heath said the city might consider modifying Huffman's lease if Dekkers agrees to a reduction in the amount of land he rents. Vacant land under Huffman's lease might be of interest to other businesses looking for a spot at the airport, he said. But Heath was skeptical the city would entertain a request just to lower the rent payments. "I don't think that's much of an option," he said. Anderson said Dekkers wasn't in a position to negotiate a rent reduction while he was behind in his rent. "He doesn't have any bullets left in that gun," Anderson said. You can e-mail Bob Mudge at: bmudge@venicegondolier.com. By Bob Mudge Back to Your Results
News Archive
6/9/2001 City threatens lessee with eviction, again

Huffman Aviation Inc. is again on notice from the city to catch up on its rent payments or face eviction from the airport. Huffman was three months behind on its principal airport lease when it paid the city $36,676.38 in May. But that payment didn't include the May rent, which is still outstanding. The rent for June was due June 1 and is unpaid as well. Venice City Attorney Bob Anderson sent Huffman a letter June 5 demanding the payment of $19,604.03 for overdue rent, late fees, sales tax, aircraft parking fees and attorney's fees on that lease. He also sent a second letter demanding $2,407.45 in rent and fees on a second Huffman lease that had not previously been in arrears. Both letters demand proof of insurance and the payment of real estate taxes for 2000. Huffman president Rudi Dekkers said the rent wouldn't be late again when he made the payment in May to avoid eviction. Neither he nor Huffman manager Dale Kraus could be reached for comment Friday on the latest default. Huffman also is late with the filing of a mandatory state report. According to the Florida Division of Corporations, Huffman has not yet filed its 2001 Uniform Business Report, which was due on or before May 1. The corporation could be dissolved by the state if the report is not filed before Sept. 15, according to a division spokesman. Huffman is currently the only full-service "fixed base operator" (FBO) at the Venice airport. An FBO sells gas, provides mechanical services and otherwise caters to private aviation at airports. You can e-mail Bob Mudge at: bmudge@venicegondolier.com. By Bob Mudge Back to Your Results
News Archive
7/21/2001 Huffman rent late, again

For the sixth straight month, Huffman Aviation Inc. has failed to pay its rent to the city on time. Huffman, the only full-service "fixed base operator" (FBO) at the Venice Municipal Airport , sells gas, provides mechanical services and otherwise caters to private aviation at the airport. Though its rent is due on the first of every month, the company paid its rent for February, March and April in May, then paid its May and June rent on June 21. Both rent payments were made after Venice City Attorney Bob Anderson sent a letter threatening to evict the company for nonpayment. Anderson sent another letter to the company July 18 demanding the payment of $9,742.13 for overdue rent, late fees, sales tax, aircraft parking fees and attorney's fees on that lease. The letter sets a July 31 deadline for payment. Huffman president Rudi Dekkers said the rent wouldn't be late again when he made the payment in May to avoid eviction. As of Friday afternoon, he could not be reached for comment. The person who answered the phone at Huffman Thursday said Dale Kraus, who had been managing its operations, is no longer affiliated with the company. Venice Airport Manager Larry Heath has sent a letter to Dekkers asking him to provide the city with the name of Huffman's new contact person. According to the Florida Division of Corporations' Web site, Huffman still has not filed its 2001 Uniform Business Report, which was due on or before May 1. The corporation could be dissolved by the state if the report is not filed before Sept. 15, according to a division spokesman. You can e-mail Bob Mudge at: bmudge@venicegondolier.com. By Bob Mudge Back to Your Results
News Archive
8/1/2001 Huffman pays rent

Huffman Aviation Inc. met another rent payment deadline Friday, avoiding eviction for the third month in a row. Huffman is currently the only full-service "fixed base operator" (FBO) at the Venice airport. An FBO sells gas, provides mechanical services and otherwise caters to private aviation at airports. Venice City Attorney Bob Anderson sent Huffman a letter July 18 demanding $9,742.13 for overdue rent, late fees, sales tax, aircraft parking fees and attorney's fees on its lease. The letter set a July 31 deadline for payment. Anderson said that full payment was made July 27 and that Huffman is currently not in default on any of its leases. "But I'm certainly not going to send this file to the warehouse," he said. Anderson sent similar demand letters in April and June. Both times the company caught up its overdue rent just before the deadline Anderson set, paying $36,676.38 in May and $22,011.48 in June. Despite the repeated defaults, Anderson has said the lease limits the city's options as long as Huffman eventually comes up with the rent. "There's no 'chronic delinquency' provision," he said. Huffman president Rudi Dekkers could not be reached for comment. Anderson said he hasn't had any contact with any representatives of Huffman other than receiving the company's check from a courier. The people he dealt with -- manager Dale Kraus and bookkeeper Charlie Voss -- no longer work for Huffman. Although the company is now current with the city, it's still delinquent with the state. According to the Florida Division of Corporations' Web-site, Huffman still has not filed its 2001 Uniform Business Report, which was due on or before May 1. The corporation could be dissolved by the state if the report is not filed before Sept. 15, according to a division spokesman. Huffman's next rent payment is due Aug. 1. You can e-mail Bob Mudge at: bmudge@venicegondolier.com. By Bob Mudge Back to Your Results
News Archive
3/3/2001 Business Briefs

Award-winner named C.J. Fishman, of Fishman & Associates Inc., has been recognized by the city of Venice as a "Pillar of the Community." Fishman is a former president of the Venice Area Chamber of Commerce , a member of the Sertoma Club of Venice and a frequent emcee at community events. Sarasota chamber events The Greater Sarasota Chamber of Commerce will be offering free small business counseling each Tuesday in March from 1-3 p.m. at its office, 1819 Main St., Suite 240, Sarasota. Call 955-8187 for reservations. The chamber's March power networking sessions are scheduled for March 6 and 20. Both sessions begin at noon and will be held at the chamber office. For reservations call 955-2508, Ext., 253. Englewood chamber events The Englewood Area Chamber of Commerce has scheduled three events for March. Business card exchanges will be held on March 7 at Alterra Sterling House, and on March 21 at Just Ask Rental by True Value. Both events begin at 5 p.m. The charge is $2 for members and $4 for non-members. For more information, call the chamber at 474-5511. The next Network at Noon meeting will be held at Angie's House of Chan on March 15 beginning at 11:30 a.m. The speaker will be Jill Leah of Manatee Community College. For more information or to make a reservation, call Ruthann Pearce of Dixie Pools at 473-0112 or contact the chamber. Investment seminar Lisa A. Van Ullen, a financial advisor and retirement planning specialist with Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, will host a free seminar on investing during volatile markets on March 13. The seminar will be held at the Holiday Inn Venice, 455 U.S. 41 Bypass North, beginning at 11:30 a.m. A complimentary lunch is included. Brent Houck, vice president of Travelers Insurance, will be the guest speaker. For reservations, call Cindy at 483-3555 Business of the Year Nominations for the Venice Area Chamber of Commerce Business of the Year Awards are due by March 16. The program, which is in its 22nd year, recognizes businesses in four categories: businesses with one to five employees; businesses with six to 25 employees; businesses with more than 26 employees; and new businesses (in business more than one but no more than three years). The awards luncheon will take place on May 30. Nomination forms can be obtained from the chamber at 257 Tamiami Trail North or by calling 488-2236. Magazine honored American Profile, a four-color weekly national magazine with regional editorial content for community newspaper readers, is the recipient of the 2000 Launch of the Year award presented by Dr. Samir Husni, a.k.a Mr. Magazine. American Profile shares the honor with "O, The Oprah Magazine," the first time two magazines have split the honor in the award's 16-year history. American Profile, which appears in the Venice Gondolier every Wednesday, showcases hometown America and its heroes. The award is based on several criteria. In addition to innovation and impact, Husni looks at a magazine's relevancy to its intended market, publicity generated from its launch and its diversification and specialization. Husni, a journalism professor at the University of Mississippi, reviewed 874 new launches for 2000. FLAIR starts service Florida Air Inc. (FLAIR), operating in cooperation with Harbor Air Inc., began intrastate air service Feb. 15 on a Sarasota-Fort Myers-Marathon-Florida Keys route flown four times a day. The new commuter airline added a Sarasota-Tallahassee route on Feb. 19 and a Sarasota-Orlando-Jacksonville route on Feb. 22. A Sarasota-Fort Lauderdale/Miami-Florida Keys route started on March 1. All of the routes are scheduled to be flown four times a day. The chief executive officer of FLAIR is Rudi Dekkers, who also owns Huffman Aviation Inc. in Venice. For more information about FLAIR, call 1-(877)-683-5247. Crane acquisition Crane Environmental, formerly known as Environmental Products, has acquired Force Filtration Systems, a company specializing in small and medium reverse osmosis systems. Crane designs, manufactures and installs water purification systems throughout the world from locations in Venice and Trooper, Pa. Kirk-Pinkerton anniversary The Kirk-Pinkerton law firm recently celebrated its 75th anniversary. Founded by James E. Kirk in Sarasota in 1926, the firm now has 20 lawyers in offices in Sarasota, Venice and Bradenton. The firm's attorneys provide a full range of legal services, and currently represent the developers of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Sarasota. Turner attends symposium Maggie Turner of Turner Photography attended the 2001 Presidential Circle symposium in Key Biscayne recently. The Presidential Circle is an association of the nation's elite professional portrait and wedding photographers. Turner Photography is one of 275 studios in the nation to be inducted into membership. Turner Photography is located at 1661 Bal Harbour Drive. The phone number is 496-8828. PGT on PBS PGT Industries' WinGuard impact resistant windows and doors were selected as replacement products for a West Palm Beach remodeling project for the PBS show "This Old House." The home owner selected the windows and doors for their hurricane protection, noise abatement and security features. WinGuard windows and doors are the only complete line of products that meet or exceed Miami-Dade construction codes, the most stringent in the nation. New Blalock agent Andrew Linebarger has become an account executive at James T. Blalock Insurance Agency, a division of Roger Bouchard Insurance Inc. He wil be responsible for commercial production for the company. The agency is located at 211 S. Nokomis Ave. Its phone number is 488-6791. Back to Your Results
The MadCow Morning News
Wally Hilliard's Busy Learjet
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Mohamed Atta snorted coke; Seized Learjet came from same source as Barry Seal's.
click here November 14world exclusive by Daniel Hopsicker copyright MadCowMorningNews may not be reprinted without permission
Mounting evidence in the investigation into the terror flight schools in Venice FL is raising questions of whether an officially-sanctioned drug see trafficking operation there discouraged the FBI from taking action against 'Mohamed Atta the terrorists that might have averted the World Trade Center disaster.
& the 'Venice Flying Circus'
The dark specter of the drug trade is throwing an increasingly long shadow across the terrorist conspiracy's activities in Venice, where Mohamed Atta and his close associates, many of whom were German, frequently used cocaine. According to a credible eyewitness, when their supplies ran low they would procure more from a flight school at the Venice Airport. In an exclusive 3-hour videotaped interview at a secret location, 21-year old Amanda Keller, Mohamed Atta's former live-in girlfriend, revealed that supposed "Islamic fundamentalist" Mohamed Atta and his closest associates in Venice were habitual cocaine users. "They were always drinking," Keller told us. "Always. Beer or wine, or sometimes rum. Once I had met everyone there (at a ' safe house' located in an condominium owned by Rudi Dekkers across the street from the Venice Airport) they felt comfortable with me and pulled out the coke." "You saw Mohamed Atta do coke?" "Yeah. The first time I saw him use it he borrowed a dollar from me to roll up as a straw, and then asked me if I wanted to do a line laid out on a glass table in the living room they used to cut it on. I said no. To me it was like something you'd see in a movie. It was the first time Id ever even seen cocaine." Numerous eyewitnesses, including their apartment manager, their next-door neighbors, and a former Huffman Aviation insider, who vividly remembers her then-hot pink hair, have verified Amanda Keller's relationship with Mohamed Atta. The two shared an apartment together for two months across the street from the Venice Airport. "These guys had money flowing out their ass," Keller stated. "They never seemed to run out of money. They had massive supplies of cocaine. Whenever theyd run out, theyd go over to the flight school. I followed them one day with Sabrina (a German friend of Atta's) to see where they were going, and saw them go into Florida Flight Training."
the explosive documentary
Read a book you're not supposed to
visit the 'Barry & the boys' two 'Magic Dutch Boys' who run flight schools at the Venice Airport. website
The Florida Flight Training Center is owned by Arne Kruithof, one of the
"Being 'Connected' Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry." In an incredible development, Federal court documents obtained by the MadCowMorningNews reveal that the Learjet belonging to Huffman Aviation owner Wallace J. Hilliard, confiscated with 45 pounds of heroin onboard on July 25, 2000 at Orlando Executive Airport, was procured by Hilliard from the same source whichtwo decades earlierprovided the Learjet used by famous drug smuggler and CIA agent Barry Seal. Moreover, affidavits filed by machine-gun toting DEA agents who surrounded the Learjet also indicate that Wally Hilliard's involvement in the operation was much deeper than has so far been reported. The Federal court records show that Hilliard got his Learjet from World Jet, Inc., owned by the notorious drug smuggling Whittington brothers of Fort Lauderdale, FL., who in their heyday in the early 1980s commanded fleets of fishing trawlers, sailboats, power boats, and jets. After being indicted for smuggling and tax evasion, their prized Learjet had gone to a man soon to become the biggest drug smuggler in American history, Barry Seal. Small world. The new revelations heighten concern that the true reason for the FBIs failure to take action against terrorists which the Bureau has acknowledged knowing were training in Venice may have been their historical reluctance to meddle on another Federal Agency's turf. Nor was the FBI the only Federal Agency protecting the drug trafficking operation, court documents reveal. Though the Justice Department, through the U.S. Attorneys Office in Orlando, declined to prosecute, the affidavits filed by DEA agents after the heroin trafficking arrests make clear their belief that the pilot of the plane, who worked directly for the Lear's owner Wally Hilliard, was also involved and should have been charged along with the five Venezuelan and Colombian nationals who eventually pled guilty in the case, called "the largest-ever seizure of heroin in Central Florida" by the Orlando Sentinel.
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'Mohamed Atta & the Venice Flying Circus!'
While machine-gun toting DEA agents swarmed around the plane, states the affidavit, "the pilot of the aircraft, DIEGO LEVINE-TEXAR, frantically attempted to make a telephone call using a cellular phone. LEVINE-TEXAR ignored agents and police officers who repeatedly ordered him to drop the telephone." "Agents had to physically remove the telephone from LEVINE-TEXARS hands," the affidavit goes on. "Based on my experience I know that narcotics traffickers maintain frequent contact with one another while transporting narcotics and currency. I believe LEVINE-TEXAR attempted to contact other accomplices as to the presence of agents and other law enforcement officials." The affidavit confirms information the MadCowMorningNews had learned from sources at the Naples, FL Airport about the frequency of the plane's trips to South America. (Flight School Owner's Plane Seized for Heroin Trafficking) It states pilot Levine-TEXAR "stated he had known (Venezuelan) VALLES-DIAZ for approximately nine months. He has flown VALLES-DIAZ to New York and Fort Lauderdale approximately 30 times during that time." The affidavit continues, "LEVINE-TEXAR said that he and his company were paid a total of $600,000 for those trips, and that he was going to be paid $80,000 for the current trip after arriving in Orlando." Numerous aviation observers indicated that thirty flights in nine monthsa weekly milk run down and back to Venezuelawould ignite grave suspicions from any legitimate charter jet company. The discovery that Hilliards operation was paid cash for each of the flights, in the unanimous opinion of aviation observers in Southwest Florida, removes any question about the legitimacy of the enterprise. "Its just blatant," said one. "They obviously werent even bothering to hide what they were doing." FBI inactivity explained?
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As early as one week after September 11, the FBI was pointedly stating that they knew about terrorists rotating through Rudi Dekkers flight school in Venice, Florida. "The FBI Knew Terrorists Were Using Flight Schools," read a Washington Post headline one week after the attack. "Federal authorities have been aware for years that suspected terrorists with ties to Osama bin Laden were receiving flight training at schools in the United States," the article stated. What they left unanswered was why they did nothing to shut it down. Indications of the FBI's "guilty knowledge" were widespread in the aftermath of the attack, including the widely-reported fact that the FBI was at Huffman Aviation with search warrants at 2.30 a.m. the night after the attack. Now we have uncovered evidence indicating that the FBI was on the scene even earlier... "How do you think the FBI got here (Huffman Aviation) so fast after the attack?" asked one Huffman Aviation insider. "They knew what was going on here. Hell, they were parked in a white van outside my house less than four hours after the buildings collapsed." "We heard that 16 of the 19 terrorists had been on Interpol's Most Wanted list," this aviation executive continued. "But early on I gleaned that these guys had Government protection. They were let into this country for a specific purpose. It was a business deal."
the 'barry' website
A "Green Light" from the DEA The new information adds to long-standing suspicions of drug trafficking held by aviation observers at the Venice Airport, who more than six months ago told us the Hilliard/Dekkers operation had a 'green light' from the DEA at the Venice Airport. "The local Venice Police Department (which mounted round-the-clock patrols at the Airport after Sept.11) were warned to leave them alone," said one aviation executive at the time. Further evidence of sinister currents swirling around the Venice Airport includes testimony from eyewitnesses indicating that Rudi Dekkers was in trouble with the DEA while still located at the Naples Airport in the mid-1990's. The notion of a Federal "hands-off" policy towards the Venice operation also helps explain a suspicious circumstance which has provoked much speculation in the local aviation community... How did ' Magic Dutch Boy' Rudi Dekkers, whose various businesses have all been utter and abject failures, manage to live in a $2.5 million mansion in a private gated community? The rumor has long been that Dekkers has other sources of income. A more important question is whetherwere it not for the drug traffickingthe World Trade Center attack could have been prevented through the simple expedient of arresting known terrorist Mohamed Atta.
"Welcome to Casablanca." Far from merely being negligent or asleep at the switchthe thrust of allegations expected to be aired in hearings by an Independent Commission currently being thwarted by the Bush Administrationthe evidence indicates the CIA was not only aware of the thousands of Arab student pilots who began pouring into the U.S. to attend flight training beginning in 1999, but was in truth running the operation. "The American people must know the full story has yet to be told," Senator Richard Shelby, a Republican member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said at a hearing last month. And U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham said on Sunday he is seeking to declassify 'the most important information' obtained in a congressional probe of the Sept. 11 attacks. 'Frankly, there is a piece of information which is still classified which I consider to be the most important information that's come to the attention of the joint committee,' Graham said on CBS's 'Face the Nation.' 'We hope that it will be declassified,' Graham said. 'I think it is an important part of our judgments as to where our greatest threats are and what steps we need to do to protect the American people here at home.' Suspicions expressed by an unexpected source, Republican Senator Shelby, indicate bipartisan unease with the continuing cover-up. "Time is not on our side," Shelby said. "You know, we were told that there would be cooperation in this investigation, and I question that. I think that most of the information that our staff has been able to get that is real meaningful has had to be extracted piece by piece." The Republican Senator, quoted in the New York Times on September 10, 2002, stated "there is explosive information that has not been publicly released. I think there are some more bombs out there ... I know that." Here here.
Daniel Hopsicker is the author of Barry & 'the boys: The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History. email the author You can say "A Free Press Would Be A Good Idea" with a donation to keep the MadCowMorningNews alive.
http://www.madcowprod.com/ [15-11-2002 6:45:40 PM]
affidavit
http://www.madcowprod.com/affidavit.htm [15-11-2002 6:46:07 PM]
small world
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Sitting in front of Rudi's hangar: a commuter plane belonging to (take your pick) Florida Air, Express Air, or Sunrise Airlines
Firm has 'green light' from local DEA. > February 25--Venice, Florida New evidence linking the owner of the Venice Florida flight school which trained Mohamed Atta to the Central Intelligence Agency surfaced earlier this month. The new evidence adds to existing indications that Mohamed Atta and his terrorist cadre's flight training in this country was part of a so-far unacknowledged U.S. government intelligence operation which had ultimately tragic consequences for thousands of civilians on September 11th. Far from merely being negligent or asleep at the switchthe thrust so far of allegations expected to be aired at joint Senate and House Select Just a gigolo? Or CIA 'made' guy? Committee hearings next monththe accumulating evidence suggests the CIA was not just aware of the thousands of Arab student pilots who began pouring into this country several years ago to attend flight training, but was running the operation, for still-unexplained reasons.
During a controversy over the awarding of a bid for an aviation maintenance facility in Lynchburg, Virginia, what had begun as a purely local spat took on national importance when it unearthed connections between Rudi Dekkersthe Dutch national whose Huffman Aviation trained both of the pilots at the controls of the airliners which crashed into the World Trade Centerand the CIA.
"Good-by Magic Dutch Boy; Hello Jerry Falwell" The CIA's links to Dekkers surfaced when an unknown company called Britannia Aviation was mysteriously awarded a five-year contract to run a large regional maintenance facility at the Lynchburg Virginia Regional Airport. except that the company worked out of a hangar at Rudi Dekkers Huffman Aviation at the Venice, Florida airport. But when Britannia was chosen over a respected and successful Lynchburg company boasting a multi-million dollar balance sheet and more than 40 employees, aviation executives there began voicing concerns to reporters at the local newspaper... "There was some sentiment that there might be something suspicious about Britannia Aviation," stated business reporter Chris Flores of the Lynchburg News-Advance. "There was a clear feeling that nobody knew who these guys were, or where they were coming from." The suspicion deepened when it was discovered that Britannia Aviation is a company with virtually no assets, employees, or corporate history. Moreover, the company did not even possess the necessary FAA license to perform the aircraft maintenance services for which it had just been contracted by the city of Lynchburg. At a Lynchburg City Council hearing on the dispute there were vocal objections from observers baffled as to why a company with virtually no qualifications was being awarded a contract to take over a large regional maintenance facility designed for major carriers like Delta and USAir Express. "It was as if someone with a learners permit from the DMV got picked to drive Richard Pettys car at Daytona," explained one local aviation executive and NASCAR fan. "It made absolutely no business sense that anyone could see." "Be True to Your School." When Britannia Aviations financial statements were released after prodding by the local aviation community they revealed Britannia to be a "company" worth less than $750. Paul Marten, a British aircraft mechanic who was the Britannia executive in attendance, rose to say it wasn't true. Britannias assets, he was sure, amounted to more than $750, though how much more was a question he left unanswered. A Lynchburg city official attempted to wave aside objections that Britannia was insolvent with a joke. "At least they have more on their balance sheet than Enron," said Lynchburg City Councilman Robert Garber. Trying to save further embarrassment, Britannia executive Marten reassured those in attendance that at Huffmans hangar at the Venice Airport they had for some time been successfully providing aviation maintenance services for Caribe Air, a Caribbean carrier. And that is how the world learned that under Rudi Dekkers FAA license Paul Marten's little dummy front company worked for a notorious CIA proprietary air carrier which, even by the standards of a CIA proprietary, has had a particularly checkered past. Caribe Air's history includes 'blemishes' like having its aircraft seized by federal officials at the infamous Mena Arkansas airport a decade ago, after the company was accused by government prosecutors of Was Enron death having used as many as 20 planes to ship drugs worth billions of "assisted suicide?" dollars into this country.
visit the 'Barry & the boys' website At the time of the award virtually nothing was known about Britannia
Isle of Dominica Where Enron meets the WTC
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Ironically, the company also made headlines a dozen years ago in a scandal in which one of the principals, Angolan rebel Jonas Savimbi, was reportedly killed just this past weekend. A Caribe Air C130 had been shot down over Angola with the loss of everyone aboard, including a US Congressmans nephew. The plane was on a mission for the Angolan government, it was discovered, laden with a cargo of whiskey and cigarettes. Observers at the time had noted wryly that, while the CIA had for years been covertly supporting the other side in the Angolan conflict, Jonas Savimbis UNITA rebels, it now appeared to be playing both ends against the middle. At least when it came to planeloads of swag. Though the Congressman with a dead nephew was not amused, the matter was quickly dropped. Curiously enough, Caribe Air is today controlled by an offshore bank located on the Caribbean island of Dominica, Banc Caribe, a private bank that may be being investigated currently by authorities pursuing the names involved in Enron's secret offshore partnerships, many of which have the name "Caribe" in their title. When four offshore bankers were arrested by United States law enforcement agencies in November and charged with money laundering, Banc Caribe Ltd., of Dominica was named in one of the affidavits filed. This is no doubt merely the sheerest of coincidences. When details of the Lynchburg controversy first reached Venice aviation executives they professed amazement. "No one here had ever heard of Britannia Aviation before," one told us. "And this is a very small airport." After our inquiry he called a DEA source of his at the airport, this aviation executive told us, to ask what he knew about Britannia Aviation. "This guy got all excited as soon as I asked," this executive stated. "He immediately wanted to know why I was so interested in Britannia. Finally he reluctantly told me that Britannia had a 'green light' from the DEA at the Venice Airport, whatever that means. He also said the local Venice Police Department (which has mounted round-the-clock patrols at the Airport since Sept.11) had been warned to leave them alone." Paul Martens had no comment on the report when we dropped in on him at his office in a Huffman Aviation hangar at the Venice Airport. He was just an honest British businessman, he told us. He had ties to Lynchburg Virginia. He had met his wife there, while she was a student at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. Her father was a pastor for the Reverend Falwell. "Jerry Falwell got bailed out in the early '90's by a Lynchburg businessman whose son is married to Billy Graham's daughter," a Lynchburg observer told us. "Since then he runs a missionary service called World Help, which flies all over the world." Many of the flight trainers who had trained the Arab terrorist pilots had also flown missions out of the Venice and Sarasota Florida Airports for such Christian missionary services as televangelist Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing. It was "Islamic fundamentalist" Osama bin laden who cloaked his covert activities under the cover of religious charities. Were we now discovering that our own government intelligence agencies used the same ruse? What was going on here? Christian-linked or not, why did a transparent dummy front company like Paul Marten's Britannia Aviation have a 'green light' from the DEA? A green light for what? NEXT: CHARACTER IS DESTINY: THE REAL RUDI DEKKER'S.
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http://www.madcowprod.com/index19.html [15-11-2002 6:46:52 PM]
Archive
A Massive Intelligence Failure Flight School Owners' Shady Ties What are they hiding down in Venice. Florida? Rudi Dekkers & the 'lone nut cadre' Did terrorists train at U.S. Military Bases? Pentagon lied: terrorists trained at U.S. Bases Was CIA Running Terrorist Flight School? Jackson Stephens 'Active' in Venice, Florida Atta, Dekkers & the Venice Flying Circus Osama & the Mob Spooks and Saudis and Florida and Raytheon Anthrax & the Politics of Terror Did Kamikaze kid pilot commit acne-induced suicide? Kamikaze Kid's Dad a Boston 'Top Hoodlum?' "Charlie Tested Clean!" "The Sugar Land Sanction" Terrorist Flight School Linked to CIA Mohamed Atta & the Saudi Royal Family Flight School Owner Changes Story... Again Says Waitress of Terror Pilots: "I Thought They Were Mafia!" FBI Cover-up of Terrorists Last Days Mohamed Atta Kept Terrorist 'E-List' Israelis Alibi Has 'A Few Problems' Magic Dutch Boy Escapes Fiery Plane Crash Secret Service Got Pre-Dawn Warning on Morning of Terrorist Attack The Mystery of Longboat Key Key Witness 'Disappears' in Venice FL One Year Later, the Cover-Up Continues in Venice FL FBI Flubs Terrorist Timeline Atta & Girlfriend's Wild 3-Day Party in Key West Venice Airport Used for Covert Ops Flight School Owner's Plane Seized for Heroin Trafficking Terror Flight School Owner Implicated in 'Protected' Drug Trafficking
http://www.madcowprod.com/archive.htm [15-11-2002 6:47:14 PM]
GOT LIVE IF YOU WANT IT!
A Massive Intelligence Failure

Amidst the carnage and horror of the attack on America there can be room in our hearts right now only for prayers for the dead and compassion for the living, hundreds of whom, we are beginning to learn, have bodies completely and massively burned from head to toe. When Peter Jennings impatiently dismissed an ABC Pentagon analysts foray into theorizing about possible declarations of war, I cheered himfor oncefor rightly insisting that Grief precede Retribution. But we all know this will very quickly change. For myself, I cannot get out of my mind the image of an anonymous man in white pants dangling out the window of the 97th (or so) floor of one of the Twin Towers. We couldnt even see his face, because of the distance and the smoke, and for once I was grateful for an MTV-like shaky-cam effect that had more to do with the honest human emotions of an anonymous cameraman than any postmodern cinegraphic trendiness. I didnt want to know too much about that dangling man in white pants. He was soon to be dead. And I didn't want any close-ups of his face showing with horrifying detail whether he already knew it. But as the acrid smoke of burning flesh lifts there will be more than a whiff of Revenge in the air. And before the finger of retribution begins pointing "over there," I want to point mine in another direction-towards something over here. Surprisingly, NBC anchor Brian Williamsyes, he of the oft-remarked unnatural tangave voice to it first. "There will be many people asking tonight," he stated, right over the public airwaves, "just what it is we are getting for all those tens of billions of dollars being spent on intelligence." Here here. ("The only real news you get about anything really big," stated a journalist of my acquaintance, "comes in the first 24 hours, before they can get the cover-up mechanism in place.") So, before I forget, Id like to send a bottle of Man Tan over to Brian Williams table, for blurting a truth on national television. After writing a recent book about the tawdry corruption surrounding the career of one of Americas most famous CIA agents, who was also and not coincidentally the most successful drug smuggler in history, I feel compelled to blurt out a similar question... Has the endemic corruption in our national intelligence services contributed toor even in some sense been responsible forleaving us helpless before this national tragedy? Could the truth really be as sordid as a statement I heard from a former NSA operative about the huge US intelligence operation in South America called Operation Condor? "Operation Condor was the result of years of careful planning designed to take over an entire hemisphere," he had stated, matter-of-factly, "the conquest and then plundering of an entire, nearly virgin, continent, for the benefit of the American intelligence operatives involved in the operation." Anyone who has brushed up against the minions of this nation's clandestine services these past few decades cannot have failed to notice their pocket-lining preoccupation with gunrunning and massive financial fraud; the unpunished looting of Americas Savings and Loans, to cite one example. Not to mention the narcotics trafficking. (Paging Colin Powell; pick up a white courtesy telephone in the Lima Aero Porto, please.) Did the cretins with an obsession to increase their market share in the illicit narcotics industryPlan Colombia, to give it its formal namekeep them from doing the job we are all paying them to do? Are the guardians of our countrys national security apparatus too preoccupied these days with looting the system to waste their time on drudgery which doesn't positively affect their Cayman Island's accounts? The brutal reality of American life entering the 21st Century was faced almost 2000 years ago by the citizens of Rome, when they looked with despair at the corrupt and swaggering Praetorian Guard which had made a mockery of their once-proud Republic, and asked out loud the question that echoes down to us across the centuries... "Who will guard the guards?" In one of the ironies of which history is so full, two days ago the New York Times ran an article on Bin Laden. So his name has been in the air. And hey, Im human, too.... As our pitifully inadequate President might pitifully put it, "Id like to kick some Arab ass" too. But as I sit in front of my television with the rest of my countrymen today, I am thinking about none of that; I am riveted in horror, as you are, watching helplessly, wondering if the cameras caught that man in white pants on the 97th floor loosen his grip on the ledge, and free-fall 100 stories into the canyons of Wall Street, like so much human confetti. Daniel Hopsicker is the author of "Barry & the boys;' The CIA, the Mob & Americas Secret History." www.barryandtheboys.com.
http://www.madcowprod.com/indexc.html [15-11-2002 6:47:29 PM]
Liked the chubby one
Death in Venice (Florida)

by Daniel Hopsicker
3. What are they hiding down in Venice Florida?

