What they're hiding down
in Venice, Florida
"First we couldn't count
votes. Now we're training terrorists."
—Florida law-enforcement official involved in 9/11 probe.
by Daniel Hopsicker
October 9—world exclusive
The airfield where Mohamed
Atta and his terrorist cadre learned to fly has a long history of being
used as a training base for paramilitary operations by federal authorities,
the MadCowMorningNews has learned exclusively.
The Venice Airport, now notorious
for two Dutch-owned flight schools which trained three of the four terrorist
pilots in the Sept. 11 attack, has been utilized in covert U.S. operations
since the earliest days of the Cold War, according to a top local law enforcement
official.
"Venice was even targeted
by the Soviet Union in the event of nuclear war, because of the military
nature of certain activities taking place at the Airport," the official
said.
During the Vietnam War pilots
were trained in Venice for the paramilitary operations of CIA-proprietary
Air America, stated the official. So too were bush pilots, a decade-and-a-half
later, during the conflicts in Central and South America during the Iran-Contra
era.
The federal activity continues
to this day.
"It's not unusual to see
a military Blackhawk helicopter touch down at the Venice Airport in the
middle of the night," stated the official, who requested anonymity, "and
then take off again thirty seconds later, after dropping off its cargo
or passengers."
"Or you look up and all of
a sudden there's 5000 soldiers from the 101st Airborne landing and taking
off. Strange things have been going on out there for a long time."
What they're hiding down
in Venice, Florida is that Mohamed Atta came to be there at the behest
of the people responsible for these operations.
"Spooks, Saudis, Raytheon...
and Venice"
Since most of the hijackers
used Florida as their home base while they were in this country, and since
15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, a big part of the story of the terrorist
conspiracy that attacked America is, perforce, a story about "Saudis
in Florida."
And the company's name that
kept coming up again and again in connection with stories of Saudis in
Florida is that of major U.S. defense contractor Raytheon.
As recently as July, for
example, Raytheon and the U.S. Air Force tested a new air to air missile
at the Venice Airport, designed to help create a ground-based air defense
system for Homeland Defense, as well as at Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama
City, Florida.
We had already heard a curious
story about Raytheon and Tyndall AFB, after a former resident of the Florida
Panhandle alerted us to a curious visit that took place there in April
of 1999, when Raytheon sponsored a delegation of seven Saudi defense officials,
led by Saudi Prince Turki bin Bandar, to Tyndall AFB.
"The Prince told me they
were at Tyndall to get a helicopter repaired that President Roosevelt had
given his father, who had been the Saudi king during World War II," stated
hotel proprietor Peggy Wood.
"When the delegation first
arrived, they asked to speak to whoever was in charge, and they wouldn't
believe me when I told them that I was," Wood recalls. "'Women don't run
businesses,' they told me."
A Saudi delegation led by
a Saudi Prince had indeed spent several weeks at Tyndall AFB, we confirmed
with the owner of the Driftwood Inn in nearby Mexico Beach, where they
stayed. And one of the members of the delegation staying at her beachside
inn, Peggy Wood told us, was a Major Mohammed Al-Ghamdi.
Shortly after the 9/11 attack
a man with that same name was taken into custody in Miami by the FBI.
The Al-Ghamdi's of Saudi
Arabia
Is the Mohammed al-Ghamdi
suspected of taking part in the 9/11 plot the same man who visited Tyndall
AFB with Saudi Royalty Turki bin Bandar?
"Good luck finding out,"
said one local source. "They don't want facts like the Saudi-Al-Qaeda
connection made known, or that companies like Raytheon have been playing
both sides of the fence."
"I took a friend of
mine from Finland over to Tyndall AFB one time," the source continued.
"We both flew the F15 simulator. How many Saudi's do you reckon got flying
time on that simulator over the years? Anyone who is a guest at Tyndall
even foreigners can go in and fly the jet simulator's. Our national security
has been a joke for the last few years."
The "Al-Ghamdi" name is prominent
in the terrorist conspiracy. Three of the 19 hijackers were named Al-Ghamdi.
