DO JEB AND
KATHERINE SHARE 'A FEELING FOR THE LITTLE GUY?'
And even while his
companies were being used to train terrorists to fly and smuggling heroin into
the U.S., prominent Florida politicians Governor Jeb Bush and Florida Secretary
of State Katherine Harris publicly endorsed Hilliard’s operation. 
Governor Jeb Bush honored Hilliard's operation (called at various times Florida
Air, Sunrise Airlines and Discover Air) with a personal visit, posing for photos
with the "Discover Air family."
Katherine Harris' endorsement of Hilliard’s operation was splashed across the
pages of her beloved hometown Sarasota Herald Tribune. "As one of Florida's top
politicians, Katherine Harris doesn't have much time to do a lot of personal
traveling," the paper reported.
"But twice in the past month or so, the secretary of state... 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."
The Herald Tribune quoted Harris spokesman Ben McKay saying, “She
appreciates the convenience that Florida Air offers.”
Ms. Harris' reputation as a stickler for the letter of the law from the
contested 2000 Presidential election was apparently put ‘on hold’ on Wally
Hilliard’s behalf: While she was "appreciating their convenience," the operation
was flying passengers without holding an air carrier certificate. 
The
juxtaposition of the discovery of a huge cache of heroin on a Lear jet belonging
to Wallace J. Hilliard, 70, of Naples, Fl, Huffman Aviation’s owner, at
the exact same time terrorist and Osama bin Laden associate Mohamed Atta
arrived to attend his flight school from Afghanistan, a country producing well
more than half of the world’s heroin, would normally have had U.S. Attorneys
looking up the sentencing guidelines appropriate to major RICO narcotics
trafficking cases, and getting ready to throw the book at him.
In fact,
they did nothing of the sort, which strongly indicates that the Army’s secret
military intelligence unit Able Danger’s inability to prod federal authorities
to move on Atta and other terrorists known to be in the U.S. encountered the
same obstacles, and for the same reason.
In fact, the
only effort made at holding financier Wallace J. Hilliard, 70, of Naples, Florida accountable was the
weak one of confiscating his plane. When Hilliard sued to get the DEA to return
the Lear jet inn forfeiture
hearings, attempting to show
himself to have
been an “innocent owner,” his motion was opposed by the Government and roundly
rejected in court.
The U.S.
Attorney’s office opposed the plane’s return. Their motion said, “because the
property was used or acquired as a result of a violation of the Controlled
Substances Act.”
Court
documents revealed that Hilliard’s leasing company, Plane 1 Leasing, had been
paid in cash for each charter by the two Latin passengers, which aviation
experts in South Florida said strains credulity.
“DEA would
not return it, they auctioned it off, they told Wally they had ‘reasons,’” said
an aviation source in Naples. “It was the first seizure in history for a
so-called ‘innocent person’ where they took and kept the plane.”
The court
concluded Hilliard’s company knew what was going on. Affidavits later filed by
the machine-gun toting DEA agents who had surrounded the Lear jet indicated
Hilliard’s company’s involvement went much deeper than anyone was willing to
acknowledge publicly.
Red Flags, Red Faces, Red Blood Everywhere
“It was just
blatant,” said a manager who worked there at the time. “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.”
Hilliard lost his Lear jet. America lost (almost) 3000 lives.
And something else as well. The fact that this story was first broken
exclusively (and only) by the MadCowMorningNews, and not “papers of record” like
the New York Times and Washington Post amply demonstrates the massive 9.11
cover-up led by the FBI which is still in place, a cover-up which has
contemptuously mocked the very concept of American democracy, of a “free
press,” and of the “people’s right to know.”
Nor
were we alone in our discovery of the officially-protected drug trafficking
network. FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds, in the months after the attack,
bumped into the arms for drugs deals. Edmonds alleged that the US State
Department blocked investigations showing links between criminal drug
trafficking networks and the terror attacks on 9/11.
"Certain
investigations were being quashed, let's say per State Department's request,
because it would have affected certain foreign relations [or] affected certain
business relations with foreign organizations," she stated.
Even
if military intelligence unit Able Danger had been allowed to notify the FBI,
the information which fingered Mohamed Atta and others of the hijackers was
already well-known to the Bureau.
“FBI Knew Terrorists Were Using Flight Schools”
the Washington Post reported on Sept 23, 2001. “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 and abroad, according
to interviews and court testimony.”
Indications of the FBI's "guilty knowledge" were widespread in the aftermath of
the attack included the widely-reported fact that the FBI was at Huffman
Aviation with search warrants at 2.30 a.m. the night after the attack. An
executive of Huffman Aviation told us that FBI agents were on the scene even
earlier than that.
"They moved pretty fast for guys in black Florsheims"
"How do you think the FBI got here (Huffman Aviation) so fast after the attack?"
asked the executive. "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."
Amazingly, the smuggling operation being protected continues to this day.
The pilot of
Hilliard’s busted Lear, Venezuelan Diego Levine Texar, was not taken into
custody. “The pilot was not arrested, according to a DEA spokesman, because of a
lack of evidence,” reported the Orlando Sentinel. He has since been
identified as also being the chief pilot on Venezuela’s “Air Force One,” which
provides a bit of context for
last week’s news that
the State Department was revoking
the visas of three Venezuelan military officers suspected of involvement in drug
trafficking.
When we
first published the DEA’s official report to the court about the Orlando heroin
bust (read it here) on our website and in the appendix to “Welcome to
TerrorLand,” we received a very credible death threat... even though the report
is a public document available to anyone.
And Rudi Dekkers just told his favorite newspaper, (of course, the Sarasota
Herald Tribune) that he was out of work.
Poor man. We guess the trips to Colombia don’t count.
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