Together on 'America's
Barbary Coast': Atta, Marwan, and 'the boys'
by Daniel Hopsicker
April 24--Venice Florida
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 list’s existence
became known last September, the MadCowMorningNews has learned.
Alarmingly, the email addresses
of several of the names on Atta’s ‘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.
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...
But enterprising reporters
had already discovered the local angle before the FBI clampdown, and reported
it in print as well as on local network TV affiliates.
The story went unreported
nationally. Then recently sources close to the investigation released the
contents of four of the emails exclusively to the MadCowMorningNews.
"Non-negotiable demands
from Paradise."
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 Niqab…and 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?"
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 Dekker’s
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?
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