The real news right now is not in what theyre giving us; its in what theyre leaving out. In the two major strands of the investigation as leaked to the press--the German connection which is everywhere, and the money trail--both have the Gulf Coast of Florida anchoring one end of the rainbow. Today's Boston Globe has a former CIA counterterrorism chief fingering Islamic Jihad. ITEM: The director of an Islamic studies think tank in Tampa was proclaimed the leader of Islamic Jihad in 1996. Afterwards the new think tank chief was held by the government for more than three and a half years on secret evidence, in a Bradenton, Florida jail. The man, Mazen Al-Najjar, was eventually released after courts ruled that he could not be detained further without just cause. On his release, local reporters wrote that the government had reluctantly revealed only the smallest bit of its evidence against him. ITEM: on the day of the attack Sarasota police said the Secret Service interrogated four Sudanese men after getting a tip that the men intended to harm President Bush during his visit to the city. The incident was found to be "unrelated" to the attacks, and ended in the release of the men. Four Sudanese men? In Sarasota, Florida? We'd have sooner believed that Katherine Harris was secretly dating Dennis Rodman than that you could ever find four Sudanese in whitebread Sarasota, Florida. What were they doing? Pricing retirement real estate? Closing a deal to buy Florida's old election machines on the cheap? Then we get to Venice Florida. The Venice Florida airport, where virtually all of the terrorist pilots trained, is the biggest September 11th crime scene that wasn't reduced to rubble. What was its attraction to the pilot trainees in Bin Lauden's terrorist air force? ITEM: Investigators are focusing on Mr. Bin al-Shibh," reports todays New York Times, "who lived with Mr. Atta and other members of the Hamburg cell... (and who) transferred 2,000 Deutschmarks, or about $4,200, through Citibank to the West Coast Bank in Florida as a down payment at the same flight school attended by Mr. Jarrah." Thats the news theyre giving us. ITEM: That money went to Arne Kruithof, owner of the Florida Flight Training School at the tiny Venice Florida airport. The New York Times neglects to mention it. The Los Angeles Times reported that "Atta and al-Shehhi, who were roommates while living in Germany, arrived in the United States within days of each other in mid-2000. They got flight lessons in Florida, but not at the same location as Jarrah." ITEM: Jarrah got his lessons right next door, at Arne Kruithofs school. All were at the tiny Venice Airport. The Los Angeles Times neglects to mention it. Nor do they bother to offer any reason for the apparent affinity of middle eastern terrorists for sleepy enclaves filled with widows with blue hair on the Florida Gulf Coast. ITEM: Almost all of the terrorist pilots received their initial training in Venice, either at Kruithofs or at Dekkers' flight school. Together, these two schools trained the core cadre of foreign national terrorist pilots. ITEM: Atta moved from Germany to train with Dekkers' flight school in Venice, Huffman Aviation. At least four other members of the same terrorist cell followed him. ITEM: Dekkers was actively engaged in an aggressive European "marketing" campaign at the exact same time Atta and his cadre left Hamburg and moved to Florida. Instead of wandering into his flight school, as Dekkers has attested, Atta may have been recruited--by Dekkers. The New York Times neglects to mention it. Dekkers went on television after the disaster insisting the terrorist pilots had had only the most fleeting of associations with his flight school. ITEM: When houses were raided in South Florida, two men caught said they were Saudi pilots on a 15-month pilot's course at Dekkers Huffman Aviation. ITEM: The FBI was swarming Huffman Aviation by 2 a.m., just 18 hours following the attack. They removed student files from two schools at the Venice airport: Huffman Aviation and the Florida Flight Training Center just down the street. "The FBI Knew Terrorists Were Using Flight Schools," reported the Washington Post a week later. They said Federal authorities have been aware for years that suspected terrorists with ties to Osama bin Laden were receiving flight training at schools in the United States. ITEM: Whatever the big secret is, they know about it at the FBI, even if mums the word. ITEM: Dekkers and Kruithof are both Dutch nationals. They bought their supposedly competing flights schools within months of each other two years ago. The New York Times neglects to mention it. In all, 27 terrorists were trained to fly, the LA Times said. Rudi Dekkers flight schools (he has another down the road in Naples) were training four hundred foreign national...a year. ITEM: A Dekkers employee named Charlie Voss housed the two ringleaders of the cell when they arrived in this country. Voss was described in press reports variously as an "ex-aviation worker, a "company clerk," or a" bookkeeper." ITEM: Nobody described Voss as an "ex-C130 pilot," although that would have been accurate too. What are they hiding down in Venice, Florida? "The FBI told us that individuals who crossed our path were involved in the tragedy," Voss said. He is no longer with the company. Dale Kraus was Dekkers second-in-command. We reached him by phone at home, to ask about his association with Dekkers. He is no longer with the company. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that George H.W. Bush, the father of President Bush, works for the bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, an international consulting firm. By the time they reach him for comment, Bush may no longer be with the company. ITEM: Press accounts from before the tragedy reveal both Kruithof and Dekkers to be spending large sums of money out at the airport. "We have plans to spend $2 million to $3 million in the next two years to boost jets to half of our business," Rudi Dekkers, president of Huffman Aviation, told the local Venice Gondolier. "Jets bring wealth."
The MadCow Morning News-ish
Rudi Dekkers Liked the chubby one.
Arne Kruithof the Silent One
our story thus far: 1. A Massive Intelligence Failure
2.Flight School Owners' Shady Ties
Daniel Hopsicker is the author of "Barry & the boys; The CIA, the Mob & Americas Secret History.
Abuse of power comes as no surprise
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theconspiracychannel.com
Arne Kruithof, owner of The Florida Flight Training Center, was building a new multi-million dollar hangar, as well as launching a new charter air service. Jets bring wealth. In the aftermath of the attacks, Dekkers was everywhere on television, like a designated "interview-EE." Yet, despite all the "face time" Rudi got, he didnt have anything much to say. He liked one of them, the chubby one, Alshehhi. "He was a teddy bear. He was friendly. I have found out, in my life, that chubby guys are always a little bit more friendly." He didn't like Atta. "If you see the picture in the newspaper, you see the face, tell me what you think," he said about his feelings for Atta. "I just didn't like the face. I have no explanation." With 5000 more or less vaporized bodies, chubby guy Rudi Dekkers holding forth on Larry King on his theories of the jolly nature of chubby guys everywhere was more than just a little beside the point. But they let him get away with it. ITEM: The money trail leads directly to Venice Florida. Investigators following the money trail connect Atta and another Hamburg-based hijacker, Marwan Al-Shehhi, to a Syrian businessman in Germany, Mamoun Darkazanli. Darkazanli tells the Associated Press on Tuesday he worked for the man accused of being bin Ladens financial wizard, but had no contact with him since a business deal fell through in 1995. He just paid for my work, Darkazanli told reporters at his apartment in Hamburg. Afterwards, I never heard from him again. "He just paid for my work." Atta and al-Shehhi alone paid Dekkers school more than $38,000. Dekkers, who knows it, defended having trained anyone who walked up to his counter. "I don't need anything from you, just a check to start flying," said Dekkers, who likened flying lessons to shopping for groceries. "We're just a business," he said. "We're just a business." "He just paid for my work." Experts have been wondering how a conspiracy of such size and duration could have gone unnoticed by US intelligence agencies and law enforcement. At least 15 of the far-flung network of terrorist pilots got their money from the same (so far-unnamed) source. While in the Venice area last year, the terrorist suspects opened checking accounts during the summer. We called someone who used to work at something like the CIA. "How could the Agency not have known about 15 foreign pilots all paid from one source?" He chose his words carefully. "I would assume that they did know. It would seem almost-impossible for them not to." Venice, Florida is a retirement community sandwiched between the more well-heeled resorts of Naples, Sanibel Island, and Boca Grande, (a Bush family favorite retreat) to the South, and Sarasota (home of local girl Katherine Harris) and Tampa, home of the Bucs, Cuban cigars, and Santo Trafficante, to the north. What are they hiding down in Venice Florida? NEXT: Rudi Dekkers and the Lone Cadre Theory
http://www.madcowprod.com/index.3.html [15-11-2002 6:47:32 PM]
Was CIA Running Terrorist Flight School?
Rudi Dekkers on the front page of the Venice Gondolier
Rudi Dekkers & the "Lone Nut Cadre"

Questions mount about the precise nature of the conspiracy which took down the World Trade Center on Sept 11, even as the time for asking them grows urgently short. Justice, vengeance, and our duty to our dead demand adherence to a simple progression. Identify the bad guys who killed our people. Find the bad guys who killed our people. Kill them. London England to Venice, Florida. Macro to micro. Tony Blair sketches out the Cliff notes version of the case against Bin Laden. He says, "Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization with ties to a global network." "A global network."
Magic Dutch Boy Rudi Dekkers
What global network? A global network of what? Said global network assisted terrorist cadre. Said global network otherwise remains shadowy and undefined. London England to Venice, Florida. Macro to micro. A massive flight training operation funnels hundreds of foreign national pilots here. Noise complaints heat up City Council meetings. Rudi Dekkers operation makes Big Noise. "During a period of two hours some 90 flights went over... 15 planes flying overhead six times each." "Fifteen planes overhead."
Magic Dutch Boy Arne Kruithof
A terrorist squadron. Bin Laden Air. Three weeks later on the tarmac at the Venice Airport they are standing clear of Rudi Dekkers. Former associates plead ignorance. They are "no longer with the company." More is learned about Rudi Dekkers. Rudis $500,000 yacht rocks at anchor in Naples, Florida. Rudi has Big Friends. Rudi has Big Problems. Rudis stock is Marked Down. Rudis story does not cohere. Rudis friends are in High Places. Down on the tarmac Rudi is Mucho Unloved. If the FBI is buying Rudis act, it isnt because of his sterling reputation. "I tolerated Rudi's advances because I needed to keep my job," said former Dekkers employee Nicole Antini.
DEKKERS' PARTNER Richard Boehlke's high school pic shows no signs of quarter billion dollar Mob heist to come...
Two weeks before the World Trade Center attack she filed suit to force him to enforce the settlement of a sexual harassment charge. Dekkers agreed to settle for $15,000. Now he was balking at paying. "As long as I have worked at Huffman Aviation," Nicole said, "I have been subjected to sexual harassment by Rudi Dekkers." Dekkers Venice Florida flight school was terrorist American beachhead. Huffman Aviation was terrorist Omaha Beach. The FBI pointedly saidearlythey knew about terrorists rotating through Rudi Dekkers flight school in Venice, Florida. They leave hanging the question of why they did nothing to shut it down. Dekkers waxes indignant. "I don't need anything from you, just a check to start flying." Dekkers tells reporters how he happened to provide pilot training to the terrorist cadre: "We're just a business." Consider the (business) logic. Two Dutch nationals, Arne Kruithof and Rudi Dekkers, buy two flight training schools at the way-off-the-beaten-track Venice Florida airport in 1998. Dekkers begins extensive "marketing" in Belgium and Germany. Atta live in Germany. Mohamed Atta and at least four of his terrorist cadre leave Germany. They move directly to Venice, Florida. They do not pass "go." If they collect $200, it comes in useful, because now they are in pilot training with Dekkers and Kruithof. Pilot training is expensive. Atta and Al-Shehhi pay $38,000 between them. Dekkers is training 500 foreign national pilots at two separate facilities. Yet, out at the Venice Municipal Airport, Rudi is falling behind on his rent. Right now there are people in Federal custody whose connections with the terrorists are far less suspicious. Both men are foreign nationals and thus presumed to be flight risks. Yet neither Dekkers nor Kruithof is being held. Big Clout. Big Friends. Big Trouble. Big Charade.
our story thus far: A Massive Intelligence Failure
Flight School Owners' Shady Ties
What are they hiding down in Venice. Florida? Rudi Dekkers & the 'lone nut cadre' Did terrorists train at U.S. Military Bases? Pentagon lied: terrorists trained at U.S. Bases
Daniel Hopsicker is the author of "Barry & the boys; The CIA, the Mob & Americas Secret History
"We're just a business." What global network? A global network of what?
The birth of the Lone (Nut) Cadre theory. Dekkers and Kruithofs importance grew this week when the Washington Post proposed the Lone (Nut) Cadre theory, which is now, they report, the operative assumption in the FBIs investigation. "The 19 hijackers who carried out the worst act of terror ever to occur on U.S. soil worked with little outside help as a single, integrated group," said the Post in a Sunday report on the state of the investigation. "Little outside help." "As more of the conspiracy becomes understood, government sources now say that the investigation so far suggests the 19 had "no major help" in the United States," wrote Post reporter Amy Goldstein. "No major help." "The FBI investigation into the plot is preliminary, and the conspiracy's precise nature probably will not be understood for years." If the conspiracys precise nature wont be understood for years, how can they rule out domestic involvement? A Federal Agency with a preference for lone (nut) gunmen floats a Lone (Nut) Cadre trial balloon. Think 19 Lee Harvey Oswalds.
That old uneasy feeling
Think squads of lone gunmen. Attas cadre was a Lone Cadre. Doing Lone Cadre-like things. Acting, Always, Alone...at least while in this country. No one else involved. No Higher Ups. Tony Blairs global network explanation now obsolete. Replaced by Lone (Nut) Cadre theory. Think FBI. Think Whitewater. Watergate. Kennedy. Think cover up. "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."
"We're just a business." The Sarasota FBI office, responsible for the Venice airport investigation, has so far not offered their version of what Rudi Dekkers was up to. Were Middle Eastern terrorists wandering the Florida Panhandle and Gulf Coast as comfortably as if theyd been listening to Tom Petty records all their lives? Or is something else the case? Might Rudi Dekkers and Arne Kruithof work for the CIA? Might the CIA have been training Bin Laden operatives as part of an intelligence operation designed to try to penetrate his organization? Might that explain FBI lack of interest in the two Venice Dutch Boys? When commercial flights resumed at Venice Municipal Airport after the Sept 11 disaster the first plane to take off was an Air Sunshine flight, part of a fleet based in Fort Lauderdale. The only passenger was the pilot. There was little other activity at the airport. Members of the media outnumbered pilots or passengers in the lobby of Huffman Aviation, watching national broadcasts about the attacks. Air Sunshine is owned by one Mirmohammed Adili, whose large family is involved in numerous aviation and import-export ventures. It is one of just two air carriers the American military lets fly into the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo, Cuba. Mirmohammed Adili's Air Sunshine is in Fort Lauderdale. Just six months before they hijacked commercial planes and slammed them into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, bin Laden operatives tried to buy a multi-million dollar Boeing 727. They found a willing broker in... Fort Lauderdale. It is just coincidence. The Lone Cadre received "no major outside help." Atta didnt Keep A Diary. Instead, Atta Left A Will. When its released experts read Atta as Saudi Wahhabi. A fundamentalist puritanical strain. No women at the funeral. No flowers. No wailing. No gnashing of terrorist teeth. But Atta is Arab elite commando. Atta is Arab elite. Attas Father is Egyptian diplomat/lawyer. Elite make poor fundamentalists. Too much money to be made to spend time speaking in tongues. Rockefellers dont handle snakes at Monday night revivals. What induced Islamic terrorists to move to a retirement enclave with more golf carts than cars? It couldn't have been the nightlife. But these terrorists--strange for devout Muslims, it seems-- dig lively nightlife. Devout Muslims abstain from alcohol. These Muslims order premium brands. These Muslims enjoy a night on the town as much as any Infidel.
all conspiracy all the time theconspiracychannel
Federal agents flash pictures at a South Florida bar of the two terrorist pilots who just a day earlier had demolished the World Trade Center. One of them drank Stolichnaya vodka for three straight hours, one bartender remembers. "Muslim extremist" Marwan al-Shehhi was drinking rum. Was Mohammed Atta a "devout Islamic fundamentalist?" Saudi puritanical or Stoli guy? Mohammed Atta is Islamic Stolichnaya 48 hours after the slaying of John Fitzgerald Kennedy a CIA pilot named David Ferrie was under suspicion of participation in the assassination conspiracy. Thirty years later Joe Pesci plays Ferrie in Oliver Stones JFK the movie. 48 hours after the September 11th attack, a flight school owner named Rudi Dekkers, known to have trained virtually the entire terrorist pilot cadre, and a possible CIA asset, seemed impervious to suspicion. What suspicions? He was being booked onto Larry King Live. The National Enquirer has the hot headline of the week: "Terrorists Still in America." "Where they are. What theyre doing. How you can spot them." Do America a favor. Drop a copy at your local FBI.
Evil in Our Backyard
by Daniel Hopsicker
Did Terrorist Pilots Train at U.S. Military Schools?

"The only real news you get after something big is in the first couple of days." In addition to having been inducted into the U.S. flight training program by two Dutch-owned flight schools in Venice, Florida, as many as six of the terrorists, including ringleader Mohammed Atta, also received training at U.S. military facilities, according to a flurry of stories between Sept 15 and 17 in the Washington Post, Newsweek, and Knight Ridder newspapers. The story had an extremely short life. Newsweek reported that "U.S. military sources have given the FBI information that suggests five of the alleged hijackers of the planes used in Tuesday's terror attacks received training at secure U.S. military installations in the 1990s." Knight Ridders news account was more specific. It said Mohamed Atta had attended International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala. In addition, Abdulaziz Alomari had attended Aerospace Medical School at Brooks Air Force base in Texas, they reported, and Saeed Alghamdi had been to the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey, California. If true, these reports would have dealt a blow to the consensus portrait then emerging of the terrorist cadre as puritanical Islamic fundamentalists. Indeed, if foreign nationals who would eventually become terrorist pilots were training at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, or going through the U.S. Air Forces International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base, they would most likely have had connections to Arab governments considered friendly to the United States. Official denial was swift, but strangely worded. The italics are ours: "Officials stressed that the name matches may not necessarily mean the students were the hijackers because of discrepancies in ages in other personal data."
"Designated Interview-ee"
"Not my best side."
"Some of the FBI suspects had names similar to those used by foreign alumni of U.S. military courses," said the Air Force in a statement. "However, discrepancies in their biographical data, such as birth dates 20 years off, indicate we are probably not talking about the same people." "Probably not talking about the same people" does not quite strike the right note of decisive certitude that we would expect when discussing the identities of the people who have just been responsible for the deaths of 6000 more-or-less vaporized Americans. But Air Force spokesmen are apparently more persuasive in person than when reading a press release over the telephone, because Newsweek, the Washington Post and Knight Ridder all dropped the story. Nothing has been reported about this since. Nada. Niente. Could a cover-up be underway? Could the original information that "leaked out" in early press reports have been true...and then suppressed in America's free press?
2.Flight School Owners' Shady Ties 3.What are they hiding down in Venice. Florida? 4.Rudi Dekkers & the Lone Nut Cadre
Or is this just six separate-but-innocent cases of mistaken identity? Did (terrorist pilot) Mohamed Atta attend International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala? Did (terrorist) Abdulaziz Alomari study at Aerospace Medical School at Brooks Air Force base in Texas? Was (terrorist) Saeed Alghamdi at the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey, California? It seemed easy enough to find out. Deploy MadCow Team Coverage. Find out. Here's the answer: "Nobody knows." News reports Sept. 16 had asserted, "Officials would not release ages, country of origin or any other specific details of the three individuals." Over three weeks later, nothing has changed. When Newsweek's Internet site reported that three of the hijackers received training at the Pensacola Naval Station in Florida, Senator Nelson had faxed an indignant note to Attorney General Ashcroft demanding to know if it were true.
Abuse of power comes as no surprise
A former Navy pilot had told Newsweek that during his years on the base, "we always, always, always trained other countries' pilots. When I was there two decades ago, it was Iranians. The shah was in power. Whoever the country du jour is, that's whose pilots we train." We called the office of Florida Democratic Senator Bob Nelson. We were hoping to hear more about the country du jour. The Senator has not yet received a reply. "In the wake of those reports we asked about the Pensacola Naval Air Station but we never got a definitive answer from the Justice Department," said a spokesman for Sen. Nelson. "So we asked the FBI for an answer if and when they could provide us one. Their response to date has been that they are trying to sort through something complicated and difficult." "If and when." "Speaking for Senator Nelson," concluded the spokesman, "we still do not know if three of the terrorists trained at one time in Pensacola or not." "Complicated and difficult." We reached a Major in the Air Force's Public Affairs Office who was familiar with the question, she said, because she had read the initial Air Force denial to the media. "Biographically, they're not the same people," she explained to us patiently. "Some of the ages are twenty year off." 'Some' of the ages? We told her we were only interested in Atta. Was she saying that the age of the Mohamed Atta who attended the Air Force's International Officer's School at Maxwell Air Force Base was different than the terrorist Atta's age as reported? Um, er, no, the Major admitted. Stiil, she persisted. "Mohamed is a very common name." We asked if the Registrar of the International Officer's School might provide us with the name and address of this second Mohamed Atta, so that we might call him and confirm that there were really two Mohamed Atta's of about the same age pursuing flight training in the U.S. at about the same time. "I don't think you're going to get that information," the Major replied. Yesterday, FBI Agents were ordered to curtail their investigation of the Sept. 11 attack, in an order describing the investigation of the terrorist hijackings as "the most exhaustive in its history." "The investigative staff has to be made to understand that we're not trying to solve a crime now," said one law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity The order was said to have met with resistance from FBI agents who believed that continued surveillance of suspects might have turned up critical evidence to prove who orchestrated the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Officials said Mr. Mueller, who was sworn in last month, believed that his agents had a broad understanding of the events of Sept. 11. It was now time to Move On. Did some of the hijackers receive training in U.S. military exchange programs for foreign officers? Was terrorist "ringleader' Mohamed Atta a puritanical Islamic fundamentalist? Or an Arab double agent? This week's best headline comes from the plucky and hopefully spore-free folks over at the National Enquirer: I Dated a Terrorist! Horrified Girlfriend Tell All "He didn't seem to me to have any evil qualities," Kristen says now. "That's the scary thing--that you never know. You never know." TOMORROW: Rudi Dekker, Businessman & Venice Dutch Boy; ; Mohamed Atta, Islamic Fundamentalist with a (lime) Twist.
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Pentagon Lied: Terrorists Trained at U.S. Bases
by Daniel Hopsicker
October 14,2001
Despite earlier denials, terrorists in the Sept. 11 attacks received training at secure U.S. military bases, a Defense Department spokesman admitted in an interview Friday. Three days after the WTC disaster, Newsweek, the Washington Post and the Knight Ridder newspapers reported claims that five of the terrorist hijackers in the Sept 11 attacks received training at secure U.S. military installations during the 1990s. The reports also claimed three of the terrorists had listed their address as the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla., and had participated in military exchange programs for foreign officers at the Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida. In an interview with a reporter questioning the vaguely-worded Sept 16 Pentagon denial, the Defense Dept spokesman was asked to explain the particulars of fuzzy statements in which officials said "name matches may not necessarily mean the students were the hijackers, and that discrepancies in biographical data indicate "we are probably not talking about the same people." (Italics added.) Pressed repeatedly to provide specifics, the spokesperson finally admitted, "I do not have the authority to tell you who (which terrorists) attended which schools." So it appears certain that at least some of the previous denials have been rendered inoperative, and that a list exists in the Defense Dept which names Sept 11 terrorists who received training at U.S. military facilities, a list the Pentagon is in no hurry to make public. This admission has significant import. Consider: Foreign nationals training at secure U.S. facilities do so almost solely at the behest of governments considered friendly to the United States. Gaining admittance to the International Officers School at Maxwell AFB in Montgomerywhich terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta was reported to have attendedwould have required Atta to be someone well-connected with a friendly Arab government. (For the record, the spokesperson denied that the International Officers School attendee named Mohamed Atta is the same Mohamed Atta who piloted a passenger plane into the WTC, while repeatedly declining requests for biographical details about a second Arab pilot with the same name as the terrorist.) Take the (online) resume of someone who indisputably did attend the U.S. Air Forces International Officers School, for example, as an illustration of just how connected these foreign nationals must be. Colonel and Staff Pilot Mohammed Ahmed Hamel Al Qubaisi is currently a Defense Military Naval & Air Attache at the United Arab Emirates Embassy U.S. embassy, after previous stints in his countrys Embassy & Security Division as Chief of Intelligence, and in the UAEs Security Division/Air Force Intelligence & Security Directorate Security Officer/Air Force Intelligence & Security Directorate. Arab Emirate-wise, International Officer's School graduate Al Qubaisi is a homeland-security kind of guy. A former Navy pilot quoted in Newsweeks Sept 15 report stated that during his years on the Pensacola base, "we always, always, always trained other countries' pilots. When I was there two decades ago, it was Iranians. The shah was in power. Whoever the country du jour is, that's whose pilots we train." The "country du jour" at U.S. military installations during the 1990s, according to numerous reports, was Saudi Arabia. Newsweeks prematurely "dis-credited" report, for example, states that according to a Pentagon source at least two of the terrorists trained at U.S. military facilities were former Saudi Air Force pilots. Mohammed Atta had a Saudi passport, early reports also indicated. Waleed Alshehri and Marwan Alsherhri had been living in Saudi Arabia before they arrived in Florida to train for their missions. Alleged associates had listed Saudi Arabian Airlines post office box in the Saudi city of Jeddah as their home address on their commercial pilots' licenses. And some of the pilots had licenses indicating they were sponsored or employed by Saudi Arabian Airlines, owned by the Saudi government. Then, too, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia told Washington 10 days before the September 11 terror attacks that US policy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict had become untenable. And the Oct 12 Times of London reports that the White House is frustrated with the lack of help from Saudi Arabia in freezing Osama bin Ladens assets and tracking those behind the September 11 hijackings, and that the Saudi regime has so far refused to clamp down on the assets of bin Laden or other al-Qaeda figures, despite repeated requests from Washington. This official admissionthat the "Terrorist 19" have suspicious connections that are still-unexploredputs even more of a spotlight on the two Dutch-owned flight schools in Venice, Florida which were the initial "port of entry" for terrorist pilots inducted into the U.S. flight training program.
EXCLUSIVE
swinging door
that old uneasy feeling
2.Flight School Owners' Shady Ties
3.What are they hiding down in Venice. Florida? 4.Rudi Dekkers & the Lone Nut Cadre Did Terrorists Train at U.S. Military Bases?
The Two Venice Dutch Boys There are over 200 flight schools in Florida. Every terrorist pilot chose one of the two in Venice, Florida. The two Venice flight schools were the terrorists American beachhead.
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Rudi Dekkers Huffman Aviation was the terrorists Omaha Beach. What made these two schools so popular with the terrorist cadre? Some flight schools may be slightly more equal than others, as it happens... "Some schools are authorized by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to issue highly coveted I-20M immigration forms that help foreign students acquire visas to enter the United States as vocational students," read one early report about the Florida flight schools. Guess who had one of those "highly-coveted" "vocational status" visas? Mohammed Atta, the alleged mastermind of the most vicious terrorist attack in the history of the world... Guess who gave it to him? Rudi Dekkers flight school, Huffman Aviation. Under the glare of TV lights on the apron of the Venice airport the day after the tragedy, Dekkers had denied any responsibility for the terrorists student visas, saying "foreign students must apply through Immigration and Naturalization Services, which he believes performs background checks. "We send them the paperwork and they go to their embassies," said Dekkers. But Richard Nyren, a British classmate of the terrorist pilots in Venice, had told reporters at the same time that it's not all that easy to get a student visa, even with the help of the school. How did Mohamed Atta happen to get so lucky in the mangrove swamps of Southwest Florida? He got his "highly-coveted" I-20M immigration because "some" schools are authorized by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to issue them. Not "all" schools. "Some" schools. Schools like Rudi Dekkers Huffman Aviation. The question is: what made Dekkers school so special? In a wire service report three days after the WTC disaster, Dekkers was quoted saying, "I can tell you that there's definitely some flaws in the system." It has been one of his few completely truthful statements. FACT: Some of the terrorists had enough juice, enough access, to have gained admittance to training at secure U.S. military facilities. That argues official government complicityleaving aside exactly which government for the momentat a level the current FBI investigation has not even hinted at. So far, the investigation conducted around the world since Sept. 11 has resulted in a finger being pointed directly at an obscure outfit most people had never even heard of, and their Taliban backers. Did Al Qaeda and the Taliban bring down the World Trade Center towers all by themselves? Or should the FBIs investigators be looking at other, larger groups and even nations? When the FBI was actively looking for "international networks" which assisted and harbored the terrorists, were any suspects overlooked? Were any protected from scrutiny? Were Rudi Dekker and Arne Kruithof acting as "cut-outs" for a U.S. intelligence operation at the Venice, Florida airport? Were they funneling Arab pilots into further pilot training? If the past 40 years of American history serves as any guide, we will very likely never know. NEXT: "SPOOKS, SAUDIS, AND THE MOB"
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Spooks and Saudis and Florida
Was CIA Running Terrorist Flight School?

