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Revelations in the case of
the Lebanese man accused
of being the ringleader of a plot
to bomb the PATH Tunnels in New
York City to deluge lower Manhattan
and Wall Street in a torrent of
water have begun to shed light on
other terrorism investigations in
the U.S., perhaps even on the very
nature of the terrorist threat.
As
many as a dozen relatives of
Assem Hammoud have already
been accused or convicted in the
U.S. of terrorist-related crime,
The MadCowMorningNews
has learned, members of what has
been called the
Hezbollah-Hammoud Syndicate
in Detroit. Their number includes
a self-admitted member of Hezbollah
in Sarasota questioned by law enforcement
authorities in late September of
2001 about his suspected foreknowledge
of the 9.11 attack.
Dubbed the
“Playboy Plotter” in
New York’s tabloid press, which
printed pictures showing him cradling
adult beverages amidst a bevy of
blonde girls, Hammoud's wide-open
lifestyle does not at all
fit the portrait of the
Islamic fundamentalist terror threat
put forth by the FBI, as well as
in books about Mohamed Atta like
“Perfect Soldiers,” which
the mainstream media has touted
as the “last word” on the terrorist
hijackers.
Instead,
the emerging portrait of the “jet-set
jihadist” confirms the portrayal
of Mohamed Atta in “Welcome
to TERRORLAND” as a free-spending
hard-drinking cocaine user
and frequenter of strip
clubs… exactly the portrait the
FBI has gone to great lengths to
dispel.
The FBI also appears to be deliberately
ignoring Hammoud’s frequent jaunts
around the world, which echo those
of Mohamed Atta, in
favor of an explanation indicating
that Hammoud and his crew
appear to be yet-another free-lance
terrorist cell which coalesced and
made plans in isolation, joining
other groups that have been broken
up in Miami, London, Toronto, Melbourne
and Sydney.
As
evidence of Hammoud’s international
connections begins to mount, it
is becoming increasingly clear that
nothing could be further
from the truth.
Hammoud-ed
up
Authorities have already confirmed
that one so-far unnamed relative
of Assam Hammoud is a member of
Al Qaeda being feverishly hunted
by intelligence agencies which suspect
he helped mastermind the PATH Tunnel
plot.
(Ridiculed as fantastic by some,
the plot’s chances of succeeding
by blowing up the slurry wall rimming
the WTC site which holds back the
Hudson River were actually quite
good, according to counterterrorism
officials interviewed in
NEWSWEEK.)
Other
Assem Hammoud relatives
reportedly include nine members
of the Lebanese Hammoud clan living
in Dearborn Michigan accused or
convicted in a global smuggling
scheme in support of Hezbollah involving
bootlegged cigarettes, phony Viagra
and counterfeit tax stamps.
Members of the
$20-million per year smuggling ring,
which eventually stretched
through Lebanon, China, Brazil and
Paraguay, included Makki and Mohamad
Hammoud, Fadi Mohamad-Musbah Hammoud,
Majid Mohamad Hammoud; Jihad Hammoud,
Imad Mohamad-Musbah Hammoud, and
Ali Ahmad Hammoud.
More than love of criminal riches
held the group together; their shared
Lebanese heritage, blood relations
and
allegiance to Hezbollah
bound them as well, federal authorities
stated in their indictment.
Initially the FBI denied that Hammoud
was ever in the U.S. They now admit
he was in this country at least
twice, but that neither trip "had
anything to do with this plot.”
The Hammoud who knew beforehand
about the 9.11 attack
But
Assem Hammoud's most intriguing
relative in the U.S. is
the Dearborn clan member who moved
to Sarasota Florida, where he was
quite a busy boy...
Wissam Hammoud owned
a cell phone store in Sarasota which
supplied mobile phones to Mohamed
Atta... bragged of helping Hezbollah
buy assault weapons and night-vision
goggles (the group needed them so
they “could kill Jews at night”)...
was convicted in February in a
Federal Court in Tampa of soliciting
the murder and beheading
of a Federal Agent...and suspected
of having foreknowledge of the 9.11
attack.
“In September 2001, the Florida
Department of Law Enforcement interviewed
Hammoud because someone had anonymously
called saying Hammoud had made a
comment that the Oklahoma City bombing
was small compared with what was
coming,”
reported the Tampa Tribune on
Jan 6 2004, in a story headlined
“Man Bragged Of Ties To Terror,
Records Say.”
