| "Being
Connected Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry"
Tied down at the front corner of the
Charlotte County Airport (it has since been moved--we'd like to think as
a result of its recent notoriety) was a vintage silver DC 3 resembling
nothing so much as an airborne Noah’s Ark, replete with painted hippos,
giraffes and elephants climbing up the fuselage toward the cockpit.
The parked plane was a conspicuous
sight at the small rural airport for at least two years, after being seized
by law enforcement officials from notorious pilot Frank Moss.
Moss, who still flies out of the Charlotte
County Airport, gained infamy during the Iran Contra Hearings which revealed
him to be a drug smuggling pilot and fly-by-night airline owner.
For a drug smuggler, Moss had some
strange connections. With Col. Oliver North, for example. The Flying Ark
at the Charlotte County Airport, it turns out, isn't the first airplane
Mr. Moss has "donated" to the U.S. Government. That honor belongs to a
DC-4 spotted off the west coast of Florida by U.S. Customs agents, whereupon
the plane began dumping into the Gulf below, law enforcement authorities
wryly noted, what “appeared to be a load of drugs.”
In the unpleasantness which ensued,
it was learned Oliver North had known Frank Moss' Contra supply planes
were being used to bring back drugs into the U.S. An address book found
aboard contained the Virginia phone number of North's "courier," Robert
Owen, and that in a memo to Owen North had written: "Moss’s “DC-6 which
is being used for runs [to supply the Contras] out of New Orleans is probably
used for drug runs into the US.”
No doubt Col. North was socked--shocked!--at
the news.
"Good old Ollie. Always on top of
things. "
Alas, as we learned in "Barry &
"the boys,'" being connected means never having to say you're sorry. And
Frank Moss--much like Rudi Dekkers--appears to have led a charmed life,
somehow always evading major unpleasantness with federal authorities.
Au contraire...
Even though he was under investigation
for narcotics offenses by a total of ten different law enforcement
agencies, the State Department thought so highly of Moss that they signed
him on to fly "humanitarian aid" missions to the Contras.
Maybe there's just something in the
air at the Charlotte County Airport. Frank
Moss isn't even the only one based there who became famous in the scandal
over contra cocaine. Another pirate and buccaneer calling Charlotte County
Airport home was Dietrich Reinhardt, linked with Barry Seal's Mena, Arkansas
cocaine operation in the Iran Contra Hearings. Like Pascal Schreier,
Reinhardt is German.
Probably just a coincidence.
In another even-more-amazing coincidence,
Reinhardt's business partner at Charlotte County Airport, Jamie Hill, is
the very man suspected by law enforcement of criminal mischief in making
their helicopters disappear. Maybe he was a wizard. Maybe he did black
magic in his hangar.
We wouldn't mind asking Pascal Schreier's
wife, Sandra Hamouda. She owns the hanger right next door.
"Keeping the shades pulled down
since the dawn of the millennium"
"You have a network of people who
obtain certain information and they take it out and sell it to … whomever
would be the highest bidder. Then you have people who would be bringing
into the country narcotics from the East, and their connections. It is
only then that you really see the big picture. The post-9/11 intelligence
'failures' included the willful quashing by the government, of investigations
tracing these criminal networks.-- Sibel Edmonds, former FBI translator
Operating out of Charlotte County Airport,
Dietrich Reinhardt’s Caribe Air, was called a CIA proprietary airline
in a Senate Intelligence Committee report which investigated the company
for delivering Hawk and TOW missiles to Iran in the arms-for-hostages deal
between the U.S. and Iran.
It was a blemish. But things would
get even worse.
When Federal prosecutors seized the
company’s aircraft in the early 90's, they had been parked at the infamous
Mena Ark. Airport, and Reinhardt was accused of allowing his planes to
be used to ship drugs worth billions of dollars into this country.
In sum, Dietrich Reinhardt is not the
sort of person you'd exactly like to see rubbing elbows with the terrorist
element out at Charlotte County Airport.
How odd then to discover that Rudi
Dekker's Huffman Aviation had been doing business with Caribe Air.
The disturbing fact slipped out during
a controversy in Lynchburg, VA. over an aviation contract that had been
awarded to a phantom company, which maintained a phantom presence inside--where
else?-- Huffman Aviation in Venice. About the phantom presence that
had previously been even-more invisible while housed under Rudi Dekker's
flying circus maintop, a source in Lynchburg noted, “They stay
strictly to themselves, and keep their shades pulled down.”
The Lynchburg City Council hearings
revealed that Huffman Aviation had a "maintenance contract" with Caribe
Air. It makes a certain sense.
You wouldn't want just anyone vacuuming
the planes.
"High Plains Drifters with prayer
rugs"
“The real activities taking place
behind the scenes are criminal… Everything from drugs to money laundering
to arms sales. And yes, there are certain convergences (between) these
activities and international terrorism. Sibel Edmonds
In a Sept 21, 2001 Story County Sheriff
William Clement told the Charlotte Sun-Herald that Atta had lived in the
area and attended a flight school at Charlotte County Airport, under an
alias.
The alias Atta used, we have learned,
was “Mohamed Arajaki,” the same one he used with Amanda Keller while
living in the Sandpiper Apartments in Venice. FBI agents told Amanda Keller
that they already knew this to be one of Atta's aliases, when they
showed up to retrieve a check he'd written to bail her out of jail.
Yet on the terror watch list the FBI
listed Mohamed Arajaki as if this were some another individual entirely.