October 19--Your legend is your cover story, in intelligence parlance; the lie that holds together long enough to let you skip the country... The legends of Rudi Dekkers as flight school owner and Mohamed Atta as fanatic 'Islamic fundamentalist have been fraying at the edges since the collapse of the World Trade Center. Still, they may have lasted long enough to do the job for which they were intended. With a war on, no one seems to be losing sleep over the fact that the version of events currently being peddled about the September 11th disaster relies on what one law enforcement source wryly calls 'the Magic Dutch Boy' theory. In the Kennedy assassination 'the Magic Bullet' theory allowed the FBI to apply Lee Harvey Oswalds lone nut gunman tag. The current 'lone nut cadre theory' of the FBI for the Sept 11 disaster, goes this latest reasoning, will only fly through use of a similarly-twisted logic trail, one now being called 'the Magic Dutch Boy theory.' It goes like this: Both of the pilots who guided planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center had trained at Rudi Dekkers Huffman Aviation when they first got to America. Dekkers, a Dutch national, had only recently purchased the flight school located at the small out of the way Venice Florida Airport. The terrorist duo practicing touch and gos in the humid September air on Floridas Gulf coast were soon joined by a third student terrorist pilot, the one on UAL Flight 93. He signed up at the Florida Flight Training Center almost next door to Dekkers Huffman Aviation, making it a terrorist trifecta out at the unsuspecting Venice Airport. Just like Dekkers Huffman Aviation, this second flight school had also just changed owners. And the new owner of this flight school too turns out to be a Dutch national. His name is Arne Kruithof, from Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The magic Dutch boy theory says that the appearance of these two foreign nationals, both Dutch, purchasing flight schools at the same time at the same airport is merely a 'magical' coincidence... Because if the appearance of a second Dutch national purchasing a flight school right as the terrorist cadre show up isn't just the a strange coincidence belonging on Ripleys Believe it Or Not... then they're hiding what looks unmistakably like a covert intelligence operation down in Venice Florida. It being Florida, that means the CIA, reputed to be active in the state. "Two Dutch boys buying adjacent flight schools which shortly thereafter get 'overrun by terrorists is one damn Dutch boy too many," stated our law enforcement source. "Its untidy." Was the CIA running a covert, or black, operation out of the Venice, Florida Airport? Might they have been training pilots for Bin Laden in an effort to penetrate his organization that went horrifically awry? Will we someday be adding Magic Dutch Boy to the 'Magic Bullet' Wing of the Secret History Museum? The local Venice Gondolier two days after the disaster ran a huge black headline reading: "Evil in our own backyard." Underneath it they had placed a picture of Rudi Dekkers facing a phalanx of TV cameras out at the Venice Airport. The irony of the juxtaposition did not go unnoticed. "At first everyone just thought it was kind of amusing," an aviation employee at the airport said, "because it made Dekkers look like he was the evil in our backyard, which the newspaper probably didnt mean." Pause. "And then it hit me. Dekkers had purchased his aviation school at just about the time the terrorist pilots moved into town and began their lessons." Is Rudi Dekkers just an innocent aviation executive whose flight school received the most unfortunate business publicity since Ryder Trucks at the time of the Oklahoma City bombing? Or is there a darker reality lurking behind his widely promoted public persona? Reporters swarmed the Venice airport in the days after the identity of the terrorist pilots and their relationship with the local flight schools became known. An analysis of their stories reveals that there were two different versions of events being given by flight school representatives, that were in disagreement even on basic chronology, like which of their schools the terrorists attended first. A flight instructor at Jones Aviation Flying Service Inc. which operates from the Venice-adjacent Sarasota Bradenton International Airport, told the Associated Press that Atta and Al-Shehhi arrived in "September or October" and asked to be given flight training.
Jones Instructor Ivan Chirivella said the two came to Jones Aviation from Huffman Aviation in Venice. Chirivella said he spent four hours almost every morning from September to October last year instructing Mohamed Atta, 33, and Marwan Yousef Alshehhi, 23. But Rudi Dekkers at Huffman Aviation, who has been getting all the national face-time, had been telling a different tale.They signed up at Huffman in late July, he stated in innumerable interviews, and stayed until December or January. The two cadre principals paid $20,000 apiece at the rate of $1000 a week. Dekkers says the terrorist were at his school, located a half an hour south of Sarasota down the Tammiami Trail, an old Indian path that wends through the mangrove swamps of Floridas Gulf Coast, at the same time the two Jones' Aviation instructors say the terrorist duo were flying four hours every morning...with them. Dekkers told his new buddy Larry King, and anyone else with a microphone who would listen, that when Atta & co. showed up at his school they were already grumbling about a bad experience at another school. This directly contradicts the story the two Jones instructors gave reporters. Why can't the flight instructors at the two schools get their stories straight? Did Atta and his sidekick attend both flight schools at once? Here's another journalistic 'snapshot' which gets a little 'blurry' when you look at it a little closer:
to read previous stories click the "Teach"
Coming in February In their inimitable British tabloid style, London's Mirror TV Pre-order Now! filmed a segment at the Venice Airport two days after the
disaster, which they slugged: "IN THE COCKPIT WHERE A HIJACKER LEARNED TO FLY!" "THIS is the cockpit of the light aircraft in which hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi learned to fly," the Mirrors American correspondent told British viewers. "Under the guidance of instructor Mark Mickart I went through the same pre-flight checks and maneuvers on the white single-engine Cessna 172, terrorists Atta and Al-Shehhi had done on July 9."
Now Playing! "The same preflight checklists!" Russell Welch talks about anthrax
Wow. Kitsch history. What is of interest is the flight instructor, Mark Mikarts, busily showing the audience How the Terrorists Checked Off. Mark Mikarts used to be somebody else. His given name is Mark Wierdak. The only relative of his we were able to locate is a half-sister. She works in the British consulate in Venezuela. When we got in touch with her to ask about her 'flight instructor' brother's new name all she would say was, "We use to share the same father." Pilot Mikarts also flies out of the Sarasota-Bradenton Airport for a Christian missionary group called Agape Flights, which describe themselves as an independent ministry fighting disease, poverty and illiteracy by serving missionaries in the Western hemisphere and beyond. They have been running a weekly flight down and back to the Dominican Republic for over twenty years. How many guys using aliases fly American missionary flights servicing the Caribbean Basin? Mikarts is a perfect example of why things seem a little out of skew, at the the flight schools at the Venice Florida Airport.
"Rudis greedy, and when youre greedy you can be used for something," a Special Operations Commando leader from the nearby McDill Air Force Base told us. "I've always had some suspicions about the way he breezed into town out of nowhere," said one observer at the Venice Airport. "Just too many odd little things. For example, he has absolutely no aviation background as far as anyone can tell. And he evidently had no use for, nor knowledge of, FAA rules and regs." These statements struck us as strange. "Breezed into town out of nowhere" and "no aviation background" doesnt square with the portrayal of Dekkers in newspaper clippings announcing his purchase of the flight school two years ago, which stressed his broad business aviation experience in neighboring Naples.
get the book being kept out of bookstores!
"Ambassador Airways owners Rudi Dekkers, 42, Naples, president, and Wally Hilliard, 67, also from Naples, were both said to be experienced pilots." Their Ambassador Airways was said to "own several jet aircraft including Lear jets." New owners of Huffman Aviation have global "Barry & the boys; The CIA, the Mob & presence
Americas Secret History
The friends of Rudi Dekkers Lack of proper aviation background was also a comment heard about Dekkers in an interview this week with Richard Boehlke, a partner of Dekkers in a recent airline venture called Florida Air. Boehlke accuses Dekkers of not having enough experience to run a commuter airline and training facilities. Portland Native's Brush with Terror "He (Dekkers) was an oxymoron the day I met him," Boehlke told Portland reporter Eric Mason. "I cant believe anyone handed him millions of dollars to run a business he had no experience in." Boehlke leveled another charge in his interview, stating Dekkers had suggested that his students hone their skills by acting as co-pilots on commuter routes in Florida and elsewhere. Boehlke said Dekkers urged him to allow students to ride-along as co-pilots on scheduled airline flights, which is illegal. "They could have been terrorists on a ride-along!" Boehlke told reporter Eric Mason of Portland Oregon radio station K-Pam. He said a 'chill' runs through him when he thinks about it. Said a FAA spokesman, about Dekkers proposed scheme, "Having a student without enough hours or that type rating as a co-pilot is not legal." Boehlke said, "I was amazed knowing how close wed been to that training environment. It would have given them legal access to cockpits and other secure areas in airports across the country." Richard Boehlke's claim to be "amazed" is like Capt. Renaud telling Bogie in Casablanca that hes shockedshocked!to find gambling going on, while pocketing his winnings at the same time. For the 53-year-old Boehlke, the sun-drenched parties aboard his personal Grumman Albatross with friends in the San Juan Islands are supposed to be over. His huge flying boat sits for sale at the Tacoma Narrows Airport in Gig Harbor, along with other assets from his troubled aviation company. He is not however running noticeably short of cash, observers note. Boehlke was hot news because of his proximity to terrorist flight school owner Dekkers and his concurrent participation in what the Securities & Exchange Commission has called "the biggest fraud by an investment manager in U.S. history." "Ex-money manager charged with fraud" was the headline in an October 6th AP story. A federal grand jury indicted Jeffrey Grayson whose firm 'collapsed' losing hundreds of millions of pension investments. Grayson was charged with mail fraud, conspiracy, money laundering, witness tampering and paying a former union chief union trust funds in a scheme that cost Grayson's clients over $355 million in failed and fraudulent investments. Might the two stories have a connection? Might the same "international network" responsible for stealing almost a half billion dollars have been simultaneously training terrorist air corps in Florida? Boehlke got $25 million to build a condominium project which court documents reveal cost only half that amount. Before Dekkers airline partner Richard Boehlke ever broke ground on his failed project, someone had already pocketed 13 million dollars. "Ive known Jeff Grayson (Capital Consultants former CEO) for 12 years," Boehlke said. "I have never known him to have any shady or, you know, some have asked me about... Mafia affiliations." There. He said the "M" word. "Boehlke would do anything for money, he was so desperate," an aviation executive who had witnessed Boehlke's descent told us. "Im surprised he hasnt skipped the country by now, what with all the trouble hes gotten himself into farting around with those Mafia boys down in Portland." Another grateful beneficiary of the money they were giving away in Portland, Or. from the retirement pension funds of the little people--laborer's and secretary's--was a Miami Florida man whose complex web of international connections is legendary. Alvin Malnik has been called "Meyer Lanskys heir" as the head of organized crime so often in print that he should put it on his business cards. But it is not Malnicks gangster ties that make your jaw drop: its his connection with the Saudi Royal Family. Jewish 'gangster' Alvin Malnicks son is married to the daughter of a leading Prince of the Middle Eastern kingdom's founding family. "The Saudi Prince not only blessed the marriage, but regularly works with the US organized crime associates," states one report on the connection. "The Saudi King would frequently send his private 747 to Florida to pick up Malnik and his associates, so they could conduct business on the plane away from prying eyes." A Saudi King, A Mob Boss, and a Terrorist Drug Kingpin "Frankly, we can't differentiate between terrorism and organized crime and drug dealing," Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff told the Senate Banking Committee hearings about the terrorists money trail in the aftermath of the Sept 11 disaster. Terrorist groups have been implicated in the $360 billion a year international narcotics trade, directed by organized crime, says judge Thierry Cretin of the European Anti-Fraud Office. As recently as six weeks ago, crime families were being seen as particularly important for terrorist groups involved in the acquisition and transport of arms, like in the case of a Jersey City man accused of attempting to smuggle Stinger missiles out of the country to Osama bin Laden who is now reportedly helping federal agents investigating the Sept 11 terrorist attacks. If the deal he got caught doing was typical, insiders say, it was oil and heroin up front for guns and training. Oil and heroin upfront for arms and training. Now there's a story we haven't heard about yet in the roiling skies above the terrorist flight schools on the Gulf Coast of Florida. And no one is saying anything about the proximity to the terrorist's training sites of nearby Tampa, Florida, long the domain of Mob Boss and heroin kingpin Santo Trafficante. QUOTE OF THE WEEK: Suzanne E. Spaulding, executive director of the National Commission on Terrorism, a congressionally appointed task force. "In hindsight, we can see how all these things [flight school connections] might be relevant and important."
Jackson Stephens 'Active' in Venice Florida
The house that Jack built

The MadCow Morning News by Daniel Hopsicker
October 31--Venice,
Florida.
Jackson Stephens, a name often linked with Americas super-secret National Security Agency, has been an influential presence for several decades in the tiny town which served as port of entry into U.S. flight and even military training for the terrorist cadre implicated in the Sept 11 attack. A block away from the Venice Florida airport stands an opulent three-story red brick building that is a monument to the rivers of money flowing through the Stephens financial empire.
Lear jets in Venice
Looking eerily-reminiscent of the plush digs of the law firm in the Tom Cruise movie "The Firm," or a particularly-ostentatious Southern Governors mansion, the building seems out of place alongside the weed-strewn airport perimeter. This was the national headquarters of Jackson Stephen's Beverly Enterprises. It is a stones throw from the Venice Airport. Gleaming like a movie set and basking in Florida's Indian summer, the building still houses Stephens former law firm, local political powerhouse Boone Boone & Boone, a firm which worked so closely with client Stephens that at least one of his executives was permanently housed there. "I dont think you could safely say that they (Boone & Boone) runs everything in town," said one local observer. "But you could safely say they run almost everything. They exert a strong influence here, including out at the airport." Why did Mohammed Atta and his terrorist cadre pick tiny Venice, Florida to be their terrorist beachhead? Did puritanical Islamic fundamentalists have a previously-unknown fascination or fetish for kindly Caucasian widows with blue hair, so abundant here?
A law firm with a really big gate
Or were they instead drawn by a covert operation of the U.S. intelligence agency to which Stephens is persistently linked, the National Security Agency? Curiously, furious government intelligence officials yesterday accused the NSA of destroying data pertinent to the Sept 11 probe, reported the Boston Globe, stating possible leads stemming from the Sept. 11 attack weren't being followed because of the NSA. Jackson Stephens name, so often linked to the NSA, has made a brief appearance in almost every whispered-about scandal or cover-up in America in the past two decades. He was named in the BCCI criminal bank scandal, in the death of Vince Foster and the stolen Promis software scandal of the Justice Dept, and in the 1996 campaign finance scandal involving allegations of Red Chinese money. Most notably, Jackson Stephens has already been named in one intelligence-related aviation scandal: the gun-running and cocaine smuggling at Mena, Arkansas during the 1980s that was behind Iran Contra and Whitewater. Were Stephens to be implicated in yet-another intelligence-related aviation scandal, it would be, for him, something very much like two in a row. More about Stephens: he was the chief domestic campaign contributor to both George Bush Senior and Bill Clinton. "At first glance it might seem curious that former President George Bush would attend an event honoring Jackson T. Stephens, the biggest Democratic power broker in Bill Clinton's home state," read one news report. "But Mr. Stephens, a self-made billionaire investment banker and philanthropist, is financing a cause that transcends politics: golf." While Mr. Stephens is often busy with his many philanthropic activities, he did manage to have found enough time to later be fingered as the "Old Man" behind the Mena, Arkansas cocaine smuggling scandal dogging Bill Clinton throughout his time in office. Interestingly enough, the Venice Airport also surfaced briefly in the questioning of Oliver North during the Iran Contra hearings, when a man with a local aviation business named Joe Duncan was alleged to have run guns to the Contras from the airport. Stephens' colorful curriculum vitae also includes the fact that he was roommates with President Jimmy Carter at the US Naval Academy. The founder of Stephens law firm in Venice, E.G. Dan Boone, is also no slouch in the roommate department. His college roommate, back when both were Florida Gators, was former Florida Governor Lawton Chiles. Jackson Stephens connections to Venice Florida are raising anew questions about the shadowy "international networks" reputed to have aided and harbored the Arab men who carried out the most heinous terrorist crime in history. Did 19 Arab men from desert kingdoms roam the Florida Gulf Coast as freely as if theyd been listening to Tom Petty albums all their lives....without U.S. Government knowledge and approval? In a series of articles touching on Stephens five years ago called "Allegations Regarding Vince Foster, the NSA, and Banking Transactions Spying, Prof. J. Orlin Grabbe wrote, "In 1983 the Stephens brothers acquired controlling interest in Arkansas' largest bank holding company, Worthen Banking Corp. Another major shareholder in Worthen was Mochtar Riady, an Indonesian banker closely connected to President Suharto. Jackson Stephens met Riady in 1976, when Riady wanted to buy into an American bank. Two years later Riady and Stephens Inc. set up a joint venture, Stephens Finance Ltd., in Hong Kong." "Later in 1983 Stephens and Riady bought Seng Heng Bank in Macao, and in 1984 they bought the Hong Kong Chinese Bank," Grabbe wrote. "Hong Kong was then the banking center for the heroin trade, just as Panama was the banking center for the cocaine trade." Whoops. Osama Bin Laden has been cited by numerous sources as being involved in the heroin trade, dominated by his adopted country of Afghanistan. The typical deal, according to knowledgeable sources, is oil and heroin for weapons and training. Besides knowledge of how to steer a Boeing airliner into a 110-story skyscraper, were there other commodities, too, being traded on the Gulf Coast of Florida, while the terrorist pilots practiced touch and gos at the Venice airport? Presumably the FBI has already looked into all of this. In another development, Rudi Dekkers, owner of the flight school of choice for the terrorists, has reportedly been indicted within the past several days in Holland, his native country, on financial charges that may include fraud and money laundering, according to law enforcement officials. Dutch authorities first recognized Dekkers on CNN, where he was ubiquitous in the days after the disaster, said a second source, who credited Larry King Live for having performed, in this case, a function normally reserved for shows like Americas Most Wanted. Dekkers professed to be unaware of any pending indictment... "My lawyer in the Netherlands has said nothing to me about any indictment," he said. Dekkers told us, "I cant imagine that I could have done anything wrong."
What are they hiding down in Venice. Florida? Rudi Dekkers & the 'lone nut cadre' Did terrorists train at U.S. Military Bases? Pentagon lied: terrorists trained at U.S. Bases Was CIA Running Terrorist Flight School?
Anonymous Rant of the Week: "Ramsey Yousef proclaimed after his first failed attempt to topple the WTC, that "next time they would take down BOTH towers"! On 9-11-01, his promise was carried out! WHY was absolutely NOTHING done by our government to better protect those two buildings and the poor innocents who perished there needlessly? It's not like we didn't know "they" were trying to bring them down! We had eight years to prepare, yet we did NOTHING! We practically invited them to blow up the Twin Towers! Is it any wonder they finally got around to actually DOING it? What was stopping them? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!!"
Jackson Stephens 'Active' in Venice Florida
by Daniel Hopsicker November 13--Venice,
Florida.
The first weird thing you notice about the airport in Venice Florida is that there is a Flying Trapeze planted down at the end of one of the runways. It is a strange juxtaposition. While taking off or landing, the terrorist student pilots practicing 'touch and gos' could look over and see tightrope walkers or aerialists dancing high above the ground while practicing gravity-defying stunts, at a circus school which is a vestige of Ringling Brothers & Barnum and Bailey Circus, which used to make its winter home here. Come to Venice. Join the Flying Circus. Become a Human Missile. Until Rudi Dekkers bought Huffman Aviation, Venice, Florida was best known as the Shark Tooth Capital of the World. But the flight training given to terrorists out at the local airport has now changed all that, and thrust this sleepy burg into the middle of one of American History's worst nightmares.
Within hours of the September 11 attack authorities concluded that the terrorist pilots had shown such unusual skill in maneuvering commercial airliners toward their targets that at least one hijacker on each jet must have been trained right here in the U.S. They were right. Cut to Venice, Florida. Middle of the night. The FBI swarms. Local police do the grunt work. Under bright klieg lights they carry away boxes upon boxes of records from Rudi Dekkers flight school.
Remember Rudi? "I don't need anything from you, just a check to start flying," said Dekkers, who likened flying lessons to shopping for groceries. "We're just a business." The next day, the FBI is back again at the Venice Airport, this time down the block at Arne Kruithofs flight school. "It's really just coincidence that terrorists chose such a place (as Venice) to be their training ground for the unspeakable," says Venice City Manager George Hunt. Determining whether that statement is true is complicated by the fact that the FBI has confiscated everything in sight looking remotely like evidence. And the FBI isnt talking.
What are they hiding down in Venice. Florida? Rudi Dekkers & the 'lone nut cadre' Did terrorists train at U.S. Military Bases? Pentagon lied: terrorists trained at U.S. Bases Was CIA Running Terrorist Flight School?
"The FBI took all our files, everything," said one local law enforcement official, after shaking his head ruefully when we asked if Rudi had any local priors. He shrugs. He cant tell. His files are now All Gone. "They loaded two Ryder trucks right outside that (police station) window, then drove them right onto a C130 military cargo plane at Sarasota airport which flew out with Jeb Bush aboard." Nobody has yet been charged over the attacks on America. FBI chiefs talk about the agents they have on the case, the doors they have knocked down, the thousand and more suspects they have arrested. They do not explain why they have failed to catch anyone responsible. That the terrorist cadre had been trained right here in America opened a huge can of worms. And before all the squiggly little creatures had been put back into a cool dark place it had been disclosed that after establishing their terrorist beachhead in unsuspecting Venice as many as six of the Terrorist 19 had gone on to receive training at U.S. military bases. Mohamed Atta, for example, was reported to have attended the International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. The Pentagon quickly disputed the reports, which had appeared in Newsweek, the Washington Post and the Miami Herald. But their denial was vague, almost flimsy, and only raised further questions. Still, they were apparently enough for Newsweek, the Washington Post, and the Miami Herald. All three dropped the story. Was this a triumph for accuracy in Media? Or an example of wartime censorship?
Jackson Stephens 'Active' in Venice, Florida
The answer is: no one knows. If they do they arent telling. Even a Senator, Bill Nelson of Florida, couldnt get a response from the Attorney General and the Justice Department when he specifically inquired about the report that three of the Terrorist 19 had listed the Pensacola Naval Air Station as their home address. We know of at least one woman in Montgomery Alabama who has credibly insisted to local reporters that she met Atta at a party on the base. She remembers because she then introduced him to her friends. "Mohamed, meet my friend the Colonel." Arab pilots, mostly Saudis, took up most of one of the most elite upscale apartment complexes in Montgomery, one observer there informed us. They too are now All Gone. "They went in and got every one of them out of there pronto. Right after it happened." There are dozens of terrorist pilots out there loose that went through U.S. flight training. But of the thousands of flight schools in this country, a mere handful of names keep popping up. Did a covert operation at the two Venice flight schools serve as a portal into an informal military training network? The former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah from 1987 to 1989, Michael Springman, told BBC Newsnight: "In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high-level State Department officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants." Last week the Boston Globe reported that the NSA was destroying evidence, to the fury of other intelligence agencies and FBI investigators. "A crying shame." Often mentioned in connection with the NSA, Jackson Stephens has been a prominent figure in tiny Venice, Florida... for decades. From a baronial estate built by Stephens financial empire the Boone law firm may still rule the city today, at least according to an angry letter to the editor in the November 7th Venice Gondolier... "I think it is a crying shame that Dan Boone and his crowd can raise obscene sums of money to control the election and make it impossible for a candidate without great resource to run for city council. We might as well cancel future elections." Even if it is a run-on sentence, this tells us something. Stephens was a big player in tiny Venice. Could be, he still is. Then on Tuesday the BBC reported that there had always been "constraints" on investigating Saudis, but that under President George W Bush it had become much worse, according to "a highly-placed source in a US intelligence agency." The Bush Family has had a number of connections with Saudi Arabia's prominent Bin Laden family. We have even heard one source we consider reputable claim that President Bush knows Osama Bin Laden personally. They met in Texas in the 80s, when the CIA was pouring money into Bin Ladens efforts, says this source. True or not, it's at least plausible. The only thing inherently wrong about Bush having known Bin Laden would be concealment of it if it were true. Because we need to know this time. We need to know everything. Otherwise how will we be sure that we have avenged the poor people we saw that day who were much like ourselves... except we were watching television while they were holding hands in twos and threes and jumping out of 110th story windows? How long does it take a 200-pound body to fall 100 stories? What prior dealings with U.S. officials might the terrorists individually or collectively have had?
What was the nature of those deals? Did they compromise U.S. security? Did money change hands? One way to get some answers, we figured, might be to go to Venice, tucked on the Florida Coast between Tampa and Fort Myers, where the terrorists began their U.S. training, and walk in their footsteps. The terrorist cadre came here to train at two flight schools, each purchased independently by two separate Dutch nationals in 1998. Some found that a little odd. "One damn Dutch boy too many," muttered one longtime national investigator. Perhaps they were just seeing things. Dutch people are free to buy businesses in the U.S., arent they? Even if the companies being bought up are located next door to one another, and each of our two supposedly-competing Magic Dutch Boys are partners with the same man? Even if the businesses are shortly thereafter used to train the Bin Laden Air Force? What of it? "We're just a business." The only explanation offered as to why the terrorists picked Venice has been a vague assertion that flight training in Florida is cheaper than in Europe. Cheaper than Europe, maybe. But is it cheaper than in the Sudan? And even if true it does nothing to answer questions about why, with more than 200 flight schools to choose from in Florida alone, Attas deadly pilot cadre from Hamburg had begun their U.S. flight training in the same podunk town at adjacent flight schools owned by Dutch nationals. As it turns out, even the "cheaper by the terrorist squadron" explanation breaks down upon closer examination... Typical training fees for a private pilots license are in the $10,000 range. Yet Atta and his sidekick together paid almost $40,000 to Dekkers Huffman Aviation. Thats almost double the going rate.
The Rudi Dekkers Surcharge. Atta didnt care. Atta was flush. Atta flashed a Big Roll. Ask the girls who dance at the Cheetah club in Sarasota. Cash was no problemo. A young man with money to burn, Mohammed Atta enjoyed very Un-Islamic lap dances in the Pink Pony Strip Club in Florida, and stuffing $20 bills into the panties of topless dancers at the Olympic Garden, a dreary nightclub at the seedier end of Las Vegas' Strip. When not ogling infidel flesh, he had a taste for the finer things as well, like hanging out at Harrys Bar in New York, for example, where he preferred a table near the piano. Life in Venice must have been hell for someone with those tastes. The median age is 69. Dinnertime begins at 4 PM. Almost everyone gets in on the early bird specials. Atta must have chafed. No wonder everyone ragged on his bad attitude. Six months in Venice must have been an eternity. But was Venice his choice? Or someone else's? Why did Mohamed Atta come here? Coincidence? Mere happenstance? Do the American people have a right to know the true nature of the threat which has so suddenly changed all our lives? Might we be better off not knowing? Maybe these questions are being answered in meetings being held right now in Hollywood, between Bush aide Karl Rove and studio honchos. Back in Venice, even the circus that made its winter home there begins taking on sinister associations. Headquartered in Vienna, Virginia, it is owned by the Feld family of Washington D.C. According to a recent two-part story in Salon magazine, Kenneth Feld hired former top CIA honcho Clair George to torment a hapless freelance writer for eight years. Why would the head of Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey want to spend eight years tormenting a hapless freelance writer? Let's assume, just for the sake of argument, that he may have had his reasons. Still, how did he know 'CIA honcho' Clair George, who ran Latin America for the Agency under then-Vice President Bush during the period of Iran Contra during the '80s? Jackson Stephens, Clair George...have we mentioned Good Old Boy and CIA Agent Miles Copeland Jr. yet? No? Next time, then. We are coming to you live at five from the runways of the airport in Venice Florida... And we have a funny feeling that we will be here for a while.
Osama & the Mob
"Taliban Planned to Supplant Cali Cartel"