Given his criminal history, and
the
threats and warnings made
in Sarasota on the night before
the 9.11 attack against the U.S.
in general and George W. Bush in
particular (reported only in the
local media and in a chapter in
Welcome
to TERRORLAND), we see
no reason to doubt that Wissam Hammoud
knew whereof he spoke.
The first casualty of war is the
truth
The
little-known fact is that at 6 a.m.
on the morning of September 11th
four Arab men posing as journalists
attempted to gain access to President
George W. Bush at the Colony Beach
Resort on Longboat Key in Sarasota,
where he had spent the night, for
the purpose of ending his life.
The evidence is in two separate
local news reports which lead to
only one conclusion: terrorists
were looking to kill George W. Bush.
Secret Service agents guarding the
President in Sarasota received a
dramatic predawn warning of an imminent
threat to the President. The plot
was very likely coordinated by terrorist
ringleader Mohamed Atta himself,
at that moment preparing to board
a commuter flight from Portland,
Maine to Boston, but who had been
seen three days earlier in Longboat
Key by numerous credible witnesses.
“The warning of imminent danger
was delivered in the middle of the
night to Secret Service agents in
Sarasota guarding the President,”
reported Monica Yadov of ABC’s
Sarasota affiliate, “and
it came exactly four hours and thirty-eight
minutes before Mohamed Atta flew
an airliner into the World Trade
Center.”
"He was honest. He was local.
He was a fireman. He talked."
The second account was in the
Longboat Observer, a
community newspaper which literally
covers the waterfront in the upscale
resort where President Bush spent
the night before the 9.11 attack.
It contained an eyewitness account
of the assassination attempt which
Monica Yadov on ABC reported the
Secret Service had been warned about.
“At about 6 a.m. September 11, Longboat
Key Fire Marshall Carroll Mooneyhan
was at the front desk of the Colony
Beach & Tennis Resort as Bush
prepared for his morning jog,"
reported the paper in a story on
Sept. 21. "From that vantage
point, Mooneyhan overheard a strange
exchange between a Colony receptionist
and security guard.”
Mooneyhan was among a group milling
in the lobby waiting to accompany
Bush on his morning run... “A van
occupied by men of Middle Eastern
descent had pulled up to the Colony
stating they had a ‘poolside’ interview
with the president,” Mooneyhan told
the Longboat Observer.
The men in the van identified themselves
as a television news crew with an
appointment with the President,
he stated, claiming they had a ‘poolside’
interview scheduled with Bush after
his morning run. They even asked
for a Secret Service agent by name.
FBI: "How very strange."
Secret Service agents at the guard
station told the men to contact
the President’s public relations
office in Washington D.C. to schedule
an interview. They turned the four
Arab men away, but they let them
go.
When reporter Shay Sullivan of the
Longboat Observer interviewed him
about what he’d seen, Mooneyhan,
endearingly, didn’t know enough
to dummy up...
He
was local. He was honest. He was
a fireman. He talked.
“In light of the attacks, Mooneyhan
wonders if what he witnessed is
related to the events of September
11,” reported the paper.
So
did the FBI. Sort of. The FBI’s
blasé reaction: “That’s very strange,”
an unnamed agent with the Sarasota
field office of the FBI said, when
informed what happened. Sullivan
wrote, “He said he would direct
agents to look into the matter.”
Savvy
reporter Sullivan knew nothing about
Yadov’s corroborating account of
a dramatic predawn warning. Still,
he immediately recognized that Mooneyhan
had witnessed an assassination
attempt, because the
ploy used in the attempt to gain
access to Bush had been successful
two days earlier...
On
September 9th, two Arab men pretending
to be journalists arrived to conduct
an interview with charismatic Northern
Alliance leader Shah Massoud,
the Taliban and bin Laden’s biggest
foe. One of the two ‘journalists’
detonated a bomb hidden
inside their television camera,
killing both their intended target
and themselves.
The media silence about these events
during the pre-dawn hours before
the 9.11 attack clearly illustrates
both how seriously U.S. officials
took the attempt, and how far they
have been willing to go to keep
it secret.