Nothing could be further from the truth. But maybe that’s the way the
FBI likes it.
Sheriff Clement told reporters Atta
had been in flight training at the Charlotte County Airport, at David Byers’
Professional Aviation. Byers denied it. “He may have had friends here,”
Byers said. “Perhaps he was visiting, but he was not at our school as
a student.”
His words "may have" just been meant
for public consumption. Byers and the FBI knew better. Two days after the
attack his school received a visit. Apparently it wasn't pretty.
"David Byers' pupils have been a focal
point for the FBI in Charlotte County,” read a news account in the Charlotte
Sun. “At least eight of them have been interviewed several times each.”
The paper reported, "After tipsters
said they saw Atta there late last year or early this year agents seized
records from a financially troubled flight school at the Charlotte County
Airport, Professional Aviation, that recruited students from Tunisia and
went out of business in the spring of 2001."
Tunisian?
"A Very Private Enterprise"
Sandra Hamouda's half-Tunisian, we
learned, and she has an extended family in Florida. Hamoudas are listed
as officers of a number of apparently family-led firms in Punta Gorda,
with names like Universal Technologies and Airex Enterprises. Globex Enterprises.
Non-specific sounding names can sometimes
be a tip-off to something... We recall being in a trendy Los Angeles eatery
one night chatting with a well-dressed and colorful fellow habitué named
Pepe, who in a fit of bonhomie gave us his business card.
Everyone said Pepe was with the CIA.
But his company's name, according to his business card at least, was "Los
Angeles Private Enterprise." It had seemed kind of cool.
Post 9/11both Pascal Schreier and his
wife Sandra Hamouda persisted, as executives in another Florida flight
school, Pelican Flight Training Center. When the New York Times did a story
about struggling flight schools in Florida on the two-year anniversary
of the 9/11 attack, the two schools profiled both received some badly-needed
free publicity.
Out of the 220 flight schools in Florida,
the Times picked Venice "Magic Dutch Boy" Arne Kruithof’s Florida Flight
Training. And Pascal & Sandra's Pelican Flight Training Center.
This is no doubt just coincidence,
we keep telling ourselves.
"It was called 'Operation Money
Flowing Out The Ass'"
“After almost three years the
American people still do not know that thousands of lives can be jeopardized
under the unspoken policy of ‘ protecting certain foreign business relations.”
—Sibel Edmonds
Atta and his doomed cadre played out
their journey to oblivion against a backdrop which contains clear and convincing
evidence of an unseen presence.
The connections between terror suspect
Mohammed Arara, Morocco’s Chief Military Attaché Colonel Ahmed Arara,
and German “recruiter” Guido Pascal Schreier, visible out of the corner
of the eye, are the scurryings back-and-forth that seem to be the routine
operations of a global network.
Mohamed Atta's terrorist conspiracy
operated, as we've seen, in close proximity to some celebrated ‘players’
from previous American scandals...
Could the group we've learned to call
"the
boys" be the ‘semi-official’ network which FBI whistleblower
Sibel Edmonds has forcefully alleged is --even now!-- being
protected from exposure by the FBI and State Department?
"These guys had money flowing out their
ass," Atta’s sometime American girlfriend Amanda Keller told us. "They
never seemed to run out of money. They had massive supplies of cocaine.
Whenever they’d run out, they’d go over to the flight school. I followed
them one day with Sabrina to see where they were going, and saw them go
into Florida Flight Training."
But the people telling the "official
story" in America's major media deny that the terrorists received any outside
help at all while they were in the U.S.
Mohamed Atta & co. were the Lone
Cadre. They were the Lost Planet Airmen. Strangers in a Strange Land. Things
like the puzzle of Charlotte County’s 23 missing helicopters have
absolutely no relevance to an understanding of the 9/11 attack.
How could they? The terrorists didn't
know
anybody!
None of the officials accounts mention
Atta hanging in the seedy company of Americans with multiple “priors.”
No purveyors of the official story have even hinted that Mohamed
Atta might have "close associates" while he was in Florida who weren't
even Arab... and that there were non-Arabs with colorful criminal histories
who Mohamed Atta called "brother."
None mention the possibility that Atta's
very presence in the U.S. might have been facilitated and
made possible by people who know how to pull a few strings while busily
and industriously engaging in what social scientists primly call “state
sponsored crime.”
Such talk is verboten in
America.
There was beaucoup strange activity
at Charlotte County Airport while Atta's crew slithered through.
But they hardly went unnoticed. Even if the airspace overhead was
filled
with soon-to-be missing helicopters, they were noticed.
So here's the deal: One of us
cannot be wrong.
You Make the Call.
One final irony from the Charlotte
County Airport: something we noticed out of the corner of our eye while
getting busy putting wild conspiracy theories and baseless rumors to rest.
Pascal Schreirer’s wife, Sandra,
created a company at the Airport called Aeronautical Services, Inc. in
the early. 90's. Her partner in the venture, a man named Rickey Hilton,
was also busy running a little venture called "Defense Trading," even as
Atta & CO. were being kept busy not knowing anybody at the Charlotte
County Airport. Thanks to the Wayback Machine we found a page from "Defense
Trading" of their now-defunct website. You
can take a look at it here.
Defense Trading looks like the kind
of place where you 'might could' get a helicopter without all the typical
fol-der-rol the government usually insists on. It is tempting to suggest
that Charlotte County’s 23 missing helicopters might have had something
to do with it...but we're already being sued by one of Adnan Khashoggi's
associates.
And we think one at a time is enough. |