by Daniel Hopsicker
December 15--Venice,
Florida.
In an exclusive interview with the MadCow Morning News, a Special Forces Commander just returned from Afghanistan has offered a reluctant-but-candid assessment of the reasons for the increase in hostility last summer between the U.S. and the "Evil Ones" that led to the heinous September 11 attack...
"The Taliban were launching an effort to take over the worldwide heroin trade, and then use that as a basis to move into cocaine distribution as well," stated this grizzled veteran of recent rescue missions behind enemy lines. "They were planning on supplanting the Cali Cartel." Who, one wonders, might have gotten a little bent out of shape about that? Three related stories, whose outcomes may provide the answer, have surfaced in the news this week... In the first, it was announced that the Senate Intelligence Committee has been quietly gearing up for major hearings in February about the "massive intelligence failure" that resulted in tragedy on September 11. "It is going to be a bombshell of an investigation of historic proportions -- a lot of embarrassing red faces resulting from it," stated columnist Bob Novak on CNN. In the second story, President Bush called on Americans to join the Sept. 11 war effort... by giving up illegal drugs. Citing narcotics trafficking as a source of funding for terrorism, Bush said, "It's so important for Americans to know that the traffic in drugs finances the work of terror...that terrorists use drug profits to fund their cells to commit acts of murder.'' "The Taliban were a drug trafficking government,'' said a spokesman at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, while stating that the Northern Alliance was also heavily involved in the drug trade. In fairness it must be noted that the American DEA is currently led by Asa Hutchinson, who while US Attorney in Bill Clintons Arkansas provided protection for what one former National Security Council official called "the biggest drug smuggling operation in history" in Mena Arkansas, just a few short miles from Hutchinsons office.
DEA head Asa Hutchinson
our story thus far... A Massive Intelligence Failure
No word from the DEA on whether this makes the Bush Administration a "drug trafficking government" too... The Bush administration plans to lean on Kabul's new government to promote crops like winter wheat, says Hutchinson, to any reporter capable of sitting through a DEA briefing with a straight face. "It's a rare opportunity that we have, to influence 70 percent of the world's supply of heroin,'' Asa Hutchinson told Reuters.
What are they hiding down in Venice. Florida? Rudi Dekkers & the 'lone nut cadre' Did terrorists train at U.S. Military Bases? Pentagon lied: terrorists trained at U.S. Bases Was CIA Running Terrorist Flight School? Jackson Stephens 'Active' in Venice, Florida Atta, Dekkers & the Venice Flying Circus
You can almost hear the cash registers ringing in his head. But DEA chief Asa Hutchinsons unfortunate past is not why some people are growing increasingly-nervous in tiny Venice, Florida. The third related story coming out this week concerns this wave of nerves and what it may portend for the success of the upcoming Senate hearings into September 11. In Venice, home to blue-haired widows, early-bird specials, and two flight schools at the airport that trained Bin Ladens terrorist Air Force, the local paper revealed last week that Venice City Manager George Hunt has been keeping a loaded gun in a desk in his office. Hunt decided that top city officials, including the airport manager, should procure concealed weapons permits. Presumably with a straight face, he told the local paper his decision (later rescinded in the face of public outcry) was based on "massive amounts" of evidence from the American Waterworks Association(!) about threats to the water supply. If that were not puzzling enough, Hunt also pushed through a measure which the Gondolier heralded in a front page headline: "Airport to Get Its Own Cops." Venice Airport Manager Larry Heath said the issue was how best to protect the airport. But citizens in other parts of the country, notably New York and Washington DC, might be excused for feeling that slightly more to the point than protecting the Venice Airport would be protecting Americans from the Venice Airport. Or at least from the covert operations run there.
With tensions running so high, some view Bushs linkage of drugs and terrorism as coming at a particularly inopportune and potentially embarrassing moment, especially given the pending Senate Intelligence Committee Sept 11 investigation. Were the real truth to ever become known about the commodities being traded so casually in Florida's over-active black market, heads would roll in such numbers that there might be calls to bring back the guillotine, just for efficiency. But with Ashleigh Banfield and Geraldo constituting what passes for American journalism, there thankfully appears little chance of that. "Trading with the Enemy" President Bush's comments about drugs and terrorism recognize, however obliquely, that Bin Laden's organization derived much of its funding through the heroin and opium trade in Afghanistan. But no one has yet alleged that Bin Ladens "Islamic fundamentalists" distributed these drugs. They merely sold them to some other organization, that then in turn distributed to retail on the American street... leaving some to question whether Osama might have had a deal with the American Mob. The MadCow Morning News was the first to report on Mob connections to Magic Dutch Boy Rudi Dekkers and the covert operations conducted at the Venice Airport. Flight School Owner Has Shady Ties. "Frankly, we can't differentiate between terrorism and organized crime and drug dealing," Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff told the Senate Banking Committee which briefly "looked into" the terrorists money trail in the aftermath of the Sept 11 disaster. "These groups don't hold themselves independently: They work with one another. Terrorists get engaged in drug activity. They have relationships with organized crime," Chertoff said. In a related story illustrating this premise, reported heavily in Mike Rupperts From the Wilderness, US federal agents arrested Kevin Ingram on 12 June as he prepared to board a privately-chartered Lear jet carrying more than $ 500,000 in cash raised from the sale of sophisticated weaponry, including missiles machine guns and grenade launchers. The weapons were destined for the Middle East to be used in possible terrorist attacks. If the deal he got caught doing was typical, insiders state, it was oil and heroin up front for guns and training. Perhaps envisioning a new career as a Magic Dutch Boy, Ingram was heading for Amsterdam on his Lear when he was arrested. Will the Senate Intelligence Committee find any of this worthy of their interest? So little is still known about the true nature of the Sept. 11th attack that any kernel of fact is an island adrift in a sea of 'journalists' in designer eyewear.
For example, on the question of whether Mohamed Atta was involved in previous terrorist acts, reports that Mohamed Atta blew up a bus in Israel in 1986 have been ridiculed as an "urban legend one sees so much of on the internet." It is a minor curiosity, perhaps, but we have discovered that, true or no, the Internet is not where this report first surfaced. The following is taken verbatim from NBC News Sept 13 transcript: "This investigation also takes us to Florida where the FBI task force saw a name on the passenger manifest that was familiar to them. NBC News has learned that flight training for Mohamed Atta, one of the alleged hijackers, apparently took place at a flight school in Florida. As NBC's Kerry Sanders reports, the FBI can also link Atta to a suspected car bombing in Israel in 1986..." Curiously, the transcript then omits whatever it was that correspondent Sanders had to say about his discovery. This couldn't be wartime censorship...could it? Finally, in the matter of wartime censorship, there is still no word from the International Officer's School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala. concerning our polite but persistent queries about Mohamed Atta's reported attendance there. First reported by Newsweek, the Washington Post, and the Miami Herald--no slouches themselves as purveyors of urban legend--the story still awaits plausible denial. Perhaps plausibility has been replaced, priority-wise, by interesting-looking frames. Or perhaps, as with so many other matters in American life these days, government officials just believe that we are better off not knowing.
http://www.madcowprod.com/index10a.html [15-11-2002 6:47:50 PM]
Did Magic Dutch Boy's Boss Slip Saudis out of Raytheon?

by Daniel Hopsicker
December 26--Venice, Florida. Everything you need to know about the corruption of America that left this country defenseless on September 11 can be gleaned today from stories coming out of Jeb Bushs Florida, the hub of the plot. There the climate of intrigue created by the commodities being traded so casually in that states over-active black market allowed 19 Arabs from desert kingdoms to wander about with the ease of Jimmy Buffet fans after a concert, looking for a bar serving frozen margaritas. Lets begin with a story in the Tampa Tribune of a twin-engine Lear jet, which took off two days after the Sept 11 attack, at a time when every other private plane in the nation was grounded due to safety concerns. "The Phantom Flight from Florida" Because the federal government says the flight never took place, the paper headlined it the "Phantom Flight from Florida." It carried a Saudi Arabian prince, the son of that nation's defense minister, as well as the son of a Saudi army commander, and it flew from Tampa to Lexington, Kentucky, where Saudi princes had been purchasing racehorses in Bluegrass Country.
From there, they flew a private 747 out of the country. But if no one in the government would acknowledge what had happened, the two armed bodyguards hired to get their clients out of the state were only too happy to recall a trip they remembered vividly. The Tribs reporter said the story revealed "a glimpse of international intrigue in the aftermath of terrorist attacks on America." It also offers a glimpse of the privilege accorded these foreign Saudi nationals that was denied American citizens. "Everyones got deals with the Saudis," protested a Special Forces Commander at McDill AFB, where the Afghan war was run, when asked about the trip. "Why point a finger at this one incident?" Because, we told him, we suspected that the initial pilot training of Bin Ladens Air Force at the tiny Venice Florida airport was a CIA operation, one they would be loath to admit. So we presumed the evacuation of the Saudis had been accomplished by the CIA, and we were trying to track down the owner of the Lear in question to better understand some of that Agencys numerous activities in Florida. Since the plane took off from a private hanger at Raytheon Airport Services in Tampa, we went there first... Raytheon is a major defense-intelligence industry player which spent the past decade expanding, purchasing notorious E-Systems and culminating with Raytheons merger with Hughes Electronics defense operations (Hughes Aircraft). Catch-22 All Over Again Surely such a patriotic organization would support the American peoples right to know? After all, thats what were fighting for, right? Freedom?
our story thus far... A Massive Intelligence Failure
What are they hiding down in Venice. Florida? Rudi Dekkers & the 'lone nut cadre' Did terrorists train at U.S. Military Bases?
But when we contacted Raytheon to ask who owned the Lear we were told we would have to ask the owner of the plane to ask Raytheon to tell us who owned the plane. A Raytheon spokesman said, "I checked our policy on disclosing owner/customer information and we decline to do so unless that owner requests that we release the information." We had inadvertently stumbled onto a modern day Catch-22. We didnt know who the owner was, so how could we ask them for permission to release their names? Todayno thanks to Raytheon the MadCowMorningNews has learned from a knowledgeable aviation source that the Lear jet in question very likely came from a Naples, Florida charter service. The Magic Dutch Boy Gets Around "Wally Hilliard owns the only charter Lear service in Southwest Florida," said this source. "If a Lear was flying that day, it would have been his."
Among his many accomplishments, retired entrepreneur Hilliard is the partner and financial backer of 'Magic Pentagon lied: Dutch Boy' Rudi Dekkers, whose Venice Florida flight school was the terrorists American beachhead. terrorists trained at U.S. Bases If Hilliards Lear jets were extricating Saudis out of Raytheon in a CIA operation at the same time that Hilliard is also the boss of Magic Dutch Boy Rudi Dekkers, whose operation trained Mohamed Atta and his terrorist cadre to fly... well anyone can connect those dots. Except of course for American journalists like Geraldo and Was CIA Ashley Banfield. Running Terrorist Flight Is the CIA responsible for the fact that Rudi Dekkers Huffman Aviation was the terrorists Omaha Beach? School? At press time, phone calls to Mr. Hilliard for comment had not been returned. Jackson Presumably, the FBI has already looked into this, and reported their findings to the Senate Intelligence panel, Stephens which will be conducting hearings into the Sept 11 debacle in the coming months....right? 'Active' in Venice, Florida The FBI, we recalled, had pointedly statedearly onthat they knew about terrorists rotating through Rudi Dekkers flight school in Venice, Florida. But they had left hanging the question of why they did nothing to Atta, Dekkers shut it down. & the Venice Flying Circus Saudi Princess Charged with Beating Servant Two other stories surfaced this past week illustrating the intrigue and corruption in Florida that may have contributed to the Sept 11 attacks. Osama & the Mob An AP article last week told of a Saudi Princess, a niece of King Fahd, charged with beating her servant and throwing her down the stairs. The assault occurred in Orlando, Florida. The Saudi Princesss attorney says she has diplomatic immunity. But what we found most interesting in the story was the revelation that several years ago another Saudi princess was also accused of beating her servants...also in Orlando. It's a Small World After All, huh? In that attack, three Sheriffs deputies stood by and watched, though they had all taken oaths to uphold American law. They were later 'disciplined' for not stopping the beating. Money doesn't talk. It swears. Death Ship Sailed from Tampa, Florida The last story that came out this week fingering Florida as a cauldron of "spookish" plots was the big story in London last week. A cargo ship was intercepted in the English Channel on its way towards carrying suspected terrorist material into the heart of London. British anti-terrorist officers seized the London-bound MV Nisha off the coast of England in a dramatic raid by Royal Navy units. The route taken by the vessel was cited as having caused suspicion... We have learned that what the British Press took to calling the Death Ship started its journey in Tampa, Florida, bound for Djibouti and neighboring Somalia (linked to Osama bin Ladens al-Qaida network) with a cargo of "humanitarian aid." Was there a Tampa-Djibouti Connection? Or is this just mere coincidence? Strangely, Tampa is also the home of an Islamic studies think tank whose head thinker left town several years ago to become the leader of... Islamic Jihad. Then the government held the new think tank chief for more than three and a half years on secret evidence, in a Bradenton, Florida jail. Mazen Al-Najjar was eventually released after courts ruled that he could not be detained further without just cause. But local reporters wrote at the time that the government had reluctantly revealed only the smallest bit of its evidence against him. Tampa, of course, is home to McDill Air Force Base, where the militarys Central Command serves as the nerve center for the war in Afghanistan. Is this just coincidence? What could have attracted "Islamic extremists" from the country (Afghanistan) known as the worldwide center of heroin production, to Tampa, a cigar-making Gulf port that was also the home to Mob Boss Santos Trafficante (who controlled the heroin trade)? Do you imagine the Senate Intelligence Committee will be looking into this? Racehorses... filled with Cocaine? In a curious aside, respected writer Dominick Dunne last week reported that a source "who helps prepare racehorses for Middle Eastern businessmen" (in Lexington Kentucky?) had told him that Rep. Gary Condit was a frequent guest at the Middle Eastern embassies in Washington "where young women would be brought for "nocturnal pleasures." The procurer supposedly told Dunne's contact that some time before April 30, Condit confided to one of his Middle Eastern friends that he had been involved with a woman and wanted to end it, but that she was "threatening to talk." Levy may have stumbled into a noxious ring of prostitution, sex slaves and Middle Eastern sheiks in Washington, D.C., said the story, which might have contributed to her disappearance. Here we recall that several sources had reported that Barry Seal, the subject of our recent book, had brought racehorses from Colombia in military C123 cargo planes that were filled with cocaine. In the wake of the Sept 11 disaster officials in Washington promised explanations. But it was left to British Prime Minister Tony Blair to sketch out the Cliff notes version of the case against Bin Laden. He said, "Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization with ties to a global network." "A global network." A global network clearly assisted the terrorist cadre. But...what global network? A global network of what? Today, this same "global network" is still shadowy and undefined. And it appears that official Washington and the major media would like to keep it that way.
by Daniel Hopsicker
January 7--Venice,
Florida.
Despite Attorney General Ashcroft's statements that the anthrax mailings had a domestic source, most Americans are still making an association between the bio-terror scare and Osama Bin Ladens Arab terrorists. This is understandable. Americans yearn to see at least one of the heinous crimes committed against the American people last fall solved, and its perpetrators punished. But theres always been something a little hinkysuspiciousabout the anthrax terror that followed hard on the heels of the Sept 11 disaster. Just as people began asking questions about how Mohamed Atta and his terrorist cadre could have infiltrated so easily into our country... the anthrax hit. And immediately America's obedient media turned its full attention to the bio-terror threat. And although some (relatively) brave FBI agents complained loudly when they were pulled off the investigation into Atta and his terrorist buddies and Coming in February transferred to the anthrax case, it was all to no avail.
Pre-order Now!
Case Closed? Anyone who was still waiting for Colin Powells promised "white paper" on the terrorists was wasting their time. "Case closed," said Atty. Gen. Ashcroft. The results of this sudden change of focus are today everywhere around us. There is still no coherent chronology of the WTC disaster. Andsurprise surprisethere are still no suspects in custody in the murder of five poor souls unlucky enough to have gotten dusted with deadly white powder. are now riding around on motorbikes through the Afghan countryside with Mullah Omar. Follow the dancing ball Could the anthrax scare have been intended as a diversion? Could bio-terror have been unleashed on the American people to divert their attention from seeking a coherent explanation for the holes, discrepancies, and unanswered questions that the FBI shows absolutely no interest in clearing up? Then came the recent news that either our CIAor our militaryis the original source of the anthrax used in the letters to Senators Daschle & Leahy...
Now Playing! Russell Welch talks about anthrax Perhaps the bio-terrorists have slipped out of the country, and
And thats when we remembered Russell Welch, an investigator for the Arkansas State Police who had been trying to blow the whistle a dozen years ago on the massive cocaine smuggling scandal unfolding in front of him in Mena, Arkansas. What does an obscure state cop in an obscure state have to do with todays bio-terror? Russell Welch was exposed to weaponized anthrax over a decade ago when he opened a letter which released electrostatically charged floating spores in his face. "I got so sick that my wife had to help me to the car," Welch told us several years ago, when we interviewed him for our two-hour documentary (banned from TV) about the Mena Scandal called "The Secret Heartbeat of America." "Luckily we had a doctor in town, a Vietnam vet, who when he saw me immediately called the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta." Prompt diagnosis saved Welchs life, if not his health. As Welch can tell you, anthrax is extremely nasty stuff... "The next day a doctor came into my room and asked me how much danger was involved with my job," Welch relates. "I told her danger was pretty much inherent with the job, because I was a cop that generally handled major cases, and asked why she wanted to know." The doctor told Welch, "I think youve been poisoned with anthrax. Somebody did this to you."
get the book being kept out of bookstores!
Later his doctor's office was burglarized, and test results and "Barry & the boys; correspondence with Center for Disease Control officials in The CIA, the Mob & Atlanta were stolen.
Americas Secret History
No one has fingered Al Qaeda for the burglary of Russell Welchs doctors office. So clearly, some other organization must have been involved. If it worked once... Anthrax was used to silence Welch, and stop him from investigating the CIA cocaine smuggling operation associated with Barry Seal at the infamous Mena Arkansas airport. Bio-terror was employed on an Arkansas State law enforcement officer to stop his investigation into a CIA aviation scandal. Russell Welch was targeted, either to make him an asset... or to make him dead. No one we know of has been asking why two Democratic senators, and the major media, were targeted with anthrax. No one has wondered aloud why, say, Republican Senator Shelby from Alabama was spared, and Senator Daschle wasn't... Could someone be sending a similar message to the one sent Russell Welch a dozen years ago to two influential Democratic Senators today? Are these two episodes related? Could someone be engineering this bio-terror crisis to silence anyone from questioning the "official version of events?" Steering the American publics focus away from potentially damaging revelations about Mohamed Atta and his cadres possibly explosive past links to people inside our own government? Maybe somebody should ask. Over to you, Senator.
http://www.madcowprod.com/index12c.html [15-11-2002 6:47:54 PM]
Kamikaze kid pilot commits acne-induced suicide?

'Official story' once again does not 'cohere.'
by Daniel Hopsicker
January 10--Tampa Florida
Last Saturday a 15-year old high school freshman named Charles Bishop piloted a light plane that wasnt his into a corner office on the 26th floor of the Bank of America building in downtown Tampa Florida. The young student pilot came out much the loser in the apparent suicide attack. When you look up at the building from the street you can see thatexcept for a medium-sized hole from broken windowsthe crash of the small plane caused little damage. One lesson has already been learned as a result of the Tampa attack. In a head-on collision between a skyscraper and a single-engine Cessna, absent tons of jet fuel, the skyscraper comes out on top. Absent tons of jet fuel.
The day after the attack was Sunday, and the plane was still sticking out of the 26th floor like a post-modernist sculpture. It attracted curious crowds of gawkers looking skyward, as if they could read a portent for the future in the plane's tail sticking out of the building. Though the Bucs were closing out their season in town, there was still a big turnout at the news conference called by Tampa Chief of Police Bernie Holder. Checking names against the 'enemies' list Holder had the unenviable job of attempting to explain What Had Happened. Most thought the effort showed. Holder announced they had found a handwritten suicide note on the body. It expressed support for Osama bin Laden and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Holder stated the family hadn't known of the boy's sympathy for Arab terrorists. Also in the note the dead youth had left instructions about his funeral arrangements, telling his mother, Julia Bishop, and his grandmother, Karen Johnson, not to let any of his enemies attend. Though FBI agents and sheriff's officials spent several hours that afternoon with the boy's mother at her Palm Harbor apartment, detectives later said they were still trying to obtain information, even about simple matters like the identity of the boy's father. A Pinellas County Sheriff's Office spokesman said the boy's mother and grandmother were distraught and "very much in denial."
Coming in February Pre-order Now! "Apparently he (Charles) didn't have anyone in his family who
would talk about him or his personality, so we don't know much about him," said the Sheriff's spokesman. Julia Bishop, who changed her name and her son's from Bishara, has declined interviews since Saturday. She told Pinellas County officials she changed her name because Bishara is an Arabic name and the United States was at war with Iraq at the time. Rumor has it she will be telling her story to People magazine first, no doubt because AOL-Time-Warner does such a good job of self-censorship with sensitive material.
But even though the mother and grandmother were mysteriously secluded behind impenetrable security, the real buzz was about Bishops' father, Charles J Bishara, half-Sicilian and half-Lebanese, who hailed from Winchester, Massachusetts. He was an even bigger mystery. Police, we are told, have not been able to contact Bishara. He was flat out missing. Authorities couldn't find him. He appears to have vanished without a trace. Later, after authorities have had time to float the "acne-induced suicide" trial balloon, it seeps out. Bishara is on the lam on heroin charges. Wait a minute. Heroin. Hasn't heroin already surfaced in "our story thus far?" Sure it has. Way back on October 19 in a story called "Was CIA Running Terrorist Flight School?" the MadCowMorningNews scooped Matt and Katie with a report that organized crime families were being viewed as particularly important for terrorist groups.
read the book being kept out of An example we cited then was the case of a Jersey City man bookstores! accused of attempting to smuggle Stinger missiles out of the
country to Osama bin Laden. The deal he got caught doing was typical. It was oil and heroin up front for guns and training. Some are now saying that this was exactly the kind of deal going down on the Florida Gulf Coast during the intrigue preceding the September 11th attack. Heroin had become a recurring plot element. But this doesn't matter, because every news report right now seems to be at some pains to tell us all that "The father hasn't been involved in his (Charles) life since the child was one."
"Barry & the boys; The CIA, the Mob & Americas Secret They are all very clear on that. History
A dopey smile and a plan Two conflicting accounts began to emerge of young dead Charles. We call the first the "Troubled Youth Scenario." Bishops' parents divorced when Charles was a baby. He never knew his Dad. He lived with his mother. They moved frequently. No one thought to ask why. Young Bishop kept to himself. He never mixed with the boys who rode bikes and scooters in his apartment complex. There was no apparent sweetheart in his life. ""He bordered on being shy," said Robyn Larson, a former next door neighbor. He changed schools a lot. Nine schools in eight years. He didn't fit in at his new high school. They thought he was a geek. "This was a new school for him, so he had not made friends with a lot of people," explained their attorney. "It didn't seem like he wanted to fit into the norm, all the high school B.S.," said classmate Adam Goch, who also stated Bishop never spoke up in journalism class, nor befriended other students. Also, Bishop's perpetual smile seemed "pretty weird," said Goch, a junior. The Family Bishara The divorced couple's name had been Bishara. His ex-wife changed her and her son's names legally to Bishop six years after their divorce. Young Charles Bishop was clearly aware of his dual heritage, and would refer cryptically to being of Arab extraction. In a sad footnote, newspapers reported that Charles J. Bishara's parents first learned they had a grandson when they read of his spectacular death.. ``It's just a tragedy to find your grandson in this way,'' Robert Bishara said. ``We lost someone we didn't even know.'' Neighbors who had lived near the Bishops in Winchester said they were shocked that the young boy, who they remembered walking alone on their street, had crashed an airplane into a skyscraper. The boy kept to himself, they said. Investigators for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said the boy spent much time alone in his room. But they also stated Bishop had no history of mental problems and did not appear to be using illegal drugs. It was left to hapless Tampa Police Chief Holder to sum up... Young Bishop's act of terrorism, said Chief Holder, really wasn't an act of terrorism. It was a desperate cry for help. The Tampa Chief reassured all Americans that the kid had been Acting Alone. "He can best be described as a young man who has very few friends and who was very much a loner," Holder said. So the kid wasn't a terrorist. He was misguided. "He saw something and decided to try it." "We're trying to avoid the issue of terrorism because he was a 15-year-old kid who was pretty screwed up," James Sewell, director of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said. "This is a ... troubled kid who saw something and decided to try it." Still, there was a definite buzz around the identity of Charles Bishop. We haven't had a 15-year old kamikaze pilot deliberately fly a plane into a skyscraper before, which leads to the Big Question: "What was up with Charley?" The official explanation for what happened in Tampa Florida last Saturday afternoon, as we currently understand it, is that Charles Bishop died in the grips of a previously unpublicized but potentially fatal illness known as "Acne-Induced Suicide." Or, more precisely, Acne Medication-Induced Suicide. Suicide by zit. Rather than a political statement of any kind, his suicide had merely been an unpleasant side effect of his medication. Charles Bishop, officials now believe, has been the hapless victim of a brand of acne medicine that compelled him, somehow, to a suicidal high-speed collision in midair with a pretty sturdy stationary target. Another side effect, apparently, involves heaping praise in suicide notes on Saudi terrorists who have a sideline in narcotics smuggling. NEXT: Who was the kamikaze kid? More About Charles Bishop and Buildings.
Now Playing! Russell Welch talks about anthrax
Just a "small time crook?" Charles Bishara's plush digs at the Ritz-Carlton Golf Resort in Naples Florida
by Daniel Hopsicker
January 14--Tampa Florida
Tampas kamikaze kid pilot was (pick one): a. A Bin Laden sympathizer b. An American Patriot. c. A British Citizen. Answer: All of the above. Puzzled? So is everyone else... In an exclusive investigation the MadCowMorningNews has discovered startling and critical discrepancies in key elements in the official account of the life and death of Charles Bishop, the kamikaze pilot who a week ago flew a Cessna into a Tampa skyscraper. Taken together, these discrepancies seem designed to deflect public attention away from the boy's father, a man named Charles J Bishara. Charles Bishops wild last ride is the only authenticated episode of terror associated with a sympathizer of Osama Bin Laden since the September 11 attack. So Bishop's case is important. But a week later the word used most often to describe it in the press is "puzzling." Why did young Bishop target the Bank of America skyscraper after telling friends that he abhorred the World Trade Center attacks and wanted to go to Afghanistan and "get the SOBs''? Too ritzy for a 'small time hood' "Pushing the envelope in juvenile delinquency" Osama Bin Laden had urged his followers to hit banks. Is that why Charles Bishop went out and hit one? Is he really just a troubled kid? Doesnt flying a plane into a skyscraper somewhat stretch the definition of adolescent "acting out?" Why would an honor student bellowing out patriotic songs near the top of his lungs and telling teachers he aspires to join the Air Force leave a suicide note praising Americas Public Enemy No.1, Osama bin Laden? Why would he tell his family that he didn't want his ``enemies'' coming to his funeral, a request similar to one made in the last will and testament of suicide pilot Mohamed Atta? Last Saturday, Charles Bishop crashed a plane into a building, leaving behind a suicide note professing admiration for Osama bin Laden. Yet by Monday police were saying he wasnt a terrorist... On Tuesday, reporters began speculatingin a truly Orwellian double-speak touch, since anyone flying a plane into a building is the very picture of sincerityon the sincerity of his note. a tendency to wonder why By Friday, he was being remembered in news stories as, of all things, an American patriot. At his Saturday funeral, the reputation of this "polite, brilliant, compassionate kid" had been so redeemed (or twisted) that someone placed a stripe off one of his father's Air Force shirts in his casket. Finally, on Sunday, Charles Bishop's metamorphosis was complete. Now the terrorist act he carried out was no longer even a specific case anymore, and Bishop was reduced to an icon, the poster child, one editorialist imagined, for "what might go down in history as "the terrorism generation." Perhaps this week hell be nominated for a Nobel Prize. With every important question in the case still-unanswered, the official version of events borders on satire; it is so ridiculous that it reads like a bad spy novel by E. Howard Hunt. The official explanation for why Charles Bishop killed himself in such spectacular fashion is "suicide by zit." His actions werent political. They were hormonal. want to know where this is leading? "This particular kid fits an interesting profile that I think the Secret Service and the FBI have been investigating for some time now," said one expert trotted out for a quote in a typical wire story. "Kids who have grown up with an inadequate sense of empathy," said Michael Peck, a Santa Monica psychologist who has specialized in suicides of youths. "But he's only half-Sicilian." Might there be a better explanation than this? Might this suppressed explanation offer glimpses of the real identities of some of the people and organizations responsible for murdering 4000 innocent civilians on September 11? The first hint of trouble came from Katie Hughes, a Tampa police spokeswoman. She said Bishop's father, who they have been unable to contact since his sons suicide, is of Syrian and Sicilian descent.
life imitates salvador dali
1-hour documentary shot in Venice Fl. "Another mystery to be unraveled," read the Miami Herald. "Where is coming Feb 15 the boy's father?" Pre-order Now!
The mystery deepened... Reporters could not find the father of the dead kamikaze kid, but they tracked down his grandfather. Strangely, he didn't seem to know much about Bishara either..Never mind that he's his son. Robert Bishara said, apologetically, "I don't want to say anything that might be wrong." Arent Mobsters noted for omerta--not talking to outsiders? Or is this instead just another example of the breakdown of the nuclear family? "Heroin, sure. But nobody said 'trafficking.' Yet." Press accounts referred to Bishara as a "small time crook" from Winchester, Massachusetts. They said that he began a string of mostly petty, occasionally alcohol-fueled crimes that made him familiar to the police in both Malden, and nearby Everett, where he lived. He was cited for running a stop sign and driving without a license in 1985. Two years later, he was convicted of breaking into a restaurant two blocks from his father's house. The same year, he was convicted of possession of burglary tools and larceny. He is currently wanted by authorities on heroin charges. Bishara's list of encounters with the law must be a long one... We discovered this particularly colorful opportunity for Charles to get to know local law enforcement from 1987, that we haven't seen mentioned anywhere... Turns out, Charles gets stabbed a lot. First in an unsuccessful and by now famous suicide pact with the woman who is today the grief-stricken Mother, Janis Bishop. A sensitive soul she may be today, but sixteen years ago she plunged a 13-inch knife into poor Charles' liver. "Just don't point the knife at my liver, okay?" Just two years later Charles Bishara gets stabbed again.
read a book you're not supposed to
Though current press reports haven't mentioned it, he was stabbed in the leg, arm, back and shoulder (thank god they missed his probably still-tender liver). His attacker was simultaneously shouting at his girlfriend, "Do you want to see me stab someone?" Sounds like something right out of Raging Bull. How many other "incidents" like this might there be? The reason this may be important is that there may be a little problem with the widely-disseminated police and FBI portrayal of Bishara as a small time crook running into minor spats with the law. If the authorities aren't lying to us--and when have we ever known them to do that?--then being a small-time crook must be paying really well in Boston these days.
visit the 'Barry' Charlie's own little place in the sun website The CIA, the Mob & Wanted in Massachusetts on heroin charges, Charles Bishara, the Americas Secret MadCowMorningNews has learned, owns a penthouse condominium History
at the new Ritz-Carlton Golf Resort in Naples Florida, located just a hundred miles down 1-75 from the family he is reputed to have had no contact with for 15 years. Penthouse condominiums sell for about a million dollars each, said Ritz Carlton sales representative Jeff DeAngelis. He vaguely remembered Charles Bishara purchasing a little over a year ago. Bishara's million dollar get-away is behind the gates of the "Bolero" neighborhood, which is not as cheesy as it sounds because it sits on a Greg Norman-designed golf course. It looks to be the very lap of luxury. Perhaps more trained observers in the FBI see something else. Is half-Syrian and half-Sicilian Charles J Bishara just a small time crook? Or is he in reality some kind of Mob Boss? Take a look at his house: What do you think? Could young Charles Bishop's violent act of terrorism have been an attempt to impress his absent Mobster Dad with his big cojones? An even bigger question: why did Charles Bishop praise Osama? No one knows. Maybe he saw something. Or heard something. In America's current war, what might this help explain about the postures of the Sicilian Mafia and the Arab Christian clans of Lebanon from which Charles Bishara sprang--along with another Bishara, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan? No information at press time on any relationship. But Sirhan worked at race tracks. Is the Mob big on the ponies? "Only connect." Could the secretiveness surrounding the entire Bishop/Bishara family be because Bishara is somehow implicated in the currently-controversial scandal involving Bishara's fellow Boston Mobster, Whitey Bulger? Bulger, it appears, was "whacking" his rivals as well as various and sundry other citizens of Boston with something like impunity because of his "relationship" with the Boston FBI. The case is made even more explosive by the startling action of President Bush last month. Bush invoked executive privilege. Bush blocked a congressional subpoena exploring abuses in the Boston FBI office after a Congressional committee began to investigate. Reporters in Boston charge cover up! Bush's party-mate Dan Burton was so incensed that he lambasted his fellow Republican in the Oval Office. "You tell the president there's going to be war between the president and this committee," he told a Justice Department official during what was supposed to be a routine prehearing handshake. Observers said Bushs invoking executive privilege was triggering what one congressman called "the start of a constitutional confrontation." "They're all on a motoring safari in Asia." Could the reason authorities "can't find" Bishara be the same reason they "can't find" Whitey Bulger? Or Osama bin Laden? Could they all be riding motorbikes across South Asia with Mullah Omar? These speculations make at least as much sense as the laughable notion that what the citizens of Tampa were subjected to last weekend was acne-medication-induced terror. Finally we come to the Curiosity of the Week: the case of Charles Bishop's nationality. According to UPI, Charles Bishop was "a British citizen, who did not have a license to fly." A British citizen? All-American patriot Chuck? (Being born of at least one British parent inside the U.S. means that until he reached 18 he had both British and U.S. citizenship.) "I say old chap, would you mind awfully giving us the money?" His mothers maiden name is deTore, which doesnt sound English. So it must be Charles Bishops father, Charles Bishara, who has the British passport. How many small-time thugs in Boston carry British passports? Probably not too many, right? Does America's Most Wanted Whitey Bulger have a British passport, too? Someone familiar with Charlie Bishara's home, Winchester, Massachusetts, told us of the town's colorful history with the Mob. And he also told us something else about Winchester, which may shed some light on the Bishop/Bishara business, when we take up the case of Janis Bishop. And one last item, one we have not even allowed ourselves to think about yet: Charles Bishara's home in Naples Florida is just a short five-minute drive from flight school owner Rudi Dekkers' headquarters at the Naples Airport. Of all places. Small world. What are the odds? It must be admitted that Charles Bisharas many brushes with the wild side would be consistent withfourteen years agoa low-level career in the Mob. From the size of Charlie's little getaway home in Naples, Mr. Bishara may have been moving upjust a littlesince then. NEXT: THE CURIOUS CASE OF JANIS BISHOP
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Bishara family crest at www.bishara.com
Kamikaze Kid Cover-up in Tampa?

