The United States Government was aware that a terrorist
attack on America was imminent, at least four hours and 37 minutes before the
first plane hit the World Trade Center Towers.

A warning of a threat to the President was delivered to the
Secret Service in Sarasota, Florida during the middle of the night before the
9/11 attack, followed several hours later by an attempt by four Arab men posing
as journalists to gain access to President George W. Bush at the Colony Beach
Resort on Longboat Key in Sarasota, for the purpose of ending his life.
In “Welcome to
Terrorland” we reported the discovery of news stories from local outlets
in Sarasota which seem to describe separate angles of this much larger
story.
We have since learned new
details reported in Newsweek and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune during the
aftermath of the attack. And more recently, a front page story in the St.
Petersburg Times attempts to debunk evidence for an assassination attempt on
Bush so ham-handedly and with such gross factual inaccuracy that it evokes the
specter of a deliberate cover-up.
4 Hours and 38 min before a plane hit the World Trade Center
First, a
brief recap of the intrigue in Sarasota FL on the night before the 9/11
attack... The drama began when Zainlabdeen Omer, a Sudanese national
residing in Sarasota, contacted Sarasota police in the middle of the night with
a chilling story.
A friend of his named
"Gandi," or "Ghandi" he said, who had made violent threats against President Bush in the
past, had just unexpectedly showed up in Sarasota.
"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.
“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 on the Sarasota ABC affiliate’s evening newscast.
“The warning, “Yadov noted,
“came exactly four hours and thirty-eight minutes before Mohamed
Atta flew an airliner into the World Trade Center.”
The Pentagon brass got the word. Did you?
The
Sarasota police immediately called in Secret Service agents guarding the
President, who was spending the night at the Colony Beach & Tennis Resort, a
pricey complex of muted grey-blue, low-height, woodsy-looking hotel rooms
nestled among thick palm trees and lush gardens on Longboat Key, a long narrow
island just off Sarasota.
Within hours Secret Service
agents were searching an apartment in Sarasota, where they took a number of
Sudanese men into custody.
Later, the Secret Service
dismissed the warning as "just coincidental" to Sept 11, which
seems odd, given the following report from the Sept 13, 2001 Newsweek:
“On the night before the
9/11 attack,” the newsmagazine reported, “A particularly-urgent warning may have
been received which caused top Pentagon brass to cancel their scheduled flights
on the morning of September 11th.”

Then, revealing that even
savvy inside-the-beltway newsmagazine journalists had no idea of just how
massive the impending government cover-up would become, Newsweek reports:
“Why that same
information was not available to the 266 people who died aboard the four
hijacked aircraft may become a hot topic on the Hill.”
"The Secret Service is a really secret service"
The
middle of the night warning proved accurate several hours later. A local fire
captain, Longboat Key Fire Marshall Carroll Mooneyhan, was at the front desk of
the Colony Beach Resort that morning waiting to accompany President Bush on his
morning jog.
Mooneyhan later told reporter Shay Sullivan
of the Longboat Observer that he witnessed a van carrying Middle Eastern men
tried to gain entry to the Colony Beach Resort, identifying themselves as a
television news crew.
They claimed they had a
"poolside" interview scheduled with the President, and asked for a Secret
Service agent by name, Mooneyhan said. However, the van was turned back by
Secret Service agents at the guard station, who told the men to contact the
President’s public relations office in Washington D.C.
An identical ruse had been
used--just two days earlier!-- to successfully assassinate Osama
bin Laden’s biggest foe, Afghan Northern Alliance leader Shah Massoud. Massoud
granted an interview to an Arab TV crew whose camera exploded when it was turned
on, killing him and two suicide bombers disguised as journalists.
Carrying Stingers in Air Force One's overhead bins