Moreover two of those three Al-Ghamdi's listed the Pensacola Naval
Air Station, known as the "Cradle of U.S. Navy Aviation," as their home
address on their driver's licenses, reported NEWSWEEK
In a never-retracted story
last Sept 15, 2001, which nonetheless died an immediate death, NEWSWEEK
reported, "The three foreign nationals training in Pensacola appear to
be Saeed Alghamdi and Ahmad Alnami, who were among the four men who allegedly
commandeered United Airlines Flight 93. That flight crashed into rural
Pennsylvania. The third man who may have trained in Pensacola, Ahmed Alghamdi,
allegedly helped highjack United Airlines."
A former Navy pilot told
NEWSWEEK that during his years on the base, "we always, always, always
trained other countries’ pilots. When I was there two decades ago, it
was Iranians. The shah was in power. Whoever the country du jour is, that’s
whose pilots we train."
Saeed Alghamdi had also,
stated NEWSWEEK, attended the Defense Language Institute at Presidio of
Monterrey in California. So the Al-Ghamdi family is apparently very well
connected, in the U.S. as well as in Saudi Arabia.
And it turns out there is
a fifth Al-Ghamdi associated with the September 11th attack on America.
In the most-aired Osama video, where he salaams a crippled Sheikh, the
crippled Sheikh's name is Sheikh Al-Ghamdi.
"There's an elephant in
the living room. Ignore it."
Just who are all these Al-Ghamdi's?
The name belongs, we learned, to one of the most important and influential
tribes in Saudi Arabia.
According to the Washington
Post's Sept 11th anniversary recap, after the Hamburg cadre left
Germany to train in Bin Laden's Afghanistan terror camps in 1999 "the first
place in Afghanistan that the new arrivals were taken was a guesthouse
in Kandahar, called the Al-Ghumad House, after the Saudi Al-Ghamdi tribe."
At least four other men named
Al-Ghamdi have shown up on records at Huffman Aviation, the flight school
in Florida where Alghamdi was said by the FBI to have trained, the Post
reported.
Rudi Dekker's Huffman Aviation
trained more than two hundred potential terrorist pilots with the surname
Alghamdi, stated the article.
Hundreds of former flight
students who took lessons in Venice are now under scrutiny by federal authorities,
one investigator told us.
All of which brings up one
crucial question which no one in authority has been willing to even address,
let alone answer: "Whose idea was it to train thousands of young Arab men
to learn to fly?"
Sarasota County is Jeb
Country.
They didn't go just anywhere
to learn to fly. They came, most of them, to Florida.
The two Venice 'Magic Dutch
Boys' have been walking, as it turns out, a familiar path... The Venice
Airport was built by the U.S. government in the early 1940s as a flight
training facility during World War II. Since then the Feds have had not
just a significant but predominant role at the airport, according to some
local officials.
Venice Florida is an otherwise
unexceptional retirement community sandwiched on Florida’s Gulf Coast
between the well-heeled resort (and Bush family retreat) of Boca Grande
and Sarasota, home of local girl-making-good Katherine Harris.
Lessons that emerged from
the Cocaine Scandals in Mena Arkansas during Bill Clinton's term included
the no-brainer notion that if you wanted to be able to act with impunity
and, say, get away with murder, having the state's coroner in your
hip pocket was clearly a good place to start.
In Sarasota County, where
Venice is located, Republicans occupy 41 of the 42 elected offices.
According to local law enforcement
who loaded the records from Huffman Aviation and Florida Flight Training
Center aboard a C130 at Sarasota International Airport the day after September
11th, when it flew out Jeb Bush was aboard.
The accumulating evidence
in Venice of official and so-far unacknowledged complicity in the presence
in the U.S. of Mohamed Atta and his terrorist cadre is a far more important
issue than the proposed focus for the upcoming independent 9/11 investigation:
"blunders and missed signals" by the CIA and FBI.
One person in Venice seems
particularly unconcerned. Said Rudi Dekkers recently, about his sudden
notoriety:
"At the beginning, it was
bad. We had some death threats. Now, basically, all we hear is good news.
People come up and say, 'Aren't you the guy who owns Huffman Aviation?'
And they shake hands with me."
Lily Tomlin said it best.
"No matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up."
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