by Daniel Hopsicker
January 22--Tampa Florida "The 15-year-old student pilot who crashed a stolen plane into a Florida office building earlier this month had no alcohol or drugs in his system when he died, according to medical examiners. Nor was there any sign the teen had taken Accutane, an acne medication that carried a label warning it might cause depression and suicide." Monica Lothrop was working in her law firm office in downtown Tampa. It was a typical Saturday afternoon. Then the plane hit. "Suddenly you're looking out into the open air, the blue sky, 28 floors up," she recalled. "I thought 'Oh my gosh, it's happening again, and they're targeting the Bank of America building, the plane is going to explode, and there's more planes coming, and we have to get out of here!"
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It was a moment of terror she will never forget. Neither will Joe Formoso, head of the Tampa air traffic controllers union. He was on duty when Bishop's small plane passed just 1,000 feet above a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 that had taken off from Tampa International Airport moments earlier. "It was only by the grace of God that the Southwest pilots saw it," Formoso says, shaking his head. When "troubled teen" Charles Bishop stole a plane and flew it into the 28th floor of the Bank of America in downtown Tampaleaving behind a suicide note praising Osama bin Ladenhe catapulted himself into the middle of the mystery surrounding the Sept 11th terrorist attack. That mystery has only deepened in the two weeks since. Charles Bishop is the first American suicide bomber in history. Two weeks after his death authorities have finally ruled out acne as the explanation for his act of terrorism.
"Very little safe ground so far." A few things are known for sure: q MacDill Air Force Basethe center of operations for Operation Enduring Freedomhad no interceptors on hand. So Tampa was a pretty safe place to do something stupid in a plane. q A Cessna does not have anywhere near the same destructive potential as a jumbo jet. q If you crash into a mostly deserted building, the person you end up killing is yourself.
watch a show The mainstream press quickly concluded that Charles Bishop's you're not supposed kamikaze flight had no connection to terrorism, a judgment some to...
thought a little cavalier.
Improbably, his suicide was instead adjudged to have been acne-induced. Or so said the Washington Post, ABC News, and the Associated Press, which all ran stories blaming Bishop's suicide mission on Accutane, the powerful acne pills produced by Hoffman-La Roche. This made little sense. But what else should we expect in a surreal tragedy which saw Mohamed Atta use a passport from the "Republic of Conch," which doesn't exist, while boarding his fatal flight? Alone among the major morning news shows, the MadCowMorningNews questioned this finding, and devoted all 1-hour documentary newsroom resourcesTeamMadCowCoverageto investigating shot in Venice Fl. questions about Bishop's suicide hanging in the soft Gulf breezes coming Feb 15 which roll into the port city of Tampa, Florida.
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Our diligence has been rewarded. This week the chief toxicologist with the Tampa Medical Examiner's office told reporters the results of tests on Bishop's blood for a range of substances, including opiates, antidepressants, stimulants, marijuana, PCP and cocaine. All came back negative.
read a book that's 'not available in stores.'
The toxicology tests showed no sign at all of Accutane, the acne medication that the press had a week earlier linked to suicide and depression. "Suicide by zit" could now officially be ruled out. But if acne hadn't impelled young Bishop to do it..what had? What motivates a 15-year old Young Republican to fly a plane straight into a skyscraper on a balmy Saturday afternoon? Since the authorities refuse to release the crucial evidence, the answer is we may never know.
"Nothing to see here. Move along."

visit the 'Barry' The Tampa police have still not released the contents of the boy's website The CIA, the Mob & suicide note. No one in the media is protesting very loud. Americas Secret This pronounced lack of curiosity is vindicationof a sortfor the pat History
response a Tampa police spokeswoman gave over and over to questions about the suicide. "We may never know," she repeated patiently. She did not sound dismayed when she said it. "We may never know." In Charles Bishop's two-page-long suicide note there had been "some (other) things in there that we prefer not to talk about [since] the investigation is still ongoing," Tampa Police Chief Bennie Holder told a news conference. "But everything in the note mentioned things that occurred on Sept. 11 and his support of bin Laden and al-Qaida."
Spell "Santos"
"Everything in the note." Media critics sometimes accuse the press for being responsible for the increasingly short national attention span. After each new item is served up it has a brief half-life in the news, goes this reasoning, and then disappears... Afterwards Americans are encouraged to assume that the matter is settled... Even when it isnt. The night the Kamikaze Kid piloted his plane into a 28th floor office the local Fox news anchors had whipped themselves into an absolute frenzy over the question they asked breathlessly during every local commercial break.. "Was there a connection to Osama bin Laden? We'll tell you at ten!" Two weeks later they no longer seem to care as much at ten.
no explanation necessary?
The kamikaze kids flight instructor, Robert Cooper, observed out loud that the media tornado had disappeared as abruptly as it had arrived. "The news media has a short memory," he said. "They're on to the next hot thing." For the past two weeks Julia Bishop has been kept under tighter wraps than any female witness since Marina Oswald. She has spoken a total of just two words to the press: "Get" and "out." Reporters waited for a word from her to no avail in front of her home in Palm Harbor, a wealthy suburb north of Tampa consisting of gated communities stretching almost as far as the eye can see... cluster after cluster of white-stucco homes on silent palm-fringed cul-de-sacs. "Opulent monotony," one reporter called it. No reporters spoke with Julia Bishop. The only activity that could be seen at her luxury apartment was a victim's advocate from the Sheriff's Office who came out periodically to walk the family's dogs. Rumor had Julia Bishop holding out to tell her story to People magazine first. But when their Jan 21 issue came out the story had not a single photo of the boy's mother, which means we still don't know what she looks like. Millions of Americans have seen the mothers of several of the Arab terrorists. How, in freeway-close Tampa Florida, has the mother of kamikaze kid pilot Charles Bishop been so completely shielded from view? Even Marina Oswald got her picture in the papers.
"Remembered for his special interest in environmental impact issues." Julia Bishops only public utterance concerning her son came in a statement read by the familys attorney: "He cared about the world his generation was inheriting and took special interest in environmental impact issues, animal rights and endangered species laws, and the new world of national politics which impacts all of these issues.'' Poor Charles Bishop. Is that how a son wants to be remembered by his Mom? Even stranger than the fact that the boy's suicide note was being withheld from the media by the police is that apparently Charles' Bishops own mother hasnt seen it either. The familys lawyer Pamela Campbellwho served as the absent Julia Bishop's mouthpiecesaid Charles Bishop's distraught mother still had no insight into the crash. Her client hadnt seen the note. Nor had the police read it to her. Campbell said. "At this point in time, she really doesn't know what to believe.' If your child committed suicide, wouldn't you want to read their suicide note right away?
"Nothing to see here. Move along." Charles Bishops "missing" Dad is Charles J. Bishara, a half-Sicilian and half-Lebanese career criminal who hails from Winchester, Mass., described by Bay State natives as a Mob town. He is currently wanted on heroin charges. News accounts had been at pains to make one thing perfectly clear: "The boy's father has been out of the mother's and son's lives for some time." Bishara's organized crime ties could thus have had nothing to do with young Charlie Bishop's bizarre suicide, still the only authenticated act of Osama bin Laden-inspired terror in America since September 11. Julia Bishara had changed her and son Charles' last names, from Bishara to Bishop. She told officials she made the change because Bishara is an Arabic name and the U.S. was at war with Iraq, and subsequent news reports pointed to this as evidence that young Charles had had no contact with his "missing" father.
Team coverage was clearly the right way to go. The MadCowMorningNews has learned that this may not be the whole story. We had puzzled over why the divorced woman hadn't reverted to her maiden name, Detore. She changed her name instead to Bishop. "The entire Bishara clan in Winchester changed their names to Bishop," a long-time native of Massachusetts told us. "They anglicized it." Six years after "small time hood" Charles Bishara had supposedly left his ex-wife and son's lives for good, had Julia Bishop changed her name to match her ex-husbands? Mother Julia and son Charles lived a rootless, nomadic lifestyle, moving from town to town and school to school, news reports indicated, without saying why. Julia Bishop listed five addresses in the Tampa Bay area. Charles had attended at least four schools there. It was a virtual prescription for maladjustment. Behind the walls of his gated community, Charlie nursed a grievance. One boy who lived on the same cul-de-sac told a reporter he would see Charlie walking his dog. "I said `Nice dog' a lot to him, but he never said anything back. I would smile, but he wouldn't smile back.'' The collapse of the official story of Charles Bishop's flight leaves troubling questions unanswered.
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Where did the straight "A" Kamikaze Kid get the crazy idea that flying a plane at 160 miles an hour into a building after praising an Arab terrorist with a sideline in narcotics trafficking was going to be just way cool? Does the identity of the Kamikaze Kid's father have anything to do with the manner in which the son "acted out?" Does this help unravel the mystery of just who it was that targeted innocent civilians for murder on September 11? The FBI's new theme song should be sung by former Go-Go's lead singer Belinda Carlisle: "Our Lips Are Sealed." When we found Bisharas million dollar penthouse condominium at the Ritz Carlton Golf Resort in Naples, Florida, we thought: why can't the FBI find Bishara? We spoke recently with a grizzled McDill Special Forces Commander who had just come back Afghanistan, and used the opportunity to ask him something similar. "Does the Sicilian Mafia or the Lebanese Arab Christian clans have a beef with the present Administration? He allowed that they might. Someone wrote to tell us that on a whim they had entered www.bishara.com into their browser's address line. It turns out to be a subsidiary of the Sultan of Oman. This is probably just coincidence. In another unrelated story, officials announced that investigators from Treasury, Justice, and the FBI have "finished the initial phase of their exhaustive effort to trace the financial underpinnings of the attacks that killed about 3,000 persons in New York City and Washington, DC, on September 11." Despite repeated charges from pundits and politicians, including President Bush, that Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization was aided and abetted by funds derived from drug trafficking, the federal "investigators" did not mention illicit drug profits as a source of funding for the attacks. Huh. Imagine that. Charles Bishop is the first American suicide bomber in history. Two weeks after his death authorities have finally ruled out acne as the explanation for his act of terrorism. "Nothing to see here. Move along."
http://www.madcowprod.com/index.17.htm [15-11-2002 6:48:02 PM]
Security was tight around the Baxter family home in Sweetwater
"Like Chinatown, but set in Texas."

by Daniel Hopsicker
February 11--Houston Texas An investigation in Houston Texas by the MadCowMorning News has uncovered significant discrepancies in the official version of the death of former Enron Vice Chairman Cliff Baxter. While Texas officials have been willing to share only a few facts about the case, much of what they have revealed, we have learned, is puzzling, misleading, or, amazingly, wrong. Even more amazing is that with billions at stakethe very real possibility that Baxter might have been murdered has been completely ignored in the press. Early wire reports quoted Sugar Land Police Department spokeswoman Patricia Whitty saying that Baxter was found inside his Mercedes early on Friday with a gunshot wound to the head, a suicide note, and a revolver at his side. It was an impressive litany. Police appeared to have all of their ducks in a row. "A gunshot wound, a suicide note, and a revolver at his side." A statement released by the Sugar Land Police Department that morning broke the news... "At 2.23 a.m. this morning (January 25) Sugar Land police officers on routine patrol discovered John. C. Baxter, a Sugar Land resident, inside a vehicle parked between two medians on Palm Royale Boulevard of an apparent self-inflicted wound to the head."
some twisted pretzel logic
"Baxter was dead at the scene and the sole occupant of the vehicle." Sugar Land Police Sgt Truman Body told assembled reporters that the discovery of Baxter's body happened during a "routine patrol. It's my understanding that a deputy had seen (Baxter's) vehicle a few minutes earlier and through his routine patrol had doubled back to see if he could offer any assistance." Even a cursory examination of the facts reveals that very little of this is true. We uncovered this startling fact: Baxter's body had not been found by the Sugar Land police, as they have been insisting...
And rather than being "dead at the scene" when authorities 'found' him, Clifford Baxter had been still alive. "Tell us one more time: which one of you found the body?" S. H. "Hal" Werlein is the Constable for the county precinct encompassing the posh Sweetwater development where Baxter lived. The Constable's Office functions much like County Sheriffs in many parts of the country, he explained. Contrary to the statements of the Sugar Land Police Department, it was not two Sugar Land police officers but one of Hal Werlein's Deputy Constables who discovered the former Enron executive slumped behind the wheel of his new Mercedes sedan, parked just inside the Sweetwater development where Baxter and his family lived, in much the poshest part of town. "Our Constables office has a contract deputy program which provides private security guards for the Sweetwater homeowners association, and it was one of these men who discovered Mr. Baxter," Werlein told us. "The report I got from my Deputy Constable there on the scene stated he had come upon a Mercedes sitting parked in a turnout. He became suspicious and approached the vehicle, where he found Baxter still alive. He then immediately called for EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians)." Why such critical discrepancies about the most crucial of details? We've all watched enough TV cop shows to grill detectives with a simple question that usually calls for a yes or no answer...
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Not buying suicide at Baxter's club
"Was the victim alive when you found him?" On the day we visited the crime scene, there were no gawkers at the turnout on Palm Royale Boulevard. But there is, nearby, a security kiosk that has a sign across the front reading Constable Precinct Four. "I dont know why the Sugar Land Police Department is saying they found Baxter, because it isnt true," continued Constable Werlein. "My Deputy Constable found him." Confronted with Constable Werleins statement, Sugar Land Police spokesperson Patricia Whitty admitted that Werlein was correct. The police statement contained inaccuracies, she stated. But she offered no explanation for how or why these critical errors or mis-statements had occurred, nor why they hadn't been corrected earlier. "Trust us. We're really really sure that he took his own life." There was one thing the Sugar Land Police Department was absolutely sure of: Baxter was a "definite suicide," which they had already proclaimed by 10:00 that morning. Sugar Land police spokesmen didn't know the caliber of the gun, were unsure of the make of the car, or if a bullet was found, or where the gun was. But--and thank god!--they DID know that there were "no apparent signs of foul play." The police captain in charge of the immediate investigation concluded that it was clear Baxter had taken his own life. He then ordered Baxter's corpse taken to a local mortuary without an autopsy.
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Incredulous, Cliff Baxter's family then reportedly called on a local judge, who intervened with a counter order insisting that the body instead be taken to the county morgue for an official autopsy. When the results of the autopsy were released last Thursday Clifford Baxter became the second American so far this year to perish through suicide by zit. These days, explanations for mysterious suicides can apparently be found as needed, as close at hand as the nearest medicine cabinet.
Read a book that's 'not available in stores.'
Take for example the lead from the Associated Press report on the Cliff Baxter autopsy, calling attention to the fact that the former Enron Corp. executive had taken "a pain reliever, an anti-depressant and a sleeping aid" before "he shot himself to death after the company's collapse." If you parse this sentence a bitlooking for a hint of an official explanation for the death of the most important witness in what some are calling the biggest scandal since Watergateyou end up with some pretty twisted pretzel logic. No mention in the AP story about the possibility Baxter may have been murdered to prevent him from divulging incriminating information to Congressional committees investigating the Enron scandal, even though one such committee had been negotiating a deal with Baxter's lawyer's to get him to testify on the very day he 'killed' himself.
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This is probably just coincidence. "A pain reliever, an anti-depressant and a sleeping aid" All things considered, this sounds like a pretty typical day in Mayberry circa 2002. But maybe the AP is intimating that under certain circumstanceslike just before testifying to Congress, for examplemixing Prozac and Advil can lead abruptly and with no warning to a heavenly choir serenading you with the final chorus to "Goodbye Cruel World." This sounds like logic that could have been conceived, in point of fact, by the very same people who brought us the word of Tampa teen Charles' Bishops' acne-induced self-immolation. "Suicide by Zit." If it had been our last night in town before heading out for that Great Roundup in the Sky, we don't think that just before falling on our sword we would be making sure that we'd taken all our evening pills. Instead we might 'ingest' a little Jack Daniels to steel our nerve, or a few shots of Stolichnaya to ward off the chill of cold gunmetal pressing against our clammy forehead. Because one thing we are not going to need, on this final night, is a sleeping pill. Taking a sleeping pill just before committing suicide only makes sense if you're going to have trouble nodding off even in the Afterlife... Its redundant, right? "Youre already covered on that front." In the wake of September 11th we think they need to run some kind of disclaimer before the news. At least warn viewers of sticky wickets up ahead. "You are entering the Twilight Zone." The 'news' of Baxters List came hard on the heels of new developments in the other currently-suspicious suicide, that of the Kamikazie Kid pilot in Tampa. Charles Bishop, the first American suicide bomber in history, committed the only authentic terrorist attack in America since 9/11. Yet authorities have still offered no explanation for his bizarre attack. They were however forced to admit that young Charles Bishop showed no traces of accutane, the previously little-known acne medication with recently discovered suicide-inducing properties. Clearly a steep price must be paid for a clear complexion in America today. Or a clear conscience. Was this misdirection? Disinformation? Regardless, it helped forestall any closer examination of whether this 15-year-old boywhose father is a mysterious half-Lebanese half-Sicilian organized crime figure from Bostonmight have overheard anything he shouldnt have. Instead, the young pilot was adjudged to be troubled, but not a terrorist, a strange conclusion to reach about someone who has just flown a plane into a skyscraper at 160 miles per hour. Authorities seemed unconcerned that something similar had--and just recently--occurred. "Nothing to see here. Move along" "Unconcerned" is also a good way to describe Texas law enforcement officials after the Enron Scandal had claimed its first victim, even though Cliff Baxter was an insider who was fixin to talk. Little wonder then that today even the relatively non-paranoid are entertaining suspicions that when they make the movie of the Cliff Baxter story, it wont play like a Lifetime Original about a Dad who couldnt cope, but like a high tech spy thriller: "The Sugarland Sanction." Like "Chinatown," only set in Texas.
Whatever the ultimate truth of how he came to die in the middle of a chilly late January night in Texas, the most immediate consequence of Cliff Baxter's death is that Americans are now going to learn a lot less about the Enron Scandal than if Baxter had managed to hang around long enough to enter Witness Protection and get fitted for a bulletproof vest. Baxter was talking of needing a bodyguard just 36 hours before he committed suicide. And here we thought you only need a bodyguard when you're trying to stay alive. Despite the blas approach of the home-town Houston Chronicle to the shocking death of the most important witness in the biggest scandal since Watergate few in Houston we spoke to believe the former Enron Vice Chairman took his own life. After going, decisively, off the record, one long-time friend of Baxters explained it to us this way: "What if, for example, they had 'gotten to' John Dean before his testimony before the Watergate Committee made him a world-wide celebrity?" "I'll tell you what would have happened. Nothing. The cancer on the Presidency gets covered with a big gauze bandage, and wed have all been none the wiser." "Nobody would have seriously investigated the suicide of an obscure mid-level Nixon staffer said to be despondent over having been called to testify about misconduct in the Oval Office." If you're talking cost-effective damage control, its hard to beat assassination. At the Houston Yacht Club, where Baxter had taken to virtually living aboard his 72-foot yacht Tranquility Base, one club executive told us: "Cliff Baxter was not a person who I could ever believe would kill himself. He had boundless energy, a positive attitude, and everything to live for: a wife, kids, and the time and money to enjoy them. He was anxiously awaiting, for example, the delivery of his sleek new boat, which he was going to call Tranquility Base II." This yacht club skipper, a man with relatively extensive business dealings with Cliff Baxter, stared for a long time at the slate-gray water of Galveston Bay on a dreary February afternoon. Then he shrugged... "Maybe Cliff just knew too much," he said. "Thats what everyone around here thinks, anyway." An incredibly explosive political murderif thats what it waswould seem to be the very definition of Hard Ball. You would think it would be the the ideal topic for a special edition of the show of the same name. Alas. It seems as if Mr. Matthews, along with most of his brethren in the mainstream press, find themselves otherwise engaged. What's going on right now in Houston Texas may eventually come to be seen as the most blatant media clampdown since the death of Vince Foster. Last word goes to Lily Tomlin, who said it best: "No matter how cynical I get, I just cant keep up."
http://www.madcowprod.com/baxter.html [15-11-2002 6:48:04 PM]
What this is about
by Daniel Hopsicker March 8--Venice Florida
New developments raise troubling questions about "Pied Piper" of terrorist pilots. Mohamed Atta had connections with the Saudi Royal Family, according to his flight instructor at Huffman Aviation in Venice Florida, who told another student pilot Atta's status as a member of the Saudi elite warranted him having a full-time bodyguard at all times during his U.S. flight training. big secrets
slipping out
earlier stories
The bombshell revelation, buried in news reports immediately after 9/11, re-surfaced recently in an Australian television documentary interview with Anne Greaves, a London osteopath whose passion for aviation led her to take flight training at Huffman Aviation at the same time as Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi. From Hamburg Germany to Venice Florida... More on Greave's startling testimony in a moment. But there were also several other developments challenging what we've been told about Mohamed Atta's true identity. Suspicion is growing in Hamburg, Germany that Atta maintained ties with Western intelligence agencies while in Technical School, says one former German intelligence official, pointing to Atta's participation in an elite program sponsored by the German equivalent of the Agency for International Development, an arm of the government which often harbors intelligence operatives in the U.S. Even the Hamburg electronics company which employed three members of the core cadreAtta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ramzi Binalshibhfor more than two years while they were students is beginning to appear to be not quite what it seemed at first glance.
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Anne Greaves: told of Atta's Saudi Royal ties
Hay Computing Service GmbH is suspected of being what is known in German as a "briefkastenfirma," literally a "mailbox firm," commonly referred to in the U.S. as a "dummy front company." A cover story begins to break down New evidence also calls into question the chronology of Mohamed Attas final days. The MadCowMorningNews has learned exclusively that an eyewitness who has never been contacted by the FBI spotted Atta, Marwan and Siad Al-Jarrah together in Venice barely a week before the terrorist attack, long after authorities say they had moved on from this tiny retirement community on Floridas Gulf Coast.
terrorist pilots were in Venice week before 9/11
All three terrorist pilots ordered subs from her in the deli at the local Publix supermarket, states Brenda Covey. She had served them all before on numerous occasions, she continued, a statement confirmed by news accounts, and so she has no doubt at all about who the three were. What were they doing-or who were they meeting with--in tiny Venice Florida? At the very least this raises more suspicion about why the FBI has insisted Atta's terrorist cadre's arrival enmasse in Venice was nothing but sheer happenstance.
Eyewitness testimony doesn't make the papers--again.