Since both Assem Hammoud and
Wissam Hammoud boasted
of belonging to Hezbollah, the obvious
question is:
Did Hezbollah play any role in the
events of that morning?
Real Americans won't be silenced
We
learned of the Sarasota Hammoud’s
connection to the alleged Lebanese
mastermind of the PATH Tunnel plot
from Bill Warner,
a
dogged private investigator
who has been tracking the criminal
activities in Sarasota and Tampa
of a number of individuals with
connections to terror networks since
the 9.11 attack.
“Wissam Hammoud first crossed my
radar when he began visiting a used
car dealer suspected of shipping
vehicles to the Middle East which
later were used as car bombs in
Baghdad,” he told us.
Information turned up by Warner’s
investigation prompted the FBI to
action on more than one occasion,
most recently in the arrest and
subsequent deportation—news of which
was unaccountably suppressed—of
four Moroccan nationals
suspected of being part of a large
auto theft ring sending cars and
cash to the Middle East.
“The
auto theft rings are
centered here, between Sarasota
and Tampa,” Warner said. . “They’ve
been shipping cars, both legally
and illegally, to Dubai and Jeddah
in the Middle East. It’s a terrorist
cash cow.”
Terrorism expert Steve Emerson,
testifying before a Congressional
committee investigating terrorist
financing, confirmed Warner’s assertions.
He stated several large auto theft
rings in the U.S. have supplied
considerable revenues into the coffers
of Hezbollah and other terrorist
organizations.
Paging Sami Al-Arian, pick up your
cell phone please
Wissam
Taysir Hammoud’s extraordinary criminal
curriculum vitae began with an even-earlier
incident with terror overtones.
In
1999 Hammoud and two pals, Mohamed
Saad and Saad Saad, were stopped
while attempting to board a flight
in Tampa. Mohamed Saad owned a market
which was raided in 2003 as part
of a nationwide stolen baby formula
scam. The owner of the property,
Sami Al-Arian, was
convicted of terrorism-related charges
in Tampa last year.
The three men were heading to Detroit.
In their luggage was an assault
weapon and more than eleven pounds
of ammunition, as well as what newspapers
delicately called “other gun-related
equipment.”
Even before 9/11, bringing a personal
arsenal fit for paramilitary bank
robbers in Los Angeles onboard a
commercial flight was considered
something of a faux pas.
Yet… nothing happened.
“It was not clear if the men faced
any charges stemming from that incident,”
reported the Sarasota Herald Tribune
in a puzzled tone.
Wait till you run out of limbs to
cut off... then behead him."
Wissam
Hammoud’s next criminal foray
occurred just three months before
the 9/11 attack, when he sold a
machine gun and short barrel shotgun
to an undercover Bureau of Alcohol
Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives
(ATF) agent, after he boasted of
being an international arms dealer
who shipped machine guns to Hezbollah
to the agent.
Out of Katherine Harris’ backyard,
Wissam Hammoud had been
selling machine guns to Hezbollah,
even as squadrons of terrorists
trained in what would become, in
2004, Ms. Harris’ very own Congressional
District.
Wissam Hammoud seemed to be leading
a charmed life... his sentence for
the machine gun mishap was one year…
Of home detention.
Hammoud now felt emboldened enough
by his seeming immunity—as
who wouldn’t?—to go shopping
for a hit man to have
the men he saw as responsible for
his continuing legal entanglements—
a federal informant and an agent
with the Federal Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives—murdered.
Perhaps he felt his draconian sentence
was motivated by “racial profiling.”
It
wasn’t just talk… When Hammoud made
his alleged solicitation to commit
murder, he already had a firearm,
a silencer, and a particularly
grisly plan.
According to the federal complaint,
Hammoud told the hit man he wanted
the informant tied to a tree, ordering
him to then ‘slowly cut pieces
of his (the informants) body off."
When he ran out of limbs to cut
off, the hit man was told, the informant
was to be beheaded. And this is
where federal authorities finally
drew the line.
Welcome to TERRORLAND

When people think of Central Florida,
they think vacations & beaches,
sunshine & fun, Tomorrowland
& Universal Tours. But nestled
in with the more traditional Florida
attractions described as being “fun
for the whole family” was an ominous
new theme park which had risen unbidden
from the murky swamp…
Some wag—it might have been us—called
it “TERRORLAND.”
