May 24, 2005 (VENICE, FL) – A book alleging an FBI-led cover-up in Florida to conceal the truth about Mohamed Atta and his terrorist cadre while they were living in this country is a runaway bestseller at an independent bookstore in tiny Venice, Fl., home to three of the four terrorist pilots in the attack, including Mohamed Atta, who used it as a base of operations until days before the attack.
The Bookshop in Venice has over the years seen celebrities like Katherine Hepburn, but it's never seen people streaming in to buy a book in anything like the numbers that have been coming in to buy “Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta & the 9.11 Cover-up in Florida,” by author and producer Daniel Hopsicker.
“We’ve had overwhelming interest in the book,” said The Bookshop’s owner, Joan Williams. “Many people here saw the terrorists around town, and are intensely interested. A lot of people here have stories to tell.”
“I’ve never seen this sort of avid curiosity before, not even with the DaVinci Code,” confirmed assistant manager Carol Heineman. “This is a small town, but one day recently we had five people in a row come in and ask for ‘Welcome to Terrorland,’ and none of them were together. It’s captured everybody's imagination; I’ve seen real enthusiasm and excitement about it.”
What could casual observers of 9.11 in a tiny retirement community in Florida know that the country at large is missing…such that would cause them to line up for a little-publicized book?
“There is, unfortunately, an inverse proportion between the number of shocking revelations in 'Welcome to Terrorland,’” states author Hopsicker laconically, “and the lack of publicity it has received. For example, Mohamed Atta had an American girlfriend he lived with for several months, who was intimidated into silence by the FBI.”
“Don’t you would think the discovery that Mohamed Atta had had an American girlfriend who was at the time a pink-haired stripper would have made the news? But the Bush Administration’s shroud of secrecy over 9.11 has never been lifted. So nobody’s heard what she, and other eyewitnesses, have to say.”
“Nor have they heard about Atta’s booze-fuelled three day weekend in Key West, or the two mysterious German men who flew in to meet him there. And nobody knows about the big heroin bust, during the same month Atta and Marwan arrived at his flight school, on the Lear jet of the flight school’s owner, a secretive financier named Wally Hilliard. They produce heroin in Afghanistan, don’t they? So, what do you think was going on?”
“Welcome to Terrorland” is distributed by IPG. Now in hardcover, with a paperback edition coming this Fall.