Englishwoman Anne Greaves met Mohamed Atta while pursuing her lifelong dream of learning to fly. As fate would have it she ended up taking flying lessons with Mohamed Atta at Huffman Aviation in Venice Florida. "I certainly found it strange to find two Arabs in such a quiet location," she told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.s investigative program 4Corners. "When I checked with my instructor on one occasion about their (strange) habits, I was informed that the men we now know as Mohamed Atta and al-Shehhi actually had royal connections with a Saudi House and al-Shehhi was his bodyguard." Correspondent Liz Jackson attempted to pin down details of Greaves stunning allegation "This story about Mohamed Atta being royalty and al-Shehhi being his bodyguard, was that something just that Huffman's told you? I mean do you think that was something that they even believed or" "It was my impression that it was generally believed," Greaves states. "Because it was my instructor who told me this at the time so I had the impression that that was generally believed, yes. "That Mohamed Atta was royalty?" "That he had some connection of the Royal House of Saudi, yes." "And al-Shehhi was his bodyguard?"
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ready end of March!
"That is what I was given to understand so in a way it made sense to me that there were always two because I never saw al-Shehhi take the controls of the aircraft. It was always Mohamed Atta but nevertheless al-Shehhi always accompanied him on his flying lessons." "A soft-shoe shuffle at 30000 feet." Was Mohamed Atta a student pilot with a bodyguard who flew along with him during flight training? This is not a detail that would have been missed by the flight school's owner, who was queried about it on-camera. Dekkers was asked, "Now there have been stories that he presented himself as an Arab prince, is that correct?" "Well, no," Dekkers replied. "If he was a prince, yes or no, I can't state that because we never heard them talking about that, we never heard anything, we have heard that one of my students who was here in the same time that Atta and al-Shehhi was here, and I think it was Miss Greaves, that she stated in the London newspaper that he was a prince, that their clothing was expensive and that al-Shehhi was his guard." "Nothing of that we have seen here in the five months they were here," continued Dekkers in broken English. "They were absolutely low profile, they clothed themselves like we all do, jeans and sneakers, there was nothing else." Someone is lying.. Atta either did or did not take his bodyguard up with him on training flights. And since there is indisputable evidence that eyewitnesses in numerous interviews mentioned Mohamed Atta's fussy-by-Florida-standards dress code, it is Anne Greaves who appears to be telling the truth. Where does that leave Rudi Dekkers?
101 things you'll never learn on NBC
coming soonish
If Rudi Dekkers lied in an improvised on camera attempt to discredit Anne Greaves' account it raises red flags about whether he was telling the truth during his innumerable television appearances in the wake of the disaster. video clips from
And it raises the question of what he might be trying to hide.
"High test or regular?" Evidence suggesting that Dekkers is an inveterate liar surfaced last week in the local Venice Gondolier, which caught him telling an obvious whopper. In a front page story about heightened security concerns at the Venice Airport the paper reported that five aviation fuel trucks belonging to Dekkers had been discovered parked at the Venice Airport with keys in their ignitions, unlocked, unattended, and loaded with over 6000 gallons of highly flammable aviation fuel. Already burdened with a bad case of nerves over their Airports involvement in 9/11, city officials were not amused. Defensively, Dekkers told reporters that leaving the keys in the ignition had not been standard procedure, but just a mistake. "That is not normal," he said. A Huffman employee, however, had already gone on record with the police stating "that's the way they always leave them." A newspaper editorial then suggested, for the first time, that it might be time for Rudi to go. "If he wont be more helpful, the city should re-examine whether it wants Dekkers business to remain at the airport," said the Gondolier editorial. In truth, slipping quietly out of town may be exactly the outcome the Dutch national is desperately seeking. When your cover is blown you've outlived your usefulness.
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No one enjoys being left hanging, twisting slowly, slowly, in the wind.
"What are they hiding down in Venice Florida?" Today Dekkers presence at the Venice Airport is a continual reminder that the FBI has unfinished business in its investigation into the global network which aided the terrorists. Their work was halted, despite vocal protests by FBI agents on the case, by Pres. George W. Bush, in what he said was an effort to free more manpower for the anthrax investigation. But after the disclosure last week that Vice Pres. Dick Cheney "strongly" urged Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle to rein in the scope of the upcoming Hearings, Bush's halting of the FBI investigation can be seen in a somewhat different light. Down in tiny Venice Florida, the biggest 9/11 crime scene that wasn't reduced to rubble, a knowledgeable airport observer pointed out to us something he found curious. Since September 11 general aviation has been in serious downturn, he told us. At the Venice Airport its been, understandably, even worse. "Remember the stories about how Rudi Dekkers had so much trouble coming up with his rent at the Airport?" (Flight School Owner has Shady Ties). Dekkers had been late paying his rent last February, March, April, May, June and July. "Rudi Dekkers isn't having trouble paying his rent anymore," stated this observer, in a slow soft voice that sounded more than a little in awe of the implications of the statement. This is all no doubt just sheer coincidence. NEXT: Character is still destiny: "The Rudi Dekkers No One Knows."
Clueless in Gaza...and everywhere else.
by Daniel Hopsicker March 15--Venice Florida
While the media spotlight was on the mis-cues at the perennially "troubled" INS, the real news this week was that Rudi Dekkers was telling reporters a significantly different version of his relationship with terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta than he gave in the wake of the September 11 disaster. Several key details in Dekker's public account of Mohamed Atta's stay in this country changed, even as, claiming to feel "vindicated," Dekkers tried to use the INS snafu to his public relations advantage. "When they hit the buildings they were approved to be here," Dekkers insisted, indicating himself to be a man of principle who would never teach people to hit buildings with airplanes until they had been vetted by the proper authorities.
Presidential wolf cookie
Anyway, that's his story. But it is one he is having an amazing amount of difficulty sticking to. "Sometimes we all feel the heat" Dekkers was not the only one trying to get some public relations mileage from the INS debacle. In addition to provoking "outrage" on Capital Hill, the hapless INS's bungling was said to have made even President George W. Bush "pretty hot." And suddenly it seemed the tide of public opinion was turning against the lowly INS, America's Slacker Guardians of our Porous Borders, and a finger of blame began to be pointed towards an otherwise swell bunch of guys who spend most of their time standing around in the hot sun at border crossings doing their level best to look the other way. Nobody ever said life was fair. More importantly, while speaking with reporters after receiving the now-famous letter in which the INS cordially invites two dead terrorists to stay, Dekkers cast further doubt on his own credibility by blithely changing his testimony on key points like when Atta started flying lessons, or how much he paid for them. Perhaps it is only of interest to (Anderson?) accountants, but we have found ourselves fascinated as Dekkers' has so far told three different stories about how many pieces of silver he collected per terrorist. At first, Atta and Marwan each paid $10,000.
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The Third Man Siad Jarrah was in Venice too
That figure was later quietly revised to $20,000 apiece. Finally, this week, the Atta-Dekkers "contract" grew once again, to almost $30,000 for each. Nobody has mentioned it so we will: This totally negates the stated purpose for the terrorist presence in Venice, which as you'll remember was to save a buck on flight training.
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According to aviation training experts we spoke to for half of what Rudi Dekker's was charging you can become a flight trainer yourself. Moreover, the chief flight instructor at neighboring Jones Aviation in Sarasota, where Atta and Marwan trained for six weeks, insisted in an exclusive interview with the MadCowMorningNews that Dekkers was flat out wrong when he told reporters that Mohamed Atta already had a private pilot's license when he entered the U.S. That's pretty basic information. How can so many crucial facts be in dispute? The question underscores how little has been made public about the subjects of the biggest American criminal investigation since the Kennedy assassination.
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"Lone nut cadres always act alone." In the days immediately after the Sept 11 tragedy Dekkers was quoted in numerous news accounts saying that Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi began flight training at Huffman Aviation in early July of 2000. Some published reports gave the date of Atta's first lesson at Huffman as July 3rd
After this six month sojourn spent learning to fly in this quiet retirement community located midway between Tampa and Naples on the Gulf Coast of Florida, Atta and his cadre moved on to more advanced training on Floridas east coast around Miami. So, at least, goes what remains of the official story of Mohamed Atta, Islamic Fundamentalist. But even Rudi Dekkers himself--one man who should know for sure--contradicted this generally-accepted chronology of Mohamed Attas stay in the U.S. While fielding questions about his role in the INS flap Dekkers told the Associated Press that "Atta and Al-Shehhi had completed their immigration paperwork on Aug. 29, 2000, just before they began their six-month flight instruction program at the school." Just before.
"Its my party, and I'll scowl if I want to." Was Dekkers now saying that Atta and Marwan didn't start flight training until August 30 at the earliest, seven weeks later than he stated in the aftermath of September11th? And if Mohamed Atta wasn't scowling at his flight instructors and everyone else at the Venice Airport for seven weeks that summer, who had he been scowling at? And where? visit the 'Barry & the boys' Atta's flight records, obtained by the MadCowMorningNews, clearly show Atta's website flying history with Huffman commencing July 6. So Dekkers has once more been caught lying. And its his story of Mohamed Atta & the Venice Flying Circus which we're meant to believe? Today Americans can learn more about a story like "Local man attempts to avoid arrest by forging another mans name on traffic ticket," than we can about the biggest crime against humanity of the still-young 21st Century. As for the question of who ultimately is to blame for the tragedy? Today's best guess seems to be the INS. Could they be the "global network" we keep waiting to see? Not unless the swells start hanging out in Laredo, they're not. What does that leave?
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Precision timing when you least expect it

In an operation nearly the equal in pin-point accuracy of Atta's own swan dive into the World Trade Center Towers the INS letter was mailed on March 6 and scored a bulls-eye five days later, arriving in Dekkers inbox on precisely the six month anniversary of the disaster. Consider: at some point fairly recently, the INS letters, containing the names of the most heinous villains in living memory, had been stuck into an envelope, and sent out... Even the New York Times raised an eyebrow. "The error seemed particularly difficult to explain, because Mr. Atta and Mr. Shehhi were among the most infamous of the 19 hijackers," said the Times. "We dont understand why this came in today, and why this was not done a year go," said Dekkers. The answer to the question of why two INS letters inviting dead terrorists to stay showed up in Rudi Dekkers mailbox on precisely the six month anniversary of September 11 is, sadly: "We may never know." It was a triumphant performance for Dekkers, who was widely portrayed as feeling "vindicated." "I could not show that we applied for the right paperwork. Therefore I am happy that I can do that now." "So you feel vindicated?" "Yes." Not widely disclosed even today is the fact that that not two, but three of the four planes commandeered by the terrorists were piloted by people who "just happened" to have learned to fly at the tiny off-the-beaten-path Venice Airport. Left out of most news accounts is the fact Siad Al-Jarrah learned to fly next door to Dekkers operation at a second flight school, that of Arne "one damn Dutch boy too many" Kruithof, also like Dekker's a native of the Netherlands.
coming soonish
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In fact, a veritable squadron of terrorist pilots trained in Venice, including several "America's Most Wanted" Hamburg cadre guys still eluding capture. Also eluding capture, though we have no evidence they have been to Venice Florida, are , of course, Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar. Mullah Omar! Now there's a real blast from the past! He's been heard from about as much as a one-hit television actor who makes a really bad career move. Mullah Omar is the Philip Michael Johnson of international terrorism. Mullah Omar has been disappeared. Sinking into deserved obscurity does not, however, seem to be what fate has in store for Rudi Dekkers. He and his Venice flight school studentsAtta and Marwanhave received so much attention since 9/11 that Rudi thinks we should begin to think about "Movin On." "I dont expect when I get in on Monday morning to get two permits for Atta and Al-Shehhi," Dekkers said. "I thought they were behind me already and my life goes on."
"Not so fast, bub, is what we want to tell him." There is another story still to surface, a so far secret story, a story which began unraveling this week and is not about inept federal agencies like the INS... There is another Agency of the Government of the United States whose good offices, apparently, resulted in Mohamed Atta and his terrorist cadre finding themselves in Venice, Florida during the summer of the year 2000. Usually reliable sources have confirmed to the MadCowMorningNews that this agency is not the INS. Dekkers, who said he faced scrutiny in the media after the attacks for admitting the students, said the INS forms showed he had followed the law. "The forms, filled out by an assistant at Huffman, indicated that both men met the English language requirements to study at the school," stated the AP story. "Atta listed his nationality as Egyptian, while Al-Shehhi said he was from United Arab Emirates." The AP story said, "On the form, filled out by a Huffman assistant, Atta's name is spelled "Mohomed." What the AP failed to note is that the mis-spelling might have owed something to the fact that the 18-year old Huffman Aviation assistant who filled them out, Nicole Antini, was just then also being sexually harassed by Rudi Dekkers, her beefy middle-aged boss, according to a lawsuit for sexual harassment which Dekkers was forced to settle recently for an undisclosed sum. The AP also let slip that the documents filled out indicated the terrorists academic term at Huffman was for up to 12 months, and would cost $27,300. What no one has noted till now is that this is the third mutually-contradictory account Dekkers has given so far on the simple question of how much the two paid for their flight lessons. As we begin to follow the money we recall some cop wisdom we once heard from a grizzled detective, about how to take down a criminal when all else fails... "Al Capone murdered over 500 people," this investigator told us. "You know what he went to prison for? Tax evasion." NEXT: ATTA DIDN'T WANT TO DO IT! another MadCowMorningNews exclusive
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Too many eyewitnesses to cower into silence?
by Daniel Hopsicker April 8--Venice Florida
Less than six weeks before the September 11th attack Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi engaged in a fist-pounding shouting match, according to eyewitnesses, at The Pelican Alley restaurant in Venice Florida. Long after the FBIs official chronology asserts that Attas Hamburg cadre had left Venice, their initial port of entry into American pilot training, the core of the terrorist group was still moving in and out of town, asserts "Mohamed Atta & the Venice Flying Circus," a new documentary investigating the Florida flight schools training terrorist pilots. An eight-minute segment is airing this week at www.theconspiracychannel.com. Just six weeks before they are incinerated along with thousands of their victims after they apparently murderously wrenched control of their planes from their pilots and steered them into the World Trade Center Towers, Atta and his young sidekick Marwan were arguing so loudly in a Gulf-front restaurant that their waitress alerted the restaurant's manager.
The chubby one: "Right after (Sept 11th) we had newspapers come down, and immediately we knew arguing for what it was about, because I remembered the table, and so did Tom," says Renee fiscal sanity
wants ticket to paradise plus the $200k
Adorna.
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"And when they showed us their pictures, I immediately recognized them, because theyd caused a scene in our restaurant."
Maybe the FBI knew what they'd find... if they looked

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Though it was said to be the most massive investigation in FBI history, it is a scene the FBI doesnt even know occurred. Even though the restaurant is located barely a block from the terrorists rented home, agents never bothered to question anyone there. How massive is that? What Atta and Marwan were arguing about offers clues to what was going through their heads, and strangely, although the terrorist pilots have been universally labeled "Islamic fundamentalists," what they were pounding the table over wasn't an argument about fine points in the Koran... They were arguing about money. "The big guy was pounding his fist on the table, saying Were talking $200,000! Weve got to answer to the Family!" recalls Renee Adorna, who with her husband Tom own and manage the restaurant. "I thought they were Mafia, and tried to stay away from their table."
visit the "There were three of them, and they all looked of the Egyptian persuasion," she 'Barry & the boys' continued. "Dark skin, dark hair. They were dressed in Florida-type shirts, you know, website the silk with the pattern. And they were all wearing lots of jewelry Lots of jewelry."
"And I could have sworn that the one guy was wearing a cross, you know, the big gaudy gold cross on the chest. But Im not sure now. But I know he had a big watch on," Renee says. Big Watch. Big Jewelry. Big Trouble for the "official story?" And if it were, would it be any Big Surprise?
Witnesses to the conspiracy in progress "I only recognized one of them, Atta," Renee continues. "He barely spoke a word to me. But he had a really mean expression on his face. He seemed very unhappy. The other guythe heavy-set guy, did all the talking and was very friendly and outgoing." "Atta and the big guy were arguing. And it was the big guy that was yelling at Atta, saying were talking $200,000! Weve got to answer to the Family!" she recalls. "I thought they were Mafia, and tried to stay away from the table, pretty much, until it looked like it could get out of hand, and so I went and got the owner." "Renee came into the office and said there were three gentlemen who were getting very loud, and creating a scene," Tom recalls. "She was afraid that it might get too out of control." Tom thereupon sat at a nearby table for the next ten minutes, which served to quell the disturbance. "I remember they were arguing about money," he says. "The big guy was doing most of the talking. The other guy, the main guy, Atta, he sat there not saying a word." When they were asked if the FBIs "massive" investigation had sent anyone into their restaurant, the answer, perhaps predictably, was no. "The FBI was right down the street at their (Atta and Marwans rented) house, but they never came by to see us," Tom Adorna says.
coming in 2 weeks!
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"When nobody came over here to talk to us, only newspaper people, I thought it was pretty strange," Renee Adorna states.
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"Maybe they already had everything they needed" "I mean, we thought that maybe they might want some information. But maybe they already had all the information that they needed." The FBI never finished its investigation into the Sept 11 disaster. Their work was halted by Pres. Bush, in an effort, he said, to free more manpower for the anthrax investigation. Well, the anthrax is behind us now...
3000 dead people command us to find the truth about how it is they came to die on September 11 in the year 2001. And any real search for that truth inevitably winds up, incongruously, in tiny Venice, Florida, at the Venice Municipal Airport, on whose runways, barely eighteen months ago, Mohamed Atta joined the Venice Flying Circus. Recognition of this prompted federal authorities responsible for barring dangerous aliens from the United States to send Atta's and al-Shehhi's names on federal visa approval forms to 'flight school owner' Rudi Dekkers, supposedly six months to the day after the attack. In an action akin to LBJ's presidential aides inviting Lee Harvey Oswald to a state dinner in the White House, Rudi Dekkers got a Free Ride. It's known as "preparing the battlefield."
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NEXT: RETURN OF 'THE USUAL SUSPECTS': BARRY SEAL'S PAL'S FINGERPRINTS ALL OVER VENICE FLORIDA
The Venice Flying Circus
At least three times during the last six weeks of his life terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta left the jazzier precincts of the Miami area to journey across the state to a retirement community with the second oldest population in the entire United States. The question is: why?
by Daniel Hopsicker April 18--Venice Florida
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Contradicting the FBIs chronology of the terrorists final days, an investigation by the MadCowMorningNews has learned exclusively that on three separate occasions during the final six weeks before September 11 Mohamed Atta was in Venice on Floridas Gulf Coast, a place the FBIs chronology says he left fully nine months before, visiting subjects unknown for reasons unknown. In interviews for Mohamed Atta & the Venice Flying Circus (portions of which air this week on theconspiracychannel.com) credible local eyewitnesses report that Atta and his sidekick Marwan Al-Shehhi were in a restaurant a block from Attas former rented home six weeks before the attack, on the phone from Venice on a Fort Lauderdale rent-a-car company's Caller ID three weeks before, and, just one week before the attack, ordering submarine sandwiches in the deli of a Venice, Florida supermarket. The FBI has previously publicly stated only that during the terrorist conspiracys final three weeks of preparation Atta was in the Miami area, with a brief trip to Las Vegas. The Bureau has been aware of Attas visits to Venice, despite saying nothing about them, we have learned, through rental car receipts, phone records, and interviews with the owner of a Fort Lauderdale car rental agency who rented cars to Atta during the month before the terrorist attack. The glaring omission of the fact that Mohamed Atta had, for unknown reasons, a continuing presence in the retirement community of Venice raises disturbing questions when viewed against the backdrop of continuing suspicion about the nature of the operations being carried out there at two Dutch-owned flight schools, which together trained three of the four terrorist pilots (see previous stories). Discovering that the terrorist conspiracy was based in Venice, or had still-unexplained links there, would seem to be a useful lead to the enfeebled FBI, which has so far been unable to track down any living participants in a conspiracy which claimed 3000 lives.
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"The FBI took all over files. Everything." The failure to disclose to the American people what little the FBI does seems to know points directly to the existence of a cover-up, designed to shield from public view activities which took place in the Venice area over the two-year period prior to the tragedy, activities whose clear result was a massive influx of hundreds of mostly Arab student pilots into the area. Increasing doubt still further is the circumstance under which the files of the two flight schoolswhich collectively may have trained dozens of terrorist pilotswere confiscated by the FBI, never to be seen or heard from again. "They loaded two Ryder trucks (of Huffman Aviation and Venice Police Department documents) right outside that (police station) window," one Venice law enforcement official told us. airport which flew out with Jeb Bush aboard. The FBI took all our files. Everything."
visit the 'Barry & the boys' website "And then they drove them right onto a C130 military cargo plane at Sarasota
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Do the files reveal what Mohamed Atta was doing in Venice one week before September 11th? In addition to the local restaurant owners who witnessed a shouting match between Atta and Marwan six weeks before, the two were also spotted together just a week before the attack.
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Islamic fundamentalists do lunch At a supermarket a mile from the Venice Airport known to have been frequented by the terrorists, Brenda Cover, who works in the deli, said, "When they showed pictures of three different guys, Atta was one of them, several days later on TV, I immediately recognized their faces." "And I told my husband then, oh my god, those are the three guys! They were just in store a week ago. The week before, they were in the store. They got subs." Atta had an intimidating or menacing presence, she stated, a sentiment heard again and again from people who had contact with him. "I didnt like they way they stared at you. It would have been different if they had talked to you like you were a normal person. You know, hi, how are you today sort of thing." "But he just stood back and glared at you with his dark eyes," she continued. "It gave me a frightening eerie feeling, like you wouldnt want to be caught in the parking lot at night with him."
The flood of Arab student pilots coming through Venice had not escaped the notice of local townspeople, according to Brenda, who said she noticed the influx in the year before September 11th. Venice to Fort Lauderdale on Caller ID A third visit to Venice by Atta and Marwan was confirmed by the owner of a rental agency in Fort Lauderdale, near Miami on Floridas other (east) coast
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During the first week of August Atta and Al-Shehhi rented a white Ford Escort from Warrick's Rent-a-Car, in Pompano Beach. "He rented two cars over three contracts for a total of five weeks," owner Bradley Warrick told us. "He wanted it (his second rental) for two weeks, he told me, to go over to the west coast of Florida." "While he was over on the west coast during those two weeks he called me from Venice. I saw it on my caller ID, and said to myself, oh wonderful. Ive got a car broke down over on the west coast of Florida. " "But he was only calling me because the service engine soon light was on. I assured him that he would be all right, and that the car would be fine, he wouldnt break down."
"Its not like there's a free press anymore." At least three times during the last six weeks of his life terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta left the jazzier precincts of the Miami area to journey across the state to a retirement community with the second oldest population in the entire United States. If Mohamed Atta had a preference for blue-haired widows over tall European models, it would come as a surprise, given his proven penchant for night life ranging from the Cheetah Club and the Pink Pony to Harry's Bar in New York, where he liked a table near the piano. So the Venice meetings must have been business. Who was he meeting? Why was he there? Local law enforcement officials indicated to the MadCowMorningNews that they, too, would like to know the answer. Nobody has yet been charged in the attacks on America that claimed 3000 lives. Though the FBI talks about the agents they had on the case, the doors they knocked down, and the thousand and more suspects they have arrested, they do not explain why they have failed to catch anyone responsible. If there is another Federal Agency involved in Venice, whose malfeasance the FBI is suppressing, they probably never will.
Frank Moss' DC3 sitting at Charlotte County Airport
Together on 'America's Barbary Coast': Atta, Marwan, and 'the boys'

by Daniel Hopsicker April 24--Venice Florida Big on Veils
Mohamed Atta sent polemical emails, including one containing a gruesome photo of a dead Palestinian child, to a regular email list of some 40 individuals, all of whom became the focus of intense scrutiny from the FBI after the lists existence became known last September, the MadCowMorningNews has learned. Alarmingly, the email addresses of several of the names on Attas terrorist e-list appear to have been, or still are, employees of US defense contractors. One name on Atta's email list, for example, apparently worked at a Canadian company called Virtual Prototypes, whose website touts the fact that the firm helped prototype the avionics instruments in the F-15 jet fighter, the F-22 Raptor, the B2 bomber and the Apache Longbow, among others. Another address on the list, paradisehasaprice@hotmail.com, appears to refer to, or perhaps even to be, a female suicide bomber in Chechnya. Emails from the terrorist ringleader first came into possession of authorities in Punta Gorda, Florida, 30 miles south of Venice. In the immediate aftermath of the attack they were turned over to law enforcement officials by a salesman at an avionics firm located at the nearby Charlotte County Airport. "Welcome to America's Barbary Coast" Today Charlotte County Airport is also home, coincidentally or not, to major intrigue involving the disappearance from the County Sheriff's Department of at least 23 helicopters, spirited out of this country, for reasons unknown, to exotic and faraway destinations like Chile, in a General Services Administration Military Surplus program very much like the one that resulted in convictions in Arizona in the Forest Service C130 scandal of a few years ago after a C130 military cargo plane belonging to the US Forest Service was discovered on a runway at the Mexico City Airport with a billion dollars worth of cocaine aboard. And it includes a cast of characters whose names, it must be stated, seem lifted straight from the transcripts of the Iran Contra Hearings, like Frank Moss and Dietrich Reinhardt, two notorious covert operatives linked over a decade ago to Barry Seal and the infamous Mena, Arkansas. Moss owns the most conspicuous plane at the airport, a vintage DC3 painted to look like an airborne Ark, which has been sitting at the airport since its seizure two years ago.
airport shakedown
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And Dietrich Reinhardt, whose Caribe Air appears about to play an increasingly large role in our story, is a partner in a venture at the airport strongly suspected of having been the conduit of the helicopter's disappearance from the County Sheriff's Air Wing. The local Sheriff says as many as 23 helicopters were stolen. Wags at the Charlotte County Airport, however, insist that the missing helicopters were merely released on their own recognizance. But first, Mohamed Atta's e-mail list... The discovery of Atta's emails came about when a local avionics salesman at Eastern Avionics sold a headset to Marwan Al-Shehhi, authorities said, after which his email address was added to a list kept by the terrorist duo, apparently sharing a single email account. After being alerted by officials at Eastern Avionics to the existence of the emails, local officials had immediately passed them on to the FBI, where knowledge of their very existence might have disappeared into the black hole where evidence collected by the Bureau oftentimes appears to end up...
visit the But enterprising reporters had already discovered the local angle 'Barry & the boys' before the FBI clampdown, and reported it in print as well as on local website
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The story went unreported nationally. Then recently sources close to the investigation released the contents of four of the emails exclusively to the MadCowMorningNews.
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"Non-negotiable demands from Paradise." video clips from

Atta's email correspondence does not contain any information illuminating the terrorist conspiracy, but is instead of a relatively-mundane political nature. One note, for example, details the passing of a Muslim figure and asks for prayers. In another, Atta writes, "I demand the decision-makers in the American University in Cairo withdraw their threats of dismissing a Muslim female student who refused to take off the Niqaband adhere to their claimed non-discrimination policy printed in their catalogue." A "Niqab" is a face veil, according to Islamic sources, and a 'Niqaabi' is "a sister who covers her face and hands when in public or in the presence of any man outside her immediate family." After verifying the authenticity of the Atta emails with local officials we shared them with one of the local reporters who first broke the story of their existence just after the World Trade Center attack, and whose first report on the discovery of the emails appeared six months ago. Amy Ochier's subsequent report led the local news last night on NBC's Charlotte County affiliate.
"Tell us again... when did they get here?"

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The discovery of Atta's emails deals another blow to the FBI's increasingly-flimsy chronology of the terrorists sojourn in the US, which has Atta's terrorist cadre first arriving in this country from Hamburg in June of 2000 to attend Huffman Aviation in Venice. But the evidence now surfacing in Charlotte County strongly indicates that Atta and Al-Shehhi were in Punta Gorda as early as April of 2000, and began their training not in Venice but at a soon-to-be-bankrupt flight school thirty miles down the road in Punta Gorda called Professional Aviation, where the school's pupils became a focal point for the FBI's investigation. At least eight of them were interviewed at least several times each. As at Huffman Aviation, the FBI carted off boxes full of paperwork from the school. "It looks like some of the terrorists were here first and then went to Venice," stated one Charlotte County official six months ago. Nothing has changed in the interim. An unknown number of Arab student pilots were left stranded by Professional Aviation's closure, including a large contingent from Tunisia, said local officials. When Professional Aviation went belly up, many of the school's students had then moved to Rudi Dekkers Huffman Aviation in Venice. Strangely, Professional Aviation was going bankrupt at exactly the same time Huffman Aviation's Rudi Dekkers was generating bad press in nearby Venice for his inability to pay his rent there on-time. Terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta was living under an alias in rural Charlotte County, just south of Venice on Florida's Gulf Coast, before moving up to Venice, according to law enforcement officials who state for the record that their investigation ended when they turned over the emails to the FBI. The feds don't share any of their information, even with local law enforcement, these sources indicated. One big question is why the FBI has been as silent on all this as Mullah Omar. Remember him?
A bunch of sweet elderly ladies...and a few spooks.
earlier stories by Daniel Hopsicker May 20--Venice Florida
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The MadCowMorningNews has learned that the elderly woman who (supposedly) provided the two Israelis arrested in Oak Harbor Washington with their alibi hasjust one week latermoved, or disappeared, and cannot be found to corroborate her account. In Oak Harbor, Washington, Fox News reported last week that two Israelis with altered passports were apprehended in a rental truck containing traces of TNT and plastic explosives on a state highway running past the home of a fleet of U.S. electronic spy planes, Whidbey Island Naval Air Station.
According to an FBI spokesman in Seattle, local police had pulled the Israelis over for speeding, and then became suspicious after one of the men was found to be in possession of an altered passport and the other was unable to produce any identification other than an Israeli driver's license. Suspicion was heightened because the Israelis were driving on a state road running past a Naval Air Station housing electronic warfare Prowler jets, as well as because of the truck driver's insistence that they were moving furniturea claim that did not seem to mesh with the late hour. Local police made an arrest. The local press reported it.
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The backpedaling which followed, however, was fast, furiousand national. Involved in the subsequent investigation were Naval Intelligence, the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Tests revealing traces of explosives were in error. They showed false positives. The Israelis alibi had checked out. It was a non-story.
There were no follow-ups. The story was reported uncritically in the mainstream press (Seattle Post) even as the Navy dogs who had provided the 'false positives' were being praised by local newspapers. ("Navy Canines Help Keep Base Safe.") It faded faster in the news than that of the Kamikaze Kid pilot who wasnt taking acne medication but was still somehow provoked by it to express his desire for self-termination by flying into a skyscraper after heaping praise on Arab terrorists-turned-drug merchants.
Meanwhile, the FBI was issuing a "general, uncorroborated and nonspecific" warning to terrorist task forces and owners and managers of apartment buildings across the nation, based on information that al Qaeda members planned to blow up apartment buildings with plastic explosives. There was more than enough to pique our interest...even before we discovered that the story may involve what we have come to refer to as "The Venice Connection.
"When people lie, its always for a reason." Seemingly coincidentally, the Israelis had been pulled over in Oak Harbor, Wa., home of a commuter airline which had been run by the business partner of visit the 'Barry & the boys' Venice flight school owner Rudi Dekkers. website Harbor Airknown locally as the "Navys airline" because its function was to serve personnel flying in and out of the nearby Naval Air Stationwas owned by one Richard Boehlke, a con artist extraordinaire, even by the standards of the Venice Magic Dutch Boy. Dekkers connection with Boehlke is, of course, of intense interest to anyone interested in possible global networks aiding the terrorists, since Boehlke had recently participated in the massive Mob-led ($352 million) looting of pension funds in Portland, Or., another non-story you probably havent read about. Dekkers, of course, is the Dutch national owner of a Venice flight school with the unique distinction of having, for sums far in excess of normal, trained both of the pilots crashing airplanes into the World Trade Center. Together with Boehlke, he started an unsuccessful airline, Florida Air, whose only accomplishment, other than having been publicly endorsed by Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, seems to be to have provided a rationale for the presence of several British Aerospace Jetstreams poised on the tarmac of an airport within easy reach of Caribbean hot spots. Still, whatif anythingdo Richard Boehlke and Rudi Dekkers have to do with Israelis running around in empty Budget rental trucks containing traces of TNT and plastic explosives? Consider: The two Israelis alibi checked out, according to authorities, after they had spoken to an elderly woman living in an elder-care facility nearby, who stated the men resembled individuals who dumped a load of furniture in her front yard in the middle of the night And before going bankrupt last year Richard Boehlke made his millions operating elder-care facilities, first in Washington state and then nationally. Did the woman live in one of Boehlkes facilities? Was there a story behind the story?
the 'barry' website
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We recalled that although Rudi Dekkers claimed he met his partner Boehlke through a mutual friend in Ohio, he had been lying... Boehlkes company, Alterra, had a gleaming facility located just a hundred yards from Dekkers Huffman Aviation at the Venice Airport. What had Dekkers been lying to protect? Was there a connection between the assisted living industry and covert operations? Well yes.
"Nothing to See Here. Move Along." Just down the block from Boehlkes assisted living home in Venice Florida, a stones throw from the Venice Airport, is a stately complex that was built to house the national headquarters of nursing home giant Beverley Enterprises, then owned by a name often linked with Americas super-secret National Security Agency, Jackson Stephens. Gleaming like a movie set basking under Florida's sunshine is a building which still houses Stephens former law firm, which according to local observers runs the town of Venice. Jackson Stephens, Rudi Dekkers, Richard Boehlke, and a no-doubt sweet little old lady living in elder care beside the Navy's electronic spy plane base... No doubt it is all just a coincidence. Just a small world. When reporters initially asked about the furniture moving story they were told investigators had already followed up on this angle, speaking with an elderly lady at an elder-care housing facility who claimed she had had furniture delivered in the middle of the night by two men fitting the description of the Israelis. The MadCowMorningNews was skeptical, and made enquiries. We discovered that the woman cited by authorities and used by the FBI to discount the FOX NEWS report on the incident (Police Seize Rental Truck With TNT Traces) hasjust one week after providing the Israelis alibimoved. Mary Williams cannot be found to verify her account. She no longer lives at the Cam Bey Senior Living Facility, the retirement home where the men allegedly dumped furniture on the front lawn in the middle of the night, before heading for the Canadian border via a road bordering the nearby Naval Air Station. A spokeswoman at the facility declines to give out any information concerning her present whereabouts, citing privacy concerns. Located in (aptly-named?) Coupeville, Washington, the retirement facility is owned and operated by a non-profit company, Senior Services of Island County, which receives HUD block grants. It has no apparent connections with Boehlke. It is all just sheer coincidence. It is a non-story. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Potential liabilities facing rapid oxidation
9-11 Clean Up Crew At Work? July 4--Venice Florida The owner of one of the two Venice, FL. flight schools at which Mohamed Atta and his terrorist cadre learned to fly barely survived the crash of a private plane last Wednesday when it nose-dived to earth after taking off from the Venice Airport. The MadCowMorningNews has learned that subsequent events have left local aviation experts wondering if Arne Kruithof's near brush with death was just accident, or something more sinister. Arne Kruithof, owner of Florida Flight Training, was one of three men who dragged themselves out of the mangled fuselage of a Twin Beech E18 and dashed to safety just moments before the plane's 300 gallons of fuel exploded in a fireball. Onboard along with co-pilot Kruithof, whose school trained Siad Al Jarrah, the terrorist at the controls of the plane that went down in western Pennsylvania, were the pilot, Glenn Goodman, and passenger John Mills. The men, who told investigators they were on their way for a pleasure trip to Cancun, were "shaken up, but essentially without injuries," according to a Venice Police spokesman. "They were really lucky to walk away from this."
"It fell."
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While 'mechanical failure' is believed to be responsible, the precise cause of the crash remains unknown.
"Did they check the fuel tanks for rubber balloons?"

