
It’s déjà vu all over again...
And enough to give anyone
old enough to remember Vietnam a nightmarish sense of having been right there—exactly
there—before.
The surge in Iraq is not
what it was advertised to be—a last gasp effort to clutch victory from the jaws
of defeat—but a transparent ploy to subvert the will of the American people as
expressed in the last election.
A bait and switch tactic
successfully employed in 1968 to make Richard Nixon President was dusted off. Nixon was elected
because he had—he said—a secret plan to end the Vietnam War, and Americans, rocked by a
decade of assassinations and what was nearly a nuclear war over Cuba, were
desperate to convince themselves that —for once—he 'might could' be
telling the truth.
It didn't start with 9/11... Or Iraq
Of
course, he wasn’t. By the time the last helicopter left the roof of the
American Embassy in Saigon, it had taken longer to end the Vietnam
war than it took to fight and win World War II.
(And even that wasn’t long
enough for Howard Hughes, who was reportedly frantically looking for someone to
bribe to keep it going a little longer.)
There is a direct echo of
this today in Iraq.
Allied armies swept across
France and Germany, across North Africa, up the Burma Trail in South Asia, and
island-hopped across the Pacific in less time than its taken to clear the
road in from the airport in Baghdad.
During our
lifetimes America has begun measuring its wars—not in years—but in
generations.
Baby boomers were the Vietnam Generation. Whatever they’re calling
teenagers today will one day be remembered as the Iraq Generation.
Or maybe
the Iraq-Iran Generation.
The question that needs to be asked isn’t why they do it... It’s how.
How did we get here?
Out-Orwelling Orwell
“Those who control the present,
control the past,” George Orwell wrote.
How they do it is by “preparing
the battlefield.”
We’ve just finished a summer-long post-graduate
course in how they do it, facing the very real prospect of being hounded out of
business after being hauled (once again) into court.
Instead of reporting the
latest in the various outrages we’d normally be following: the 5.5 -ton
Homeland Security Cocaine One DC9; the murder beef in South Florida for
which Jack Abramoff is apparently getting a “pass;” the
criminal dereliction of our national press in covering the story of the
9/11 terrorist conspiracy at its base of operations in Venice, Florida…
We spent our summer
vacation preparing to go to court. And what we learned there is that--right
now-- they are preparing the battlefield for a struggle that will take place
after the Bush Administration leaves office, over what happened in Venice, Florida
in the 18 months before the 9/11 attack.
How I Spent My Summer Vacation
A
Sarasota County Courthouse was the site two weeks ago of the latest
skirmish in the organized effort to suppress, discredit, and/or remove from the
public record evidence unearthed during our
investigation into the activities and associates in Florida of Mohamed Atta’s
cadre of terrorist hijackers during the 18-month run-up to the 9/11 attack.
A roll call of the effort to
date includes:
-
two lawsuits;
-
the emergence of a
“second
Mohamed" in Venice, a French-Tunisian man who—despite looking nothing like
Mohamed Atta—claimed it was he who had been misidentified as the terrorist
ringleader by numerous witnesses, including an American girl, Amanda
Keller, with whom he lived for several months;
-
a brief and
unconvincing
retraction of her highly-detailed account from Keller herself, in the
Sarasota Herald-Tribune, one of three newspapers which initially
reported her account, and the corroborating accounts of a half-dozen credible
eyewitnesses;
-
and a concerted attempt to
roll back the startling information that a half-dozen of Atta’s closest
associates while he was in Florida weren’t Arabs, but German, Swiss, and
Austrian.
Pecked to Death by Ducks

What New Orleans was
to the Kennedy Assassination, Venice is to the 9/11 terrorist conspiracy: the operation’s nerve center.
Instead of Clay Shaw, picture secretive financier
Wallace J. Hilliard. For David Ferrie, pencil in Rudi Dekkers.
But because there has been
no courageous prosecuting attorney like Jim Garrison exposing elements of the
conspiracy, it’s unlikely the story will ever have an Oliver Stone to bring it
to life.
Jim Garrison discovered that
the faint outline of what really happened in Dallas was still visible in
New Orleans several years after the murder of JFK. Today some of the
wiring for what became the 9/11 attack is still exposed in Venice, FL.
Therein lies the rub, and
the reason we’re being pecked to death by ducks.
The minions of a huge,
shadowy, and unnamed organization—the ducks— hauled us back into court for a
hearing in front of Robert Bennett, Jr., the Chief Judge of the Sarasota Circuit
Court. He was considering a motion to hold us in contempt of the settlement
agreement reached last year with one of the German pilots we’d identified, in “Welcome
to TERRORLAND,” as a close associate of Atta’s.
Inconvenient facts I'm still allowed to mention
The
Miami lawyer representing the German pilot indignantly told the Sarasota Herald
Tribune at the time, "He's constantly reporting that my client somehow has had
something to do with terrorists, which is a total lie.”
The pilot who sued us—who
we’d admitted we’d been in error in identifying as an associate of Atta’s—is
a convicted smuggler, who was living, at the time he sued, in the Naples, Florida home
of a Hungarian Mobster convicted of money
laundering in 1991 while serving as the manager of the Indian Casino on the
reservation of the Morongo Indian Tribe in Cabazon, CA.
It’s a little far afield for
a Hungarian Mobster to be running an Indian
Casino in California.
Or perhaps its just an excellent example of the globalization of organized crime.
This same German pilot—who,
again, wasn’t an associate of Mohamed Atta’s—bought a business in Naples,
Florida, from another German pilot, a man named Wolfgang Bohringer.
Return of the Snake-Oil Standard
Subsequently, the mysterious
Bohringer became the subject of a terror alert issued by the FBI in the South
Pacific last summer. Exposing the fact that a close associates of Atta’s in
Florida included non-Arabs, like Wolfgang Bohringer, will be seen someday to
have been as important to the true story of the 9/11 attack as the exposure of
New Orleans as the operations center for the pre-assassination planning for the
Kennedy Assassination.
It was Amanda Keller’s
identification of Bohringer as a close associate of Atta’s, combined with his
suspicious activities, which formed the basis for the terror alert.
But despite—or maybe because
of—that fact the Sarasota Herald Tribune offered no explanation for why any
woman would want to pass herself off as the former girlfriend of a man
responsible for murdering almost 3000 innocent people.
“They want to put us back on
the snake-oil standard again,” Kurt Vonnegut once said.
“It was ‘my bad,’”
Amanda Keller supposedly said.
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