There was an extraordinary
level of security surrounding President George W. Bush in Sarasota, we learned
recently, including the deployment of surface-to-air missiles, according to a
Sarasota Herald-Tribune story on Sept 10, 2002.
While Coast Guard vessels
patrolled offshore, snipers prowled the grounds, and surface-to-air missiles
bristled atop the roof of the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort, reported the
paper.
We learned of this report,
and that of Newsweek, through the efforts of Paul Thompson of
cooperativeresearch.com, as reported in the documentary "9/11: Press
for Truth," which features the women known as “The Jersey girls,” widows
of men who perished in the attack on the World Trade Center.
“On the night before the
attack President Bush may have slept more soundly,” the documentary reports,
“knowing that snipers surface-to-air missiles had been placed on the roof of the
resort where he was staying, which was not a typical security procedure at the
time.” 
Was Bush carting batteries
of surface to air missiles around with him on Air Force One before the 9/11
attack? Not as a general rule... Experts told us that the level of security was
extraordinary, and it has since been neither acknowledged or explained.
Still, its safe to
assume somebody was expecting something out of the ordinary.
“In light of the attacks,
Mooneyhan wonders if what he witnessed is related to the events of September
11,” reported Shay Sullivan in the Longboat Observer.
So did the FBI. Well, sort
of, anyway…
Since the Apalachin Summit, Always the Last to Know
“That’s
very strange,” an unnamed agent with the Sarasota field office of the FBI said,
when informed what happened. “He said he would direct agents to look into the
matter.”
For reasons unknown, news of
the suspected assassination attempt on Bush has until now been consigned to the
realm of “secret history,” a term which can be loosely defined as “the news
they’re able to keep out of the newspapers.”
And if the story splashed
across the front page of the July 4, 2004 St. Petersburg Times with the
provocative headline “Of fact, fiction: Bush on
9/11”offers any indication, that’s exactly where somebody wants it to stay.
Before setting out to debunk
talk of an assassination attempt, St. Petersburg Times senior correspondent
Susan Taylor Martin at least makes an effort at journalistic even-handedness.
But it doesn't last long.
Posthumous warnings can be safely discounted
“Was the president ever in
danger while in Florida on 9/11?" she asks.
“In the days and weeks after
the terror attacks, news organizations in the Sarasota area reported several
incidents suggesting he was. But like so many things that day, rumor often
superceded reality.”
Actually its
“superseded,” but we don’t mean to quibble
about spelling, especially when there’s such
dishonest reporting still to come…
Martin dismisses the warning
of a threat to the President this way:
“A Sarasota TV station
reported another incident: Omer Zainelabden called Sarasota police on Sept. 10
to say that a friend named "Gandi," who had made threatening remarks against
the president in the past, had just arrived in town. Zainelabden, a Sudanese,
then disappeared -- perhaps nabbed by immigration authorities in a post 9/11
sweep of Muslim men”
“But records show
Zainelabden called police Sept. 11, hours after Bush left town. And
Zainelabden, who had a history of heavy drinking, was still in Sarasota months
later, other records show.”
Well, no.
First, a small matter in the
“Who What When Where Why” category: The name of the man who tried
to warn the Secret Service isn’t “Omer Zaineladden.”
Its “Zainelabdeen
Ibrahim Omer.”
"The pool reporter was at the pool"
A much
more important factual error--an outright lie-- is this assertion:
“But records show
Zainelabden called police Sept. 11, hours after Bush left town.”
The St. Petersburg Times
would be correct in insinuating that a warning delivered hours after the threat
has passed is not as significant as one delivered several hours before
an assassination attempt on the President of the United States. But its
not germane to this discussion.
Because several hours
before the alleged assassination attempt took place is when
Zainlabdeen Omer delivered his warning. Its right there in black and white
in the police report, which was taken at 4.07 AM on the morning of September 11.
Or, as ABC reporter Yadov
correctly, and succinctly, put it, “Exactly four hours and thirty-eight
minutes before Mohamed Atta flew an airliner into the World Trade Center.”
"Conspiracy buffs: Model train enthusiasts, but not as nice."
Not realizing (or maybe
not caring) that she has completely shredded whatever credibility accrues to a
senior correspondent for a national newspaper, Martin then continues in the same
vein.
“But while many reports
were questionable at best it soon became known that some of the 9/11 hijackers
had spent time on the west coast of Florida and taken flight lessons there.
“Some of the hijackers had
spent time on the west coast of Florida and taken flight lessons there” appears
to be the level of specificity at which the St. Petersburg Times feels
comfortable.
We are, after all, dealing with
important matters better left to the minions of our national security state, and
we wouldn't want to commit journalism now, would we?
Martin deals with the story
of the van filled with Middle Eastern men in similarly cavalier fashion…
"As related by Mooneyhan,
a van occupied by men of Middle Eastern descent had pulled up to the Colony
about 6 a.m. on Sept. 11 and said they had a "pool side" interview with the
president. The Secret Service said it had no record of an interview and turned
them away.”
“To conspiracy buffs, the
incident bore an eerie resemblance to a successful ruse used 8,000 miles away
in Afghanistan. On Sept. 9 - two days before the U.S. attacks - Ahmed Massoud,
the pro-American leader of the Northern Alliance, had been assassinated by two
men posing as journalists and carrying a bomb disguised as a TV camera.”
To conspiracy buffs,
sure. And also to prosecuting attorney’s, anyone with common sense, a
decent grade school education, or the ability to reason.
Keller-izing witnesses with inconvenient knowledge

