Questions mount about the precise nature of the conspiracy which took down the World Trade Center on Sept 11, even as the time for asking them grows urgently short.
Justice, vengeance, and our duty to our dead demand adherence to a simple progression.
Identify the bad guys who killed our people. Find the bad guys who killed our people. Kill them.
London England to Venice, Florida. Macro to micro. Tony Blair sketches out the Cliff notes version of the case against Bin Laden. He says, "Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization with ties to a global network."
"A global network."
What global network? A global network of what? Said global network assisted terrorist cadre. Said global network otherwise remains shadowy and undefined.
London England to Venice, Florida. Macro to micro. A massive flight training operation funnels hundreds of foreign national pilots here. Noise complaints heat up City Council meetings. Rudi Dekkers’ operation makes Big Noise. "During a period of two hours some 90 flights went over… 15 planes flying overhead six times each."
"Fifteen planes overhead."
A terrorist squadron. Bin Laden Air.
Three weeks later on the tarmac at the Venice Airport they are standing clear of Rudi Dekkers. Former associates plead ignorance. They are "no longer with the company."
More is learned about Rudi Dekkers. Rudi’s $500,000 yacht rocks at anchor in Naples, Florida. Rudi has Big Friends. Rudi has Big Problems. Rudi’s stock is Marked Down. Rudi’s story does not ‘cohere.’ Rudi’s friends are in High Places. Down on the tarmac Rudi is Mucho Unloved.
If the FBI is buying Rudi’s act, it isn’t because of his sterling reputation. "I tolerated Rudi's advances because I needed to keep my job," said former Dekkers’ employee Nicole Antini.
Two weeks before the World Trade Center attack she filed suit to force him to enforce the settlement of a sexual harassment charge. Dekkers agreed to settle for $15,000. Now he was balking at paying. "As long as I have worked at Huffman Aviation," Nicole said, "I have been subjected to sexual harassment by Rudi Dekkers."
Dekkers’ Venice Florida flight school was terrorist American beachhead. Huffman Aviation was terrorist Omaha Beach. The FBI pointedly said—early—they knew about terrorists rotating through Rudi Dekkers’ flight school in Venice, Florida. They leave hanging the question of why they did nothing to shut it down.
Dekkers’ waxes indignant. "I don't need anything from you, just a check to start flying."
Dekkers tells reporters how he happened to provide pilot training to the terrorist cadre:
"We're just a business."
Consider the (business) logic.
Two Dutch nationals, Arne Kruithof and Rudi Dekkers, buy two flight training schools at the ‘way-off-the-beaten-track’ Venice Florida airport in 1998.
Dekkers begins extensive "marketing" in Belgium and Germany. Atta live in Germany. Mohamed Atta and at least four of his terrorist cadre leave Germany. They move directly to Venice, Florida.
They do not pass "go." If they collect $200, it comes in useful, because now they are in pilot training with Dekkers and Kruithof. Pilot training is expensive.
Atta and Al-Shehhi pay $38,000 between them. Dekkers is training 500 foreign national pilots at two separate facilities.
Yet, out at the Venice Municipal Airport, Rudi is falling behind on his rent.
Right now there are people in Federal custody whose connections with the terrorists are far less suspicious. Both men are foreign nationals and thus presumed to be flight risks. Yet neither Dekkers nor Kruithof is being held.
Big Clout. Big Friends. Big Trouble. Big Charade.
"We're just a business."
What global network? A global network of what?
The birth of the ‘Lone (Nut) Cadre theory.
Dekkers’ and Kruithof’s importance grew this week when the Washington Post proposed the ‘Lone (Nut) Cadre’ theory, which is now, they report, the operative assumption in the FBI’s investigation.
"The 19 hijackers who carried out the worst act of terror ever to occur on U.S. soil worked with little outside help as a single, integrated group," said the Post in a Sunday report on the state of the investigation.
"Little outside help."
"As more of the conspiracy becomes understood, government sources now say that the investigation so far suggests the 19 had "no major help" in the United States," wrote Post reporter Amy Goldstein.
"No major help."