The MadCowMorningNews has learned that Kruithof's near brush with death has local aviation experts wondering if the crash was just an accident. Could someone now be attempting to ensure Kruithofs silence in the so-far anemic Congressional 9/11 investigation? Does someone want Arne Kruithof dead? This notion was bolstered late this week by the unseemly haste with which the plane's wreckage was destroyed... well before an FAA finding on the cause of the crash. "The plane was almost immediately dragged off to be compacted even though the FAA hadn't yet determined the cause for the crash," one local aviation observer told us.
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"That's not just irregular. It's highly irregular. So we're all kind of wondering just what the hell's going on. And besides... isn't it a little warm in Cancun in July?"
Magic Dutch Boys Two by Two It was Dutch national Kruithof's purchase of one of the two Venice flight schools, at the same time fellow countryman Rudi Dekkers purchased the other, that led to them being dubbed the Venice 'Magic Dutch Boys.'
("Two damn Dutch boys training terrorist pilots is one damn Dutch boy too many," growled one famous Southern lawman to us last fall. "It's untidy.") Even before the tragedy of September 11th, both men's dealings had lifted some eyebrows at the Venice Airport... And though both have gotten a free ride from the national press that has done nothing to lift the cloud of suspicion hanging over them locally among their aviation peers. The two flight schools at Venice Municipal Airport cater almost exclusively to international students. Huffman President Rudi Dekkers has trained some 800 foreign students at his school during the past two years. Training, also had numerous international students.
visit the 'Barry & the boys' Venice residents said the city's other flight school, Florida Flight website
Kruithof is expected to testify at Congressional Hearings at some point both about his relationship with Rudi Dekkers--the other Dutch national flight school owner at the Venice Airport--and partner Pascal Schreier, a German national living in Munich.
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"Say, didn't the terrorists come from Hamburg?" Their company, Aviation Aspirations, (Kruithof is VP) provides both financial assistance and a "Mentor Programme."
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Schreier recruited students in, among other places, Hamburg. The company's motto, somewhat ironically, is: "Better training because we care." About their "mentoring programme," the company's literatures says: "The help is both financial and practical. We now provide one-to-one practical assistance from experienced Professional Pilots (our Mentors) whom we have established throughout the world. Could 'mentor' be just a cute way to say 'handler?' Do good recruitment prospects require special mentoring? French newspaper Le Monde has reported that Osama Bin Laden's brother Yeslam sent student pilots to Venice for training.
Is Aviation Aspirations a front, being used as a vehicle to recruit and assess potential intel assets like terrorist pilots?
Birds of a Feather The crash also threw a spotlight on some of Kruithof's curious associations.
the 'barry' website
Glen Goodman, the pilot of the downed Beech craft and Kruithof's partner in Florida Flight Maintenance, for example, incorporated a business in Florida in July of 2000, just after the terrorist pilots began training at the Venice Airport. Named for the "N-Number" of the business's sole asset, an aging DC3, it never filed an annual report and was subsequently closed by the State of Florida--like many other companies related to the Venice 'Magic Dutch Boys--on September 21,2001. When we ran the N number we discovered that the plane's colorful history includes long stints in exotic locales like Manuel Noriega's Panama, Costa Rica, and Fort Lauderdale, and is now resting in a military flight museum, exactly the same kind of venue from which the CIA has 'liberated' military planes in the past for use by foreign drug cartels. Known as N90079, Inc., the company was set up as a "for profit" corporation, not as a "fund-raising sponsor or non-profit" that might otherwise associate with a program to raise money to restore planes for a museum. In fact, the plane can be traced back to an infamous South Florida Customs airplane "boneyard," where "planes with checkered pasts" in a fenced storage yard... like the sister ship to the Fairchild C-123 shot down over Nicaragua in 1986 with Eugene Hasenfus aboard. Goodman has apparently allowed a certain Christian missionary organization named Missionair to use the DC3 to ferry around the Caribbean something called the "Living Water Teaching Ministry." Could the CIA be using Christian operations like Missionair, and Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing at the nearby Sarasota Airport, for cover in the Caribbean, just as Bin Laden's people use Muslim charities? It is all probably just coincidence. It is probably also just coincidence that the sister company to Magic Dutch Boy Rudi Dekkers' terrorist training school, a failed airline had in its brief lifespan just one celebrity endorser... Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. From the Sarasota Herald-Tribune: "As one of Florida's top politicians, Katherine Harris doesn't have much time to do a lot of personal traveling. So she appreciates the convenience that Florida Air offers." In the indifferently-motivated September 11th investigations so far, the one really burning question hasn't even come up. It is this: "What's been going on in Florida?" One Florida law-enforcement official involved in the probe of the Sept. 11 attacks shakes his head ruefully. "First we couldn't count votes. Now we're training terrorists." We think the state should post signs at all of its borders: "Welcome to Terror-Land." "Remain seated at all times."
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Missing Witnesses & a Massive 9-11 Cover-Up in Florida

by Daniel Hopsicker July 22Venice, FL.
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Secret Service agents guarding the President during his visit to Sarasota, FL. on Sept 11 received a pre-dawn warning that a terrorist attack on America was imminent four hours and thirty-eight minutes before Mohamed Atta flew an airliner into the World Trade Center. The warning, which proved accurate, also contained information that President George W. Bush might be a target for assassination that morning as well. And indeed there was an attempt to assassinate Pres. Bush in Sarasota on the morning of Sept. 11., the MadCowMorningNews has learned. But, perhaps because of the potentially explosive identity of the person named in the warning, authorities have, ever since, been assiduously covering it up.
Pre-dawn cold sweat? The drama began when a Middle Eastern native residing in Sarasota named Zainlabdeen Omer contacted local police the night before the attack. Omer said that a friend of his, who had made violent threats against the President in the past, had just arrived in Sarasota, thirty miles north on Florida's Gulf Coast from Venice, the home-away-from-home of Mohamed Atta's terrorist cadre. In the police report obtained by the MadCowMorningNews the man Omer is warning authorities about is identified only as "Ghandi." "Ghandi" reportedly told Omer he was in town to get a friend out of jail. But since the President was staying in Sarasota too, Omer feared that there was a connection. He told Sarasota police that "Ghandi" might be in Sarasota to kill the President. Sarasota Police immediately called in the Secret Service.
"You're not cleared for ANY of this information." When local reporters got wind of the story in the days following the attack, oddly enough the Secret Service dismissed the warning as "just coincidental" to Sept 11.
But according to the eyewitness testimony of a local fire captain, Longboat Key Fire Marshall Carroll Mooneyhan, who was at the front desk of the Colony Beach Resort that morning as President Bush prepared for his morning jog, the warning proved accurate several hours later. Mooneyhan told reporter Shay Sullivan of the Longboat Observer that at about 6 a.m. on Sept. 11 a van carrying Middle Eastern men tried to gain entry to the Colony Beach Resort, where Bush was staying. The Middle Eastern men identified themselves as a television news crew with an appointment with the President.
They claimed they had a "poolside" interview scheduled with the visit the 'Barry & the boys' President, and asked for a Secret Service agent by name, Mooneyhan said. website The van was turned back by suspicious Secret Service agents at the guard station in front of the Colony Beach Resort, who told the men to contact the Presidents public relations office in Washington D.C. But the Secret Service has not acknowledged the obvious... which is that the ruse used at the Colony Resort on Longboat Key to attempt to gain access to Pres. Bush is exactly the same as that used just two days earlier to successfully assassinate Afghan Northern Alliance leader Shah Masood. Masood had granted an interview to a television crew whose camera exploded when it was turned on, killing Masood and two suicide bombers disguised as journalists.
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Given the identical modus operandi and the massive terrorist attack which occurred just two hours later that morning, the Secret Service is no doubt lying, or at least issuing statements that will later be rendered inoperative, when they say the warning was "just a coincidence." This incident, clearly, was not a breakdown in media relations. It was an assassination attempt.
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Christian Animists Against the New World Order? Later that morning Secret Service agents searched an apartment in Sarasota looking for further corroboration of Omer's account. Inside they found and arrested three men from Sudan, and took them in for questioning that lasted for the next ten hours, according to one of the three, Fathel Rahman Omer. Next the Secret Service raided a beauty supply store in Sarasota. The owner of the store, identified only as "Hakim," had information about "Ghandi," the man who came to Sarasota on the same day as the President. Hakim identified 'Ghandi' as a member of the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army, or S.P.L.A., a Christian and animist group fighting against the fundamentalist Muslim government in Sudan, itself closely allied with the Taliban and Al Queda. Hakim's story seems to make no sense. Why would an operative battling a fanatic fundamentalist Islamic government want to murder George W. Bush? We tried to find out. But, as it happens, the key witnesses are all missing.
"Forget the money. Follow the bodies." A few days after the Secret Service questioned the owner of the beauty supply store, reported Monica Yadov of Sarasota's ABC News 40, it was suddenly closed, and the owner, Hakim, was gone. Said Greg Breslich, owner of North Trail Liquors next door, "We always thought there was something strange about the operation of that Hijacker Ahmed establishment. We saw a lot of people go in there, but didnt see Alghamdi anyone come out with beauty supplies." Where is the man who accurately warned of an assassination attempt, Zainelabdeen Omer? You'll never guess. He's missing too. After Zainelabadeen Omer went to federal authorities with his information, he quickly quit his jobs, and left his Sarasota apartment. "All I know is he cant leave town," a friend of Omers told reporter Monica Yadov. "Omer got in a lot of trouble with the law."
Hijacker Saeed Alghamdi
"So you think hes still somewhere?" Yadov asked. "Should be," shrugged Omers friend, who insisted on anonymity. "If hes still alive." When Yadov took the story to the Secret Service for comment, the Special Agent in charge of the Presidential detail in Sarasota said that the President was never in any danger while he was in Sarasota. The agent said the connection to the SPLA, and the warning that the Secret Service got just before the terrorist attack was all "just a coincidence." The Secret Service's deliberate stonewalling leads to questions about what other assistance the group may have provided to the ongoing and massive cover-up in place in Florida. Consider: It was Bush brother Jeb Bush who flew out of Sarasota aboard a C-130 loaded with files about the Venice flight schools which trained the terrorist cadre. Did the Secret Service help with this get-away project? Were they controlling access into and out of the Sarasota Airport?
Hijacker Hazma Alghamdi
"Didn't we tell you to stay away from that stuff?" Where are these missing witnesses? The Secret Service says they dont know. Is Omer being detained? The INS wont say. What's the reason for all the official silence?
the 'barry' website
The answer may lie in the identity of the mysterious "Ghandi," whose name may have been deliberately misspelled by authorities, a tactic which has previously been used by authorities to conceal inconvenient knowledge in everything from the Kennedy assassination to the Vince Foster investigation. That the man whose presence in Sarasota was obviously a part of the Sept 11th conspiracy and Presidential assassination attempt shares the same last name as a revered Indian pacifist seems more than just a little "over the top." It seems downright absurd. But it wouldn't be absurd if his real name wasn't "Ghandi'' but "AlGhamdi." It would actually make perfect sense...because if the man who threatened the life of George W. Bush in Sarasota on September 11th was named "Alghamdi," he would join three other men with the same last name who have already been identified as being part of the terrorist conspiracy. Three men named Alghamdi were among the nineteen hijackers. Curiously, all three listed on their drivers' licenses a home address at the Pensacola Naval Air Station. All three are now, presumably, very much dead. But there is yet another Alghamdi... still very much alive. And this fourth Alghamdi, authorities believe, was also involved in the Sept 11th terrorist conspiracy. And wait till you hear what we've learned about him. NEXT: MOHAMED ALGHAMDI, RAYTHEON, AND THE SAUDI ROYAL FAMILY
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by Daniel Hopsicker July 29Venice, FL.
Just three nights before President George W Bush arrived at the swank Colony Resort on Longboat Key on the evening of Sept 10, 2001, Mohamed Atta was staying at a slightly-less tony hotel just two miles down the beach, the Holiday Inn Hotel & SuitesLongboat Key, according to eyewitnesses who contacted the FBI in the immediate aftermath of the attack.
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Predictably, the story went nowhere. So too did early wire reports stating that on the day of the attack Sarasota police said the Secret Service interrogated four Sudanese men after getting a tip that the men intended to harm President Bush during his visit to the city. The incident was found to be "unrelated" to the attacks, the AP reported, and ended in the release of the men. But these stories are now being resurrected in the wake of recent reports of a possible Longboat Key assassination attempt against Bush on the morning of the terrorist attack, and they are provoking disturbing questions about how much, or how little, Americans have been told about the events surrounding the attack on their country. In an exclusive interview with the MadCowMorningNews, the bartender at Marty's Pub at the Holiday Inn, Darlene Sieverts said, "Mohamed Atta sat right on that bar stool, drinking rum and coke." "I didn't have any real interaction with him. A bartender can tell when a customer doesn't want to talk, and he didn't."
"How do you say 'I'll have what he's having?'"

"About fifteen minutes later he was joined by a second man. When I approached (the second man) and asked what he'd like to drink, he indicated that he didn't speak English, and motioned for Atta to intercede. Instead of ordering something for him, Atta asked for the bill," bartender Sieverts told us. "He left a $20 bill to cover a $4. tab."
Sieverts recollections of spotting on Longboat Key the most cold-blooded killer of the still-young 21st Centuryjust a few short days before Bush's arrivalwere confirmed to the FBI by other hotel employees, several of whom also recalled seeing Atta on another occasion, dining in the hotel's Gulfstream restaurant with a man identified by the restaurant manager and a waiter as Marwan Al-shehhi. The two both dined on the hotels featured 'Surf & Turf' buffet. The revelation of Atta's proximity to Bush, first reported in the local Longboat Observer, deepens the mystery surrounding the pre-dawn warning received by the Secret Service detail protecting the President on his Florida trip in the early morning hours on Sept 11.
Alarmingly, The Colony, which bills itself as "the nation's no. 1 tennis resort," is just two miles of mostly-deserted white sand away from the Holiday Inn Hotel frequented by Atta and Al-shehhi. Longboat Key is located just outside Sarasota, Fl., itself the home of such curious attractions as the Ringling Bros. Circus, and Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, now running for Congress, the local daughter of a citrus magnate who became internationally-famous overnight in the aftermath of the Presidential election of 2000. Bush was in Florida to promote his administration's new education bill. His first stop of the day was to be at the Emma E Booker Elementary School in Sarasotaa 25-minute drive from the Colony. "Four Sudanese men? In Sarasota?"
visit the In the warning, Zainelabdeen Omer, a Sudanese national who has since disappeared, told 'Barry & the boys' authorities of an immediate threat of a possible assassination attempt and terror attack on website
America from a friend of his, a man named "Ghandi" who had just arrived in Sarasota to bail someone out of jail.
To bring the day's chronology into focus, a little after 6am on September 11, 2001, according to an AP report, "Bush awoke in the magnificent surroundings of the Colony Beach Resort on Longboat Key, an upscale and relatively-pristine tropical island enclave located directly on the Gulf of Mexico a spindly coral island in the Gulf of Mexico, off Sarasota, Florida." "The previous evening Mr Bush had dined beachside with his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, the state that had controversially handed him the presidency. Now, on the morning of his 234th day in office, a light, warm breeze was slipping in from the ocean, and, after breakfast, Bush led his Secret Service crew on a four-mile run around the nearby Serenoa golf links."
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"On his return to the Colony, the President showered, changed into a lightweight, dark blue suit, and, still glowing from the morning's exertion, sat down for the first routine intelligence briefing of the day. It was 8am." "At the same time Atta, was fourteen hundred miles away, making his way onto American Airlines Flight 11 taking off from Boston's Logan International Airport, followed 14 minutes later from the same airport by Al-Shehhi, aboard United Airlines Flight 175."
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"No van, no warning? No problem." The AP story neglects any mention of a van filled with Middle Eastern men attempting to gain access to the President at the same time as Bush is leaving for his morning jog. And although the story was reported on the local NBC affiliate, the AP also neglects any mention of the pre-dawn warning of an attack. Instead, the AP's account of Bush briefing that morning states that "The President's briefing appears to have included some reference to the heightened terrorist risk reported throughout the summer, but contained nothing specific, severe or imminent enough to necessitate a call to Condoleezza Rice, his 47-year-old National Security Adviser. The FBI, too, seemed unimpressed.
"Nationwide the FBI has received over 200,00 such tips, stated FBI spokesman Sarah Oakes, "with more than 5000 of the tips coming into the Tampa office alone."
"Mum's the word in Florida" Unlike whistleblowers who have come forward in the FBI's Minneapolis and Phoenix offices, to name just two, agents in the Tampa FBI office have maintained their silence. So too have agents in the Sarasota FBI office.
the 'barry' website
Does their silence signal valid national security concerns? Or just embarrassment? Atta and Al-Shehhi's presence on Longboat Key just days before the President's arrival raise a number of disturbing questions. The most pressing is also the most obvious. What were terrorists doing on Longboat Key? Still, the Secret Service, no doubt very aware of Atta's suspicious presence on Longboat Key, has dismissed the pre-dawn warning they received as "just coincidence." This must mean that when, three days later, a van filled with Middle Eastern men attempted to gain entry to Bush's hotel by posing as journalists, it has nothing at all to do with "terrorist ringleader" Mohamed Atta's recent presence on Longboat Key. It is all just a coincidence. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Amanda Keller worked out call in Sarasota
previous stories August 29 A MadCowMorningNews world exclusive.
At least four months before the FBI says he first arrived in this country, terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta was living with (and physically abusing) an American girlfriend at an apartment they shared across from the Venice Airport.
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According to numerous eyewitnesses, including their next door neighbor and the apartment manager, Atta lived with a girl named Amanda Keller during March and early April of 2000, four months before the FBI says he first entered the U.S. The two shared an apartment located directly across the street from the Venice Airport at the Sandpiper Apartments, a drab two-story stucco building which was the American home of dozens of foreign pilot trainees from Huffman Aviation and the Florida Flight Training Academy, the two Dutch-owned flight schools that trained three of the four terrorist pilots. During her year-long sojourn in Venice Amanda Keller was a willowy 20-year old bleached-blond, who met Atta at a bar at the airport, the 44th Aero Squadron), was an out-call 'lingerie model' for an escort service called Fantasies & Lace in nearby Sarasota, not far from Cheetah's, a nearby strip club Atta is known to have frequented . Another 'disappeared' witness While Amanda Kellers present whereabouts are a mystery, what is clear is that the FBI has been inordinately eager to suppress the story of her and Attas dalliance so eager that agents from the Bureau have engaged in a regular and systematic pattern of intimidation of eyewitnesses to the affair. "The question they asked was always the same," says Stephanie Frederickson, who lived next door to the couple: "You arent saying anything to anybody, are you?" For six months after the Sept 11 attack, Frederickson says she received weekly visits from agents from the FBIs Sarasota office.
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"At first, right after the attack, they told me I must have been mistaken in my identification. Or they would insinuate that I was lying. Finally they stopped trying to get me to change my story, and just stopped by once a week to make sure I hadnt been talking to anyone. Who was I going to tell?" She shrugs. "Most everyone around here already knew."
"All the news that's ripped from print." Curiously, Frederickson says that a New York Times reporter to whom she told the story also accused her of making it up, and urged her to stop talking about it. What makes this especially strange is that the N.Y. Times reporter need only have read early wire service reports in the days after the attack to learn that the story about Attas American girlfriend had already been confirmed by numerous witnesses, even including Amanda Keller herself as well as her mother and the apartment managers where the duo co-habitated.
"Charles Grapentine, the manager of Sandpiper Apartments on Airport Avenue in Venice, said he remembers seeing Atta at the complex for about three weeks in April," read a Sept 15 AP story. " He said Atta was living in the apartment of Amanda Keller." "In a telephone interview late Friday, Keller said she met Atta through a friend and let him stay in the apartment with her and her then-boyfriend, Garrett Metts, because she felt sorry for him. She said authorities told her not to say anything at all about Atta," the story continued. "I can't really discuss anything," she said. "I'm afraid I'll get in trouble." "Real Americans won't be silenced."
visit the 'Barry & the boys' Now the duo's next-door neighbor, a 50-year old housewife named website Stephanie Frederickson, has stepped forward to testify about the affair, as
well as the FBI harassment that hasso far been successful in preventing the story from surfacing. "Amanda moved in next door first, saying she had come from Orange Park (near Jacksonville," Frederickson says. "Then one day in the middle of March (of 2000) she brought home Atta. Id like you to meet my friend Mohamed Atta, she said to me. Hes from France." "Later when I saw her alone I asked her if she realized that Mohamed Atta wasnt really a French name, and he was definitely not French. She looked at me like I was nuts. I didnt know if she really believed he was French or not, but it was clear to me that he wasn't."
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The relationship was troubled. While Atta's cheesy taste for infidel flesh is well-known, he apparently balked at sharing it with others.
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Blows Against the Empire? "There were a couple of time he beat her up that I know about," Frederickson says, "mostly over the slutty way she dressed to go to meet her escort service clients. Her hair was always done up in a half dozen funky colors and she always dressedwell, like a hooker." Frederickson said that Fantasies & Lace would send a car and driver to get Keller. "And I would hear the driver and Atta arguing out on the balcony. Atta didnt want her to leave." "The third time he beat her up she put him out," states Frederickson. "She threw his two suitcases, and a blue Golds gym bag which he always carried around with him, over the balcony railing onto the driveway in front of the apartments and called a cab to come get him." Frederickson was glad to see Atta leave. "He was a really nasty guy," she says. "He had no patience, and seemed mad at the world. One day I remember, it was raining out, and I left the apartment house at the same time he was leaving. He didnt have a car then, so I offered him a ride."
"He got furious at me. You do not speak to me unless I speak to you first!" he shouted. "Hey bub, youre in America,' I told him. "American women are bitches, he told me. I told him the least he could do was thank me for offering him a ride." What was the attraction between Atta and Amanda Keller?
the 'barry' website
"Atta and his crew were always flush with lots and lots of money," she says. "These guys were really party animals." Although they may have been well off, their living accommodations didnt reflect it. "I lived next door to Amanda and Atta on the second floor, but then moved downstairs to my fathers apartment to help him, because he had had surgery and couldnt climb stairs any longer," says Frederickson. "So Attas pals took my old apartment. One time I stuck my head in, and there were at least eight of them living in a small two-bedroom place, with sleeping bags spread out everywhere."
Paging the National Enquirer Our week-long search for Amanda Keller has failed to locate her current whereabouts. And its raised more questions than it's answered. Questions like: Why are you reading about it first in the MadCowMorningNews? A girl who makes her living as a "lingerie model," like Keller, certainly could use the couple hundred thousand the tabloids would seem eager to pay to run a story titled "Terrorist's Girlfriend Bares All!" So why hasn't she? Is something preventing her? Is she even still alive? Last Sundays Associated Press headline about the approaching 1-year anniversary of the 9/11 attack read: "A year later, the 19 hijackers are still a tangle of mystery and contradiction." Maybe now we're learning why.
NEXT: THE COMPANY HE KEPT: ATTILA THE HUN, SID, & SARAH THE PHARMACIST.
A Federal history going back to WW2.