The big question is why—-after
9.11—-this dark carnival
should still be right in our
midst, open for business?

After being stung in an argument
with his one-time American girlfriend
about which of their cultures was
the most barbaric, Mohamed Atta
boasted, “There are many rich people
who fund what we do.”
“He said there was someone in Florida—some
rich Arab—who had a lot of money,”
Amada Keller recalled. “He asked
me, ‘Are you aware that when we
come over here, your people pay
to have us set up businesses?’”
“Eventually, he told me, his people
were going to try to take over this
country,” Keller continued. “He
said: ‘I’ve been in this country
many times before. I can come in
and go as I please.”
It's
a small world after all
Like
Mohamed Atta, who spent seven years
in Hamburg in a program which most
complete in two, Assem Hammoud spent
seven years at Concordia University
in Montreal.
And just as Mohamed Atta’s father
lied that he had heard from his
son on September 12th, the family
of Lebanese PATH Tunnel bomb suspect
Assem Hammoud produced photographs
showing him cavorting with pretty
women and drinking alcohol, as if
to prove his innocence.
Hammoud's family apparently was
not aware that he had received small-arms
training at Ain al-Hilweh, a Palestinian
refugee camp near Sidon.
His mother, Nabila Qotob,
said Hammoud drinks alcohol, had
girlfriends, traveled widely and
showed no similarities to Islamic
militants. To prove her son was
no jihadi, she showed very un-Islamic
pictures of Hammoud with three smiling
women - none of them wearing veils
- on his arm during an undated stay
in Canada, and photos of Hammoud
lounging shirtless on a speeding
motorboat in Germany.
She described her son as "someone
who loves life ... drinks alcohol
... and has several girlfriends,"
arguing that he was anything but
a religious fanatic. Hammoud's mother
told the media that her son "drinks
alcohol, had girlfriends and showed
no similarities to Islamic militants";
So
had the family of Ziad Jarrah,
the Lebanese hijacker-pilot
of the United Airlines flight which
crashed in Pennsylvania. They too
sought to prove their son’s innocence
by saying he was just a fun-loving
young man with a Turkish girlfriend.
Like Scarface, but in Arabic

Private investigator Warner sees
the terrorist network as being motivated
by factors having little to do with
Islamic fundamentalist zeal, an
assessment that fits well with what
is known about Assem Hammoud.
“They’re criminals,” he stated flatly.
“Gangsters. There’s a lot of money
involved.”
The criminal nature of the terrorist
conspiracy and the worldwide dog-fight
they have engaged in with U.S. forces
is reminiscent of the gangs in the
U.S. during Prohibition that murdered
their rivals until their eventual
merger into what is today known
as “organized crime.”
The son of a wealthy Sunni Muslim
family from Beirut, Hammoud taught
economics and management at a private
college, is fluent in Arabic, English,
French and German, had many girlfriends,
drank alcohol, and, according to
a delicate quote in the Beirut newspaper
Al-Safir, "pursued a very complex
social lifestyle."
Assem Hammoud’s life in both Canada
and Lebanon, where he taught at
a private University, was filled
with "a lot of booze, a lot
of parties, a lot of sex."
He was “a party animal.”
Some of his students even thought
he was a drug addict.
Does this sound like an “Islamic
fundamentalist?” Or is it, rather,
a description of a lieutenant in
an Islamic drug cartel?
But no... All this, investigators
said, was part of a systematic effort
to mislead those around him, according
to FBI Assistant Director
Mark Mershon.
This is the same thing the FBI said
about “party animal” Mohamed Atta,
who spent several months living
with a
pink-haired stripper in Venice.
But why would Assem Hammoud need
to “pretend” to be living a
gangsta lifestyle while
living in Lebanon?
The answer would appear to lie in
what no one in power in America
wishes to acknowledge: this is,
at least in part, a drug war,
with the world’s first Islamic drug
cartel. 
“The first casualty of war is the
truth,” goes a famous quote.
Maybe that’s even true in a drug
war. Maybe that’s especially
true in a WORLDWIDE drug war.
The whole world has become Chicago
during Prohibition...
And every day is St. Valentine’s
Day.
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