"The FBI investigation into the plot is preliminary, and the conspiracy's precise nature probably will not be understood for years."
If the conspiracy’s precise nature won’t be understood for years, how can they rule out domestic involvement?
A Federal Agency with a preference for lone (nut) gunmen floats a Lone (Nut) Cadre trial balloon.
Think 19 Lee Harvey Oswald’s.
Think squads of ‘lone gunmen.’
Atta’s cadre was a Lone Cadre. Doing Lone Cadre-like things. Acting, Always, Alone…at least while in this country. No one else involved. No Higher Ups.
Tony Blair’s global network explanation now obsolete. Replaced by Lone (Nut) Cadre theory.
Think FBI. Think Whitewater. Watergate. Kennedy.
Think ‘cover up.’
"I did not have sexual relations with that woman."
"We're just a business."
The Sarasota FBI office, responsible for the Venice airport investigation, has so far not offered their version of what Rudi Dekkers was up to.
Were Middle Eastern terrorists wandering the Florida Panhandle and Gulf Coast as comfortably as if they’d been listening to Tom Petty records all their lives?
Or is something else the case? Might Rudi Dekkers and Arne Kruithof work for the CIA? Might the CIA have been training Bin Laden operatives as part of an intelligence operation designed to try to penetrate his organization?
Might that explain FBI lack of interest in the two Venice Dutch Boys?
When commercial flights resumed at Venice Municipal Airport after the Sept 11 disaster the first plane to take off was an Air Sunshine flight, part of a fleet based in Fort Lauderdale. The only passenger was the pilot. There was little other activity at the airport. Members of the media outnumbered pilots or passengers in the lobby of Huffman Aviation, watching national broadcasts about the attacks.
Air Sunshine is owned by one Mirmohammed Adili, whose large family is involved in numerous aviation and import-export ventures. It is one of just two air carriers the American military lets fly into the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo, Cuba. Mirmohammed Adili's Air Sunshine is in Fort Lauderdale.
Just six months before they hijacked commercial planes and slammed them into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, bin Laden operatives tried to buy a multi-million dollar Boeing 727.
They found a willing broker in… Fort Lauderdale. It is just coincidence. The Lone Cadre received "no major outside help."
Atta didn’t Keep A Diary. Instead, Atta Left A Will.
When it’s released experts read Atta as Saudi Wahhabi. A fundamentalist puritanical strain. No women at the funeral. No flowers. No wailing. No gnashing of terrorist teeth.
But Atta is Arab elite commando. Atta is Arab elite. Atta’s Father is Egyptian diplomat/lawyer. Elite make poor fundamentalists. Too much money to be made to spend time speaking in tongues. Rockefellers don’t handle snakes at Monday night revivals.
What induced Islamic terrorists to move to a retirement enclave with more golf carts than cars? It couldn't have been the nightlife.
But these terrorists–strange for devout Muslims, it seems– dig lively nightlife. Devout Muslims abstain from alcohol. These Muslims order premium brands. These Muslims enjoy a night on the town as much as any Infidel.
Federal agents flash pictures at a South Florida bar of the two terrorist pilots who just a day earlier had demolished the World Trade Center. One of them drank Stolichnaya vodka for three straight hours, one bartender remembers.
"Muslim extremist" Marwan al-Shehhi was drinking rum.
Was Mohammed Atta a "devout Islamic fundamentalist?" Saudi puritanical or Stoli guy?
Mohammed Atta is Islamic Stolichnaya
48 hours after the slaying of John Fitzgerald Kennedy a CIA pilot named David Ferrie was under suspicion of participation in the assassination conspiracy. Thirty years later Joe Pesci plays Ferrie in Oliver Stone’s JFK the movie.
48 hours after the September 11th attack, a flight school owner named Rudi Dekkers, known to have trained virtually the entire terrorist pilot cadre, and a possible CIA asset, seemed impervious to suspicion. What suspicions? He was being booked onto Larry King Live.
The National Enquirer has the hot headline of the week:
"Terrorists Still in America."
"Where they are. What they’re doing. How you can spot them."
Do America a favor. Drop a copy at your local FBI.