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Questions on the 1-year anniversary of a still-unsolved crime

by Daniel Hopsicker September 9 Venice. click here
Two stories currently unfolding in Venice FL offer glimpses behind the curtain veiling the terrorist conspiracy's activities before the Sept 11 attack... Arne Kruithof, one of the two Magic Dutch Boys at the Venice FL Airport, may have previously-undisclosed links to Zacharias Moussaoui, charged by the United States government as an accomplice with Osama bin Laden and the 19 hijackers in the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings.
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Kruithof was grilled for two days last week at the Sarasota FL court house about his connections to Moussaoui by a Justice Dept. Asst. Attorney General and top-level officials from the FBI, the MadCowMorningNews has learned. The group was in town taking depositions from potential witnesses in Moussaoui's upcoming trial. Kruithof is the owner of the Venice flight school which trained Siad Al-Jarrah, at the controls of the plane which went down in western Pennsylvania. Less well-known is the fact his school also trained Ramzi Binalshibh, who lived at the same Hamburg address as Atta and who is currently the most wanted Hamburg cadre member.
But authorities have not hinted previously that Kruithof's contacts with terrorists may have included dealings with Moussaoui, the alleged "20th hijacker." More to come.
Present whereabouts (still) a mystery

On another front, we have so far learned very little more more about Mohamed Attas American girlfriend. Amanda Keller and Mohamed Atta, you will recall, lived together in her Venice apartment during March and early April of 2000, fully four months before the FBI says Atta first entered the U.S. For her part, Ms Keller has spoken barely a dozen words to the press. Authorities told her not to say anything at all about Atta, she told reporters in her one quote... "I can't really discuss anything," she said. "I'm afraid I'll get in trouble."
A lot can happen in two years Its been two years since hundreds of Arab student pilots practiced take-offs and landings, in squadrons of as many as sixteen aloft at a time, on the runways of the Venice FL Airport.
In some ways nothing has changed. The airport's two 6000-foot runways still point out over the vast and sparkling Gulf of Mexico. There is still no tower, no radar, and no one to check in with. Some people seem to find that an irresistibly-attractive set of circumstances. It has been reported that terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta lived in Venice for more than six months, from June-December 2000. What is being kept secret is that Mohamed Atta was also in Venice during two of the last three weeks of his life. Visiting persons unknown... For reasons unknown... On some of his last days on Earth.
visit the 'Barry & the boys' Three days after September 11 it briefly surfaced in the news that three of website
This has been reported nowhere except the MadCowMorningNews. (Now you know how we got our name.) the four terrorist pilots from Hamburg, Germany had moved from there to tiny Venice FL. The question that has never been answered is why. Venice FL is a retirement community, its got the second-oldest population in the entire United States, and absolutely nothing to recommend it to young men. They roll up the sidewalks at sunset. Local restaurant traffic peaks a half-hour before the end of the early-bird special.
An operation hiding in plain sight

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Yet large numbers of Middle Eastern men were enrolled as students at flight schools here, which were operated by people reeking with shady and clandestine connections. And all within spitting distance of communities of 'retired' CIA agents. A row of aluminum hangars runs along the street side of the airport. The ownership of those hangers is, even now, quietly changing hands. Rudi Dekker's Huffman Aviation anchors one end. Rumor around the airport is that he'll be gone in 60 days. Then comes Florida Air (now Triple Diamond), then Arne Kruithof's Florida Flight Training Center. Aviations observers say Kruithof has been told to cooperate or his papers may be revoked. Arne, too, may now have outlasted his usefulness. Then there is a specialty plane repair shop, and at the other end of the airport a hangar where Florida Air used to keep its Jetstreams. Dozens of the pilot trainees at the two Dutch-owned flight schools in Venice are today suspected of being terrorists. The schools were training a hundred Arab student pilots for every Mideast job opening.
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What went on here does not exactly, at this time, make any kind of sense. And now it's been a whole year since we watched the unimaginable made manifest right before us. In its Aug 30 9/11 recap story the New York Times says, "The Federal Bureau of Investigation believes that Mr. Atta was the pilot of one of the planes that struck the World Trade Center, and Mr. Shehhi is believed to have flown the other one. Mr. Jarrah is presumed to have been the pilot of the aircraft that crashed in Pennsylvania (italics ours.) Considering we lost 3000 people, that's pretty weak tea. Some might even consider it a betrayal. Why haven't we done better?
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A new voice for Florida's Terror Coast
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FBI Bungles Terrorist Atta's Timeline By At Least Three Months

by Daniel Hopsicker September18 Venice FL click here
Sometime in the middle of March of the year 2000 Amanda Keller rented an apartment at the Sandpiper Apartments across the street from the Venice Airport, according to credible eyewitnesses. Two weeks later terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta moved in with her, beginning a bumpy relationship which came to a stormy end six weeks later with Amanda dumping his two suitcases and one gym bag from her second floor balcony down onto the building's asphalt parking lot, say eyewitnesses, where Atta stood waiting for a cab to take him away. (see 'Key Witness 'Disappears' in Venice FL') This squalid little domestic spat would be of no more importance than a bad episode of "Cops" except for this: As the MadCowMorningNews has been reporting exclusively (see 'One Year Later, the Cover-Up Continues') this brief romance or assignation between 'terrorist ringleader' Atta and 'out-call lingerie model' Keller took place a full three months before the FBI says Atta first arrived in the U.S.
Since there's justice for 3000 dead people to consider, the question must be asked: is this just another example of sloppy investigative technique by the much-maligned FBI? Or is there, instead, some hidden can of worms here that federal officials don't want opened?
"What's the Wahabbi take on girls with pink hair?" In either case, the discrepancies and gaps in the FBI's account of 'Islamic fundamentalist' Atta's U.S. timeline encourage speculation on whether there is something suspicious and unexplored in the fact that Mohamed Atta showed up at her apartment just two weeks after Amanda Keller moved in. "She (Amanda) had only been here for a short time before he showed up, just a couple of weeks," says the couple's neighbor, Stephanie Frederickson, to which apartment manager Charles Grapentine concurs. "She told us she met him at the bar at the 44th Aero," states Frederickson. "They were remodeling and the 44th Aero wasn't open yet, but the bar was still doing business." "That's when she started dressing really slutty, and dyeing her hair pink," Frederickson continues. The image of Mohamed Atta as "Islamic fundamentalist" has been taking a continuous beating (see 'Says Waitress of Terror Pilots: "I Thought They Were Mafia!" from people we met in Florida who had crossed paths with him, many of whom made him sound more like a character out of HBO's "The Soprano's" than an "Islamic fundamentalist." If 'Islamic fundamentalists' ever shack up with women with hot pink hair, we haven't heard much about it. Then, too, Atta also liked to flash a roll, we learned, like any 'made guy' from New Jersey. "Atta carried a fanny pack around his waist, says Charles Grapentine. "I remember Amanda once telling him she needed some new clothes, and he reached in and peeled off a few hundreds from a thick roll of cash he had stuffed inside the fanny pack."
Mum's (still) the word in Venice Florida The FBI, which still insists Atta didn't arrive in the U.S. until June, did not warm to apartment manager Charles Grapentine's earlier recollection of his presence. And they were especially frosty on the subject of his talking to reporters... "They called me a liar, and told me to keep my mouth shut," states the ex-marine grimly. "Nobody likes to hear that: that they didn't see visit the 'Barry & the boys' something they know they saw."
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Grapentine's account of Atta's presence is confirmed by the couple who lived next door, who also received 'friendly' warnings from the FBI, as we have previously reported, about the advisability of maintaining a low media profile. "Atta was a nasty guy, very rude," says housewife Stephanie Frederickson. "When I said 'hello' to him on the stairs one time, he said to me, "You do not speak to me unless I speak to you first!" "I said get over yourself, bub," says Frederickson. "You're in America now." Since early April we have been reporting growing evidence indicating that there are big problems with the FBIs account of Mohamed Attas terrorist cadres stay in this country, in everything from when the FBI says Atta first arrived in the U.S. to where Atta and the inner cadre spent the final days before the attack. According to the FBI Atta first arrived in the U.S. (in Newark) on June 3, 2000. As we have seen this is not quite correct. Mohamed Atta came to America months (at least) before the FBI says he did. And now comes independent confirmation of this huge scoop, from an unexpected source: an official with the US Government itself. In an interview with Brian Ross of ABC NEWS, an official of the U.S. Department of Agriculture who had dealings with Mohamed Atta may have inadvertently let the cat out of the bag for good about Atta's presence in the U.S. during the Spring of 2000.
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"That's A-T-T-A... like in 'Atta boy.'" Johnelle Bryant, a Dept of Agriculture loan officer, said (transcript here) that Mohamed Atta applied for a USDA loan to buy a crop duster, "between the end of April and the third week of May of 2000." But as we've seen the FBI says Atta didn't arrive in America until June 3. And the Farm Services Administration loan officer is unlikely to have misstated the date: she told Ross she took notes from the moment Atta came in to her office and gave her his name. "He called himself "Mohamed Atta," loan officer Bryant told Ross. "And I was taking notes. We typically take notes of what's considered an initial applicant interview. And while taking notes, I wrote his name down. And I spelled it A-T-T-A-H, and he told me, "No, A-T-T-A, as in 'Atta boy!'" ABC's Ross, focused on the "face to face with the terrorist ringleader!" angle, missed the revelation.
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"Welcome to the Island of Lost Witnesses" Since her ABC interview USDA official Johnelle Bryant has been transferred within the Agriculture Department to an undisclosed location, where, according to one government source, "she is most assuredly not talking with reporters anymore." Apparently Ms Bryant spoke a little out of turn, and has been whisked away to an idyllic hideaway shielded from the media, a place which I have begun to think of as "The Island of Lost Witnesses." There she may be frolicking in the surf even now, alongside other Lost 9/11 Witnesses, unfortunate souls all, who through no fault of their own saw things that they shouldn't have seen and now possess inconvenient knowledge and information for which they were never properly cleared. Like Atta's former squeeze Amanda Keller, currently missing, or the manager and bartender of the Ft Lauderdale bar where Atta got drunk three nights before the attack, also missing, or... The point is, the list is, slowly but steadily, growing. The truly amazing thing about what loan officer Johnelle Bryant had to say about Mohamed Atta's presence in this country in the Spring of 2000 is that her testimony has been confirmed by numerous other credible sources. So if Mohamed Atta was, demonstrably, in the U.S. at least three months or so before the FBI says he first arrived, why don't they just quietly change their timeline? Why dissemble over a couple of months? We admit we haven't a clue. But at least after the Kennedy Assassination sources were in agreement about when Lee Harvey Oswald had been in New Orleans, and when he'd been in Dallas. Despite our wondrous communications technology, this sort of truth seems to have become, forty years on, an ever-more elusive quality.
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Terrorist ringleader introduced girls to two "German friends"

by Daniel Hopsicker September 27 Venice FL click here
Mohamed Atta footed the bill for himself and two young American girls on what an associate of the two girls later described as a non-stop 3-day drug-and booze-filled romp in Key West in February of 2001, the MadCowMorningNews has learned.
The story emerged with the news that Attas American girlfriend Amanda Keller, in addition to accompanying him to Key West, had also during that same month rented a safe house for him for a short time in Mohamed Atta & nearby North Port FL.
the 'Venice Flying Circus'
"He didn't even care if the house had a bed, all he wanted was a desk," landlord Tony Laconia told local reporters. On the day after the Sept 11 attack, FBI agents began combing the town of North Port just south of Venice looking for local residents Tony and Vonnie Laconca, who had rented a home to Mohamed Atta and Amanda Keller, they had discovered, in February of 2001. Landlord Anthony Laconca told the FBI that Keller had dishwater-blond hair, was big-boned and freckled, and seemed to be very "enamored of Mohamed," according to a report in the local Sun-Herald newspaper containing never-before publicized details illuminating the terrorist conspiracy's stay in Florida. After renting to the pair, the Laconcas later learned that a young female friend of Amanda's, a then-employee of Vonnie Laconca's cleaning firm, went with Atta and Amanda to Key West for a wild drug-and-booze-fueled party. "They were gone for three days," Tony Laconca told local reporters. "They didn't sleep. It was a continuous party."
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"'The boss' writes all the checks." Laconca said Mohamed footed the entire bill, including alcohol, drugs, hotel, and buying new clothes for Keller and the unnamed female cleaning company employee.
Then Tony Laconca made an even-more amazing disclosure... "While in Key West Atta introduced the girls to two men from Germany that they said were Mohamed's friends," he stated. "I thought it was strange at the time, because Mohamed didn't appear to be German." Even more incredibly, Tony Laconca's then-wife Vonnie told authorities that she had learned that her former cleaning company employee got a phone call from Atta during the week before the Sept.11 attack. Where are Amanda Keller and her unnamed friend today? Why haven't they come forward with their story to either inform the American public of what they know, or simply to cash in? Who were the two German men with Mohamed Atta in Key West? It strains credulity that Atta would have "accidentally" bumped into German friends in tiny and remote Key West. "Anything we have to say we say on CNN."
visit the 'Barry & the boys' But the FBI in Tampa would neither confirm nor deny that agents were website
The Sun-Herald reporter probably then asked some of the questions we would like to ask. even interviewing people in North Port.
In an incredible statement by an FBI spokesperson identified only as "Pam," which exemplifies the total blackout on critical information which has prevailed from that day to this, Sun-Herald reporter Elaine Allen-Emrich was told, "We recommend that you check in with CNN for current information. Any press statements can be found on televised stations like CNN." The discovery that Amanda Keller had a year-long ("enamored of Mohamed") relationship with the terrorist ringleader makes the willowy 22-year old lingerie model a potentially important witness in the upcoming independent investigation into the terrorist conspiracy which led to the Sept 11 attack. Too bad she's missing. video clips from
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"The Boss' writes all the checks: Pt 2." It is clear that Keller, who settled into her new Venice apartment just two weeks before Atta moved in with her, for what neighbors said was a very stormy six-week stay, had a back-stage pass to the activities of the terrorist conspiracy, and a behind-the-scenes view of the terrorist ringleader known to the other cadre principals as "the boss" from the time he first hit the ground in Venice, in March of 2000, three months before the FBIs chronology has him entering the U.S., to, at least, February 2001, almost a year later. When Amanda rented their property in North Port, the Laconcas told authorities, she said she would translate for Mohamed, who spoke limited English. Keller also told them she would be responsible for the rental, but it was Atta who wrote the check, and when Atta returned alone several weeks later to pick up his security deposit the couple was surprised to discover that his English was excellent. Keller was arrested on a minor bad check charge a few weeks later, and Atta returned the favor by bailing her out of Sarasotas South County Jail. Interestingly, the Laconcas told authorities that Amanda Keller told them Atta was French-Canadian. This echoes what we have already heard, from Keller's next-door neighbor at the Sandpiper apartments, who stated she listened in amazement as Keller introduced Atta to her as being "from France."
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Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. The discovery of Amanda Kellers arrest and mug shot also quickly led us to conclude that we had earlier been in error in reporting that Attas girlfriend Amanda Keller was the same Amanda Keller who was also known to be a member in Clearwater, FL of the Sea Org of the Church of Scientology. A comparison of the Amanda Keller in the Florida mug shot with the picture available on the Internet of the Amanda Keller who belonged to the "Sea Org," shows clearly that they are not the same person. The Amanda Keller we are looking forAtta's squeezeis another Amanda Keller. Put another way, the Amanda Keller who consorted with Mohamed Atta in Floridathe girl in the mug shot taken at the Sarasota County Jailis definitely not the Amanda Keller who belongs to Scientology's Sea Org. We sincerely regret the mistaken identification and apologize to Ms. Keller as well as to the Church of Scientologys Sea Org. (see Correction and Apology) (Click here to see mug shot of Attas girlfriend alongside a photo of the "Sea Org" Amanda Keller.) "Tell us more about your two German friends in Key West," we would love to be able to ask Mohamed Atta today, while simultaneously shining a bright light into his eyes. Failing that, we would like to ask the same question of FBI Director Robert Mueller, while if at all possible shining a bright light into his eyes as well. Sadly, however, we have all already heard the only answer our Government has so far been willing to give: "Nothing to see here. Move along."
Keeping the lid on Florida's Terror Coast
What they're hiding down in Venice, Florida

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"First we couldn't count votes. Now we're training terrorists." Florida law-enforcement official involved in 9/11 probe.
by Daniel Hopsicker October 9world exclusive
The airfield where Mohamed Atta and his terrorist cadre learned to fly has a long history of being used as a training base for paramilitary operations by federal authorities, the MadCowMorningNews has learned exclusively. The Venice Airport, now notorious for two Dutch-owned flight schools which trained three of the four terrorist pilots in the Sept. 11 attack, has been utilized in covert U.S. operations since the earliest days of the Cold War, according to a top local law enforcement official. "Venice was even targeted by the Soviet Union in the event of nuclear war, because of the military nature of certain activities taking place at the Airport," the official said. During the Vietnam War pilots were trained in Venice for the paramilitary operations of CIA-proprietary Air America, stated the official. So too were bush pilots, a decade-and-a-half later, during the conflicts in Central and South America during the Iran-Contra era. The federal activity continues to this day. "It's not unusual to see a military Blackhawk helicopter touch down at the Venice Airport in the middle of the night," stated the official, who requested anonymity, "and then take off again thirty seconds later, after dropping off its cargo or passengers." "Or you look up and all of a sudden there's 5000 soldiers from the 101st Airborne landing and taking off. Strange things have been going on out there for a long time." What they're hiding down in Venice, Florida is that Mohamed Atta came to be there at the behest of the people responsible for these operations. "Spooks, Saudis, Raytheon... and Venice" Since most of the hijackers used Florida as their home base while they were in this country, and since 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, a big part of the story of the visit the 'Barry & the boys' terrorist conspiracy that attacked America is, perforce, a story about "Saudis in website Florida." And the company's name that kept coming up again and again in connection with stories of Saudis in Florida is that of major U.S. defense contractor Raytheon.
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As recently as July, for example, Raytheon and the U.S. Air Force tested a new air to air missile at the Venice Airport, designed to help create a ground-based air defense system for Homeland Defense, as well as at Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City, Florida. We had already heard a curious story about Raytheon and Tyndall AFB, after a former resident of the Florida Panhandle alerted us to a curious visit that took place there in April of 1999, when Raytheon sponsored a delegation of seven Saudi defense officials, led by Saudi Prince Turki bin Bandar, to Tyndall AFB. "The Prince told me they were at Tyndall to get a helicopter repaired that President Roosevelt had given his father, who had been the Saudi king during World War II," stated hotel proprietor Peggy Wood. "When the delegation first arrived, they asked to speak to whoever was in charge, and they wouldn't believe me when I told them that I was," Wood recalls. "'Women don't run businesses,' they told me." A Saudi delegation led by a Saudi Prince had indeed spent several weeks at Tyndall AFB, we confirmed with the owner of the Driftwood Inn in nearby Mexico Beach, where they stayed. And one of the members of the delegation staying at her beachside inn, Peggy Wood told us, was a Major Mohammed Al-Ghamdi. Shortly after the 9/11 attack a man with that same name was taken into custody in Miami by the FBI. The Al-Ghamdi's of Saudi Arabia Is the Mohammed al-Ghamdi suspected of taking part in the 9/11 plot the same man who visited Tyndall AFB with Saudi Royalty Turki bin Bandar? "Good luck finding out," said one local source. "They don't want facts like the Saudi-Al-Qaeda connection made known, or that companies like Raytheon have been playing both sides of the fence." "I took a friend of mine from Finland over to Tyndall AFB one time," the source continued. "We both flew the F15 simulator. How many Saudi's do you reckon got flying time on that simulator over the years? Anyone who is a guest at Tyndall even foreigners can go in and fly the jet simulator's. Our national security has been a joke for the last few years." The "Al-Ghamdi" name is prominent in the terrorist conspiracy. Three of the 19 hijackers were named Al-Ghamdi. Moreover two of those three Al-Ghamdi's listed the Pensacola Naval Air Station, known as the "Cradle of U.S. Navy Aviation," as their home address on their driver's licenses, reported NEWSWEEK In a never-retracted story last Sept 15, 2001, which nonetheless died an immediate death, NEWSWEEK reported, "The three foreign nationals training in Pensacola appear to be Saeed Alghamdi and Ahmad Alnami, who were among the four men who allegedly commandeered United Airlines Flight 93. That flight crashed into rural Pennsylvania. The third man who may have trained in Pensacola, Ahmed Alghamdi, allegedly helped highjack United Airlines." A former Navy pilot told NEWSWEEK that during his years on the base, "we always, always, always trained other countries pilots. When I was there two decades ago, it was Iranians. The shah was in power. Whoever the country du jour is, thats whose pilots we train." Saeed Alghamdi had also, stated NEWSWEEK, attended the Defense Language Institute at Presidio of Monterrey in California. So the Al-Ghamdi family is apparently very well connected, in the U.S. as well as in Saudi Arabia. And it turns out there is a fifth Al-Ghamdi associated with the September 11th attack on America. In the most-aired Osama video, where he salaams a crippled Sheikh, the crippled Sheikh's name is Sheikh Al-Ghamdi. "There's an elephant in the living room. Ignore it." Just who are all these Al-Ghamdi's? The name belongs, we learned, to one of the most important and influential tribes in Saudi Arabia. According to the Washington Post's Sept 11th anniversary recap, after the Hamburg cadre left Germany to train in Bin Laden's Afghanistan terror camps in 1999 "the first place in Afghanistan that the new arrivals were taken was a guesthouse in Kandahar, called the Al-Ghumad House, after the Saudi Al-Ghamdi tribe." At least four other men named Al-Ghamdi have shown up on records at Huffman Aviation, the flight school in Florida where Alghamdi was said by the FBI to have trained, the Post reported. Rudi Dekker's Huffman Aviation trained more than two hundred potential terrorist pilots with the surname Alghamdi, stated the article.
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Hundreds of former flight students who took lessons in Venice are now under scrutiny by federal authorities, one investigator told us. All of which brings up one crucial question which no one in authority has been willing to even address, let alone answer: "Whose idea was it to train thousands of young Arab men to learn to fly?"
Sarasota County is Jeb Country.

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They didn't go just anywhere to learn to fly. They came, most of them, to Florida. The two Venice 'Magic Dutch Boys' have been walking, as it turns out, a familiar path... The Venice Airport was built by the U.S. government in the early 1940s as a flight training facility during World War II. Since then the Feds have had not just a significant but predominant role at the airport, according to some local officials. Venice Florida is an otherwise unexceptional retirement community sandwiched on Floridas Gulf Coast between the well-heeled resort (and Bush family retreat) of Boca Grande and Sarasota, home of local girl-making-good Katherine Harris. Lessons that emerged from the Cocaine Scandals in Mena Arkansas during Bill Clinton's term included the no-brainer notion that if you wanted to be able to act with impunity and, say, get away with murder, having the state's coroner in your hip pocket was clearly a good place to start. In Sarasota County, where Venice is located, Republicans occupy 41 of the 42 elected offices. According to local law enforcement who loaded the records from Huffman Aviation and Florida Flight Training Center aboard a C130 at Sarasota International Airport the day after September 11th, when it flew out Jeb Bush was aboard. The accumulating evidence in Venice of official and so-far unacknowledged complicity in the presence in the U.S. of Mohamed Atta and his terrorist cadre is a far more important issue than the proposed focus for the upcoming independent 9/11 investigation: "blunders and missed signals" by the CIA and FBI. One person in Venice seems particularly unconcerned. Said Rudi Dekkers recently, about his sudden notoriety: "At the beginning, it was bad. We had some death threats. Now, basically, all we hear is good news. People come up and say, 'Aren't you the guy who owns Huffman Aviation?' And they shake hands with me." Lily Tomlin said it best. "No matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up."
Daniel Hopsicker is the author of Barry & 'the boys: The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History. email the author TheMadCowMorningNews is under attack. We're being sued (currently) for 'slander & libel' in a frivolous lawsuit...in Texas courts, which has successfully kept "Barry & 'they boys' out of bookstores. Please donate anything you can to A Free Press Would Be A Good Idea For America Fund.
"A Lear Too Far"
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by Daniel Hopsicker October 24world exclusive
A Learjet belonging to the true owner of the Venice flight school that trained both terrorist pilots who flew into the World Trade Center was seized with more than 30 pounds of heroin onboard by Federal Agents in July of 2000 at the Orlando Executive Airport.
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Authorities at the time called it the biggest seizure of heroin ever found in central Florida. The seized plane belonged to 70-year old Wallace J. Hilliard of Naples, FL., multi-millionaire businessman, self-styled Mormon Bishop, and the see newly-discovered secret owner of Huffman Aviation at the Venice Airport since its 'Mohamed Atta purchase in 1999, just months before terrorists began arriving in force in Southwest & the 'Venice Flying Circus' Florida. Hilliard was already well-known in aviation circles as the 'money man' and deep-pocketed financial backer of Rudi Dekkers, according to local aviation observers like chief flight instructor Tom Hammersly, who taught at the Venice Airport while the two flight schools there experienced a flood of Arab student pilots. "What we heard was that he (Dekkers) had somebody in Naples backing him financially. We all knew that the money he (Dekkers) flaunted was not even his money, that he was just a 'front' man for the man who had the money," stated Hammersly in an interview in "Mohamed Atta & the Venice Flying Circus."
Though in his many media appearances Rudi Dekkers portrayed himself as both president and owner of Huffman Aviation, this claim, like so many other Dekkers pronouncements, is untrue. Lying on and off-the-record Court documents filed in August at the Sarasota Courthouse reveal that the so-called 'Magic Dutch Boy' never completed the Huffman sale, neglecting to pay for his shares of stock in the resulting corporation.
While terrorist student pilots flew in veritable squadrons (as many as sixteen at a time) over Venice, Wally Hilliard had been Huffman Aviation's true owner. Nor is this the first time Rudi Dekkers has neglected to pay for shares in business ventures. In 1995 in The Netherlands, the MadCowMorningNews has learned, Dekkers incorporated a company and never paid for his shares of stock in it either. A Dutch court adjudged Dekkers guilty in that case of acting "in a manifestly improper fashion," and said that "his manifest failure to properly manage the company was an important cause of (the firm's) bankruptcy." As a result, Rudi Dekkers, a man who was invited to testify before the Congress of the United States of America on his thoughts on preventing future terrorist attacks, is today a fugitive from justice in his native Holland. fly, from his base in Naples, just a short helicopter ride south of Venice, his partner Wally Hilliard was running a charter jet service called Plane 1 Leasing which provided the jet carrying 30 pounds of heroin. "Celebrity Endorsement as Double-Edged Sword" At the same time their planes were flying back and forth from Venezuela with illegal cargo Hilliard's charter service was also, unbelievably, being utilized at virtually no costdespite the fact that rentals for Lear jets can run as high as $1,800 an hourby Florida Governor Jeb Bush.
visit the 'Barry & the boys' And while Rudi Dekkers busied himself training thousands of young Arab men to website
Even stranger, both Governor Jeb Bush and Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris were providing celebrity endorsements to Hilliard's operation well after the company's Lear (N351WB) had been busted by DEA agents armed with machine guns. Pretty poor advance work, at the very least...
One would think a sitting Governor seems well-advised to steer well clear of anything to do with heroin trafficking. Yet Governor Jeb Bush honored Hilliard's operationcalled at various times Florida Air, Sunrise Airlines and Discover Airwith a personal visit, even posing for photos with the "Discover Air family." The company promptly commemorated the memorable event by posting pictures of the visit on their website. Finally somebody in the Bush camp realized their lethal potential exposure, and the webpage was hastily taken off the Discover Air site. Getting Google-ed But they didn't reckon with Google's heralded cache system. So today you can see the page in all its former glory. Alas for Discover Air, soon after beginning operations they were forced to see their shortcomings in headlines, like this June 28, 2001 doozy from the hometown Orlando Sentinel: AIR SERVICE TO MIAMI FLOPS; NOT ONE PERSON BOUGHT A TICKET, SO DISCOVER AIR HALTED PLANS FOR FLIGHTS FROM DAYTONA BEACH. Having "not one person buy a ticket" would seem to be hugely embarrassing to a fledgling airline... if scheduled passenger service was the true aim of the Enterprise. Katherine Harris' endorsement of the Hilliard/Dekkers operation must also be providing her with some bad moments today: "As one of Florida's top politicians, Katherine Harris doesn't have much time to do a lot of personal traveling," read the Sarasota Herald Tribune's chatty lead. "But twice in the past month or so, the secretary of state --who received national attention for her role in the November presidential election -- has taken the 75-minute plane ride from her current home in Tallahassee to her old stomping grounds in Sarasota. Her choice of airline? Florida Air, a start-up commuter airline based here, grasping to be an air-taxi for the entire state." 'She has taken the airline twice,' Harris spokesman Ben McKay said. 'She appreciates the convenience that Florida Air offers.'" Since at the same time then-Florida Secretary of State Harris was "appreciating their convenience" Florida/Discover Air had been flying passengers without holding an air carrier certificate, Ms. Harris' reputation as a stickler for the letter of the law can be said to have suffered something of a beating. Is it just incredible bad luck that these two prominent Florida politicians endorsed an operation that both trained murderous terrorists AND brought heroin into America? Criminal Conspiracies & Florida: Like Cookies and Milk Heroin overdoses kill more people in Orlando each year than anywhere else in Florida. The city's growing importance as a major transshipment point for heroin prompted Congress to officially designate Central Florida a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. Thus the investigation which resulted in the big seizure was launched with some intensity after a Colombian national, Nassar Darwich, was arrested in Orlando with 1.3 kilograms of heroin in the soles of shoes he was carrying.
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As a result of Darwich's arrest, DEA agents were waiting two weeks later when the Learjet landed at the airport on July 25, and swarmed the plane brandishing machine guns, according to eyewitnesses. Passengers Edgar Valles and Neyra Rivas, both of Caracas, Venezuela, were arrested after 13 kilograms of heroin was found hidden in the soles of tennis shoes stashed in their luggage. The pilot was not arrested, according to a DEA spokesman, because of a lack of evidence. The flight plan of the Lear 35A originated in Venezuela and made a stop in Fort Lauderdale before landing in Orlando, with New York as its final destination. Eventually five people in Orlando were convicted in connection with the seizure, including two Venezuelans who were traveling aboard the jet when it landed at Orlando's Executive Airport, according to the Orlando Sentinel. "It confirms the sad fact that a massive amount of heroin is coming through Central Florida," U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration special agent Brent Eaton told the paper when the arrests were announced. "It's very disturbing to the DEA that more and more high-quality heroin is coming from Colombia and at a cheaper price." Apparently the DEA was "very disturbed" enough to look more closely at Hilliard's jet charter operation. The result was their firm opposition to returning the plane to Hilliard. And although no one from Plane 1 Leasing was charged with any crime, there appears to be abundant evidence pointing to the conclusion thatat the very leastthe company had to have known what was going on. "It was just blatant," said one aviation observer. "That same plane flew that same run thirty or forty times, ferrying the same people. And they always paid cash for the rental." "The red flags could not have been raised any higher." The plane's frequent roundtrips to South America were confirmed by an official at Executive Jet Service, the facility which serviced the jet at Orlando Executive Airport, who stated the plane made weekly down-and-back runs to Venezuela. This isn't Watergate. It's bigger. Three weeks after his jet was impounded by the DEA, Hilliard asked for it back in a motion filed in the U.S. District Court in Orlando, arguing that he was an 'innocent owner' unwittingly duped by a known individual. "Plane 1 and its officers shareholders and directors were not aware of the identity of the passengers utilizing the Lear 35A on this trip other than Mr. Valles," stated Hilliard's motion, and were "unaware that the individuals chartering the plane were engaging in criminal conduct," as well as being "not aware of any facts from which they should have been aware that individuals leasing the plane were engaging in criminal conduct." The U.S. Attorney's office opposed the plane's return, "because the property was used or acquired as a result of a violation of the Controlled Substances Act. In a hearing on November 3, 2000 Federal Magistrate Judge James Glazebrook denied Hilliard's motion to get his Lear back. "Wally took a big hit on that one," stated one aviation observer at the Naples Airport. "The DEA was not going to let him have that plane back." "The DEA was planning on adding it to their Border Patrol fleet," confirmed a spokesman for the Lear jet's current owner. East Coast Jets of Allentown, PA. bought the plane, they told us, after the insurance company which had insured it for the lender against seizure successfully wrenched it back from the DEA after Hilliard had been removed from the picture. Wally Hilliard's central role in the purchase and operation of the flight school that was a magnet for Mohamed Atta and the Hamburg cadre requires raising some serious questions about his charter jet company's possible involvement in heroin trafficking... Especially since the chief product for export of Osama Bin Laden's terrorist organization was also, strangely enough, heroin. Perhaps this is all just coincidence. But one has to wonder: will these questions ever be asked in a proper forum? Is there even a pretense of democracy in America anymore? Testifying in the wake of the 9/11 attack before the Senate Banking Committee about terrorist connections in money laundering, Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff said: "Frankly, we can't differentiate between terrorism and organized crime and drug dealing. These groups don't hold themselves independently: they work with one another. Terrorists get engaged in drug activity. They have relationships with organized crime." Too true, dude. Too true.
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Daniel Hopsicker is the author of Barry & 'the boys: The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History. email the author You can say "A Free Press Would Be A Good Idea" with a donation to keep the MadCowMorningNews alive.
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Death in Venice (Florida) : Flight School Owner Has Shady Ties

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Death in Venice (Florida) : Flight School Owner Has Shady Ties

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Death In Venice

Death in Venice (Florida)

Flight School Owner Has Shady Ties

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Tuesday, October 29, 2002

5/29/1999 New owners of Huffman Aviation have global presence

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9/13/2001 Huffman Aviation no stranger to headlines

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Tuesday, October 29, 2002

5/12/2001 Huffman rent is late again

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6/9/2001 City threatens lessee with eviction, again

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7/21/2001 Huffman rent late, again

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Liked the chubby one

Death in Venice (Florida)

3. What are they hiding down in Venice Florida?

Rudi Dekkers Liked the chubby one.