Susan Taylor Martin then
delivers the coup de grace, and Carroll Mooneyhan pulls an Amanda Keller. He
recants his testimony.
She
Keller-izes him.
There. That wasn't so hard,
was it?
“Were the men on Longboat
Key planning to kill Bush in similar fashion? The problem with this theory is
that Mooneyhan denies he ever told the Observer about any men in a van seeking
an interview.
"How did they get that
information from me if I didn't know it?" Mooneyhan asks.
Well now. We’ve seen this
sort of thing before, haven't we? And on a personal level, I'm just
thankful its not my reporting that's currently being victimized.
If there were a cover-up in
progress, there would be signs of witness intimidation, of authorities actively
discouraging people with firsthand knowledge from talking.
When we spoke with Mooneyhan
it was already several years after the events in question. Yet he did nothing
to take advantage of the opportunity to say he’d been mis-quoted.
What Carroll Mooneyhan said
was, “I was visited by the CIA and the Secret Service after 9/11. I have a
career to think about. I have to be careful what I say.”
He didn't tell
us he'd been "misquoted."
He said, "I have a
career to think about."
All Ms. Taylor
Martin has accomplished is to
raise and answer the question of whether
someone has leaned a little on poor local boy Carroll Mooneyhan--an honest man in a world he never
made--to clam up.
Prescription for journalistic success: "Do What You're Told."
Susan Taylor
Martin's agenda gleams like a sharp knife under a full moon. She knows exactly
what Mooneyhan said to us.
That's not egotistical. The entire point of her story--what
they pulled her off her no-doubt desperately important Iraqi war beat to
do--is discredit reporting of the assassination attempt on Bush.
She knows it.
We know it. And we all know that Shay Sullivan
reported exactly what his friend Carroll Mooneyhan told him happened--before
finding out he'd been out of school to spill that particular can of beans.
Susan Taylor Martin is an
experienced reporter. Her bio says she's covered "two wars in Iraq, the war in
Kosovo, the war against terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the death and
Princess Di, the funeral of Jordan's King Hussein, the handover of Hong Kong to
China, and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center."
So here's the Big Question:
Is it just an innocent mistake when a senior correspondent for a national
newspaper can't read the date on a police report, and bases an entire debunking
exercise on... a lie?
We have deliberately not
presented any of the other corroborating evidence, preferring to let Ms.
Martin hoist herself by her own petard.
But its there... in spades.
-
The numerous witnesses who
saw Mohamed Atta at the Holiday Inn on Longboat Key on the day Bush's upcoming
visit was announced.
-
The claims of specific and
credible threats on the President's life, to counter claims Bush went AWOL
during the critical hours after the attack.
-
The Associated Press
report that Osama bin Laden personally ordered the assassination of
Afghan opposition leader Ahmed Shah Massoud. (So he's already used the phony
journalist ruse successfully.)
-
And the
presence of a vicious Hezbollah cell, right in Sarasota, led by the man who
supplied Mohamed Atta with his cell phones,
Wissam Hammoud, convicted
of selling machine guns to Hezbollah, and hiring a hit man to have an ATF
agent murdered... by being tied to a tree and having pieces of his body
slowly cut off. When the ATF agent had ran out of limbs, he was to be beheaded.
A Modest Proposal: Make phony journalism a crime
Susan Taylor
Martin pretends to live in a world that bears little resemblance to the one
inhabited by any American who witnessed the rise of the national security state
in the last half of the 20th Century.
In her America, there are no
“Miami stories,” as Joan Didion calls them, fragments of an underwater narrative
familiar to close observers of covert operations in this country since at least
the Bay of Pigs.
In her America
witnesses are never forced to recant, or
discovered, like
Johnny Roselli,
bobbing up and down in an oil drum in
Biscayne Bay
the night before
testifying to a Congressional Committee about his knowledge of the JFK
assassination.
In Susan
Taylor Martin's America the
address stamped on the “Fair Play for
Cuba” leaflets being passed out by "Castro sympathizer" Lee Harvey Oswald is
never the same as that of former FBI agent Guy Bannister’s detective agency
where CIA pedophile freak David Ferrie hangs out with anti-Castro Cubans.
That address,
544
Camp, has, in any event, been torn down and replaced by a federal
courthouse. Today it is just another abandoned historical moment.
Huffman Aviation at the Venice Airport will be like that too, one day
soon, just another part of the underwater narrative that is America’s Secret
History. Its our true history, its what really happened, and in it there are no
lone nut gunmen. But it is goes unmentioned at the St. Petersburg Times,
or the Sarasota Herald Tribune, or the New York Times, or Washington Post, which
are all today
places where questioning too closely is not conducive to becoming a senior
correspondent.
Politicians are scum. Journalists are whores. What's new?
We
spent three years in Venice Florida tracing the outlines of a massive covert
operation which brought hundreds of Arab men to Southwest Florida.
But
nothing we wrote summed it up quite as succinctly as a matter-of-fact
"From the Archive” feature in the Sarasota Herald Tribune, reprinting a
news story which ran in the paper 50 years ago, on March 26,1947:
Two planes were seized by customs officials at the Venice airport, suspected
of being involved in a plot to overthrow the governments of Cuba or possibly
some countries in Central or South America.
The planes were seized by U.S. authorities, along with a cache of arms in New
Orleans. A Honduras chicle grower announced that the equipment, including
tanks, planes and guns, had been designated for farm development in Honduras.
The planes were held in Venice under orders from federal court in Tampa until
the case was resolved.
Whatever his myriad faults,
George W. Bush has never pretended to be anything other than what he is, a
fiercely partisan politician with a room temperature IQ.
But Susan Martin Taylor, on
the other hand, pretends to be a journalist, and pretends to be working on
behalf of what Walter Cronkite used to call “the people’s sacred right to
know.”
She, and her ilk, are to
real journalism what Dan Rather was to Walter Cronkite. A phony careerist and a
pale imitation.
We hope she has the decency
to be ashamed of herself. Even better, we hope she decides to rewrite the
story to reflect the facts, which we used to imagine was what journalists got
paid to do.
But we’re not holding our
breath.

NEXT: More Real Questions about 9/11
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