The importance of this week’s revelation that an Army intelligence unit was tracking Mohamed Atta’s movements in the U.S. during 1999 and 2000 is so mind-boggling that it seems nobody quite gets it yet…
You’ve been hearing it for three years in articles in the MadCowMorningNews, and in “Welcome to TerrorLand.”
Now you can hear it from an elite Army intelligence unit, one with at least several patriots with very large cojones. Their testimony is clear, explicit, and uncompromisingly contradicts the FBI’s official story. Only one conclusion can be drawn from it…
The FBI has been telling a massive lie to the 9.11 Commission and the American people, a lie whose result has been to halt in its tracks, as a Commission spokesman freely admitted on Thursday, the investigation into the murder of almost 3000 people.
People go to jail for that sort of thing, don’t they?
God willing, we may be about to find out.
The Dog Ate the 9.11 Commission’s Homework
9.11 Commission spokesman Al Felzenberg on Thursday excused the Commission’s decision to withhold from their Report any mention of the Army Able Danger intelligence unit in Tampa which was tracking Mohamed Atta and other members of his terrorist cadre during 1999 and 2000.
Felzenberg cited the fact that the information provided to them by military officers in the unit did not agree with the FBI’s timeline concerning Atta’s arrival in the U.S.
Information provided by a military officer from Able Danger did not make it into the final report, “because it was not consistent with what the commission knew about Atta’s whereabouts before the attacks,” Commission spokesman Al Felzenberg said.
Staff investigators became wary of the officer, Felzenberg stated, after he stated that the military unit had identified Atta as having been in the United States by late 1999 or early 2000. ‘The investigators knew this was impossible, since travel records confirmed that he had not entered the United States until June 2000.”
“There was no way that Atta could have been in the United States at that time, which is why the staff didn’t give this tremendous weight when they were writing the report.”
Forget Jamie Gorelick. Forget trumped-up allegations that former Clinton Administration officials were weak on terror…
Al Felzenberg is lying. So is the FBI.
The Big Question Nobody’s Asked
911 Commission did no independent investigation of their own. Instead they relied entirely on the much criticized and beleaguered FBI… an Agency whose competence has been questioned by prominent individuals across all party lines… An Agency which has never managed to offer a coherent account of such investigative niceties as an accurate chronology of when Atta arrived in the United States, and what he did (and with whom) when he got here.
Here’s the big question nobody seems to be ready to ask: Upon what basis did the 9.11 Commission conclude that the FBI’s timeline was correct and that an elite Army Intel unit was mistaken in saying they were tracking Mohamed Atta roaming freely across America during 1999 and 2000?
We’d love to hear Felzenberg hem and haw his way around that.
So too, we suspect, would relatives of the innocent murdered victims.
What’s at Stake: The Fate of what’s left of what used to be called The Free World.
The controversy over news that an Army intelligence unit was tracking the movements in the U.S. of Mohamed Atta’s terrorist cadre during 1999 and 2000 offers the last best hope for Americans to take a close look at the FBI’s timeline of Mohamed Atta’s time in the U.S.
What they will see is a tissue of lies comprising a deliberate cover-up.
Calling unwelcome attention to the massive inaccuracies in the FBI’s timeline was probably not Republican Curt Weldon’s purpose when he brought the story to light…But if his efforts to implicate Clinton Administration officials results in highlighting the FBI’s incomplete and corrupt investigation, we think he get some kind of medal, maybe called the Inadvertent ‘Dumb-Ass’ Hero Award.
We suspect his Republican friends would much prefer to let sleeping dogs lie. Because it isn’t just one elite Army Intel unit that’s saying it… In the aftermath of the 9.11 attack numerous eyewitnesses came forward to attest to Atta’s presence in the U.S. before June of 2000.
Their number even includes a U.S. Government official with a signed and dated loan application from Mohamed Atta his-ownself.
In interviews with major news organizations Johnelle Bryant, an official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, revealed that Atta and three other September 11th terrorists visited her Florida office seeking a government loan.
ABC’s Brian Ross reported: “Johnelle Bryant is the USDA loan officer in Homestead, Florida, who Atta approached in May of 2000, long before al-Qaeda and bin Laden were household words.”
Mr. Atta swung by in May, 2000, and Ms. Bryant remembers quite a bit about it.
“At first,” she says, “he refused to speak with me,” on the grounds that she was, in his words, “but a female.”
“I told him that if he was interested in getting a farm-service agency loan in my servicing area, then he would need to deal with me.”
Ms. Bryant says the applicant was asking for $650,000 to start a crop-dusting business. His plan was to buy a six-seater twin-prop and then remove the seats. “He wanted to build a chemical tank that would fit inside the aircraft and take up every available square inch of the aircraft except for where the pilot would be sitting.”
Here’s the kicker, or rather, the smoking gun: Before Atta left her office he filled out a loan application.
Loan applications are dated, aren’t they? That’s why Johnelle Bryant knows exactly when Atta was in her office. so, without even referencing any of the other numerous indicators of Atta’s presence in the U.S., one thing that can be said with absolute certainty:
The FBI’s timeline, their chronology of events, the essential tool of any homicide investigation, is wrong. And not wrong by accident, either.
Wrong on purpose. Wrong by design.
By the way: don’t try dropping by Bryant’s Homestead office to confirm the details with her, as we did…She’s no longer there.
She’s (presumably) been airlifted to the Island of Lost Witnesses.
Another Question We Bet You Thought Has Already Been Answered
Where did Atta and Marwan first go to flight school in the US.?
If you answered “Huffman Aviation” you’d be wrong That’s because the flight school Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi first attended in the U.S. has never been named.
It is unknown. It is The Mystery Flight School.
The name of the first school Atta attended would seem to be one of the first facts uncovered in the 9/11 investigation. But it hasn’t been… After first visiting a flight school in Norman Oklahoma, the FBI said Huffman Aviation was the first flight school Atta attended. 
But the owner of Huffman Aviation, Rudi Dekkers, denied it, declaiming responsibility for the terrorists having been allowed into the U.S.
On the morning after the disaster anchor Jane Clayton of the CBS Morning News asked Dekkers: “How was it that they (Atta and Marwan) could gain access and admittance to your school?
“Well, they didn’t came through our paperwork,” Dekkers replied.
In interviews as well as sworn testimony before Congress, Dekkers passed any blame onto the first flight school the terrorists first attended.
It was this school, Dekkers said, which held responsibility for Atta’s INS paperwork and visas, not his.
“Like if they were calling from Europe and we know two months ahead and we know they are showing up. As I say, they came from another flight school out of Florida. Probably that flight school did all the INS paperwork with them in their country.”
“Another flight school out of Florida.”
He was equally vague later that day on ABC’s Good Morning America. Only now he changed the location of the unnamed first school. Correspondent Jim Mora asked Dekkers: “Now, how did they get to you? Did they apply to the school? Did they just show up?”
“No, they just walked up into the front door,” Dekkers replied. “Apparently they were flying at another school—I’ve heard Tampa; I can’t confirm that.”
This is a really obscure flight school. It has no name. Its located somewhere out of Florida, but near Tampa.
Dekkers’ reference to Atta’s first flight school—attended before he came to Huffman Aviation—went completely un-remarked upon in the national media. And Dekkers didn’t just mention the mystery flight school once or twice…
He did it numerous times. “The two men were clearly from the Middle East,” he told the New York Times on September 13. “They complained that they had begun instruction elsewhere but didn’t like the school.”
Did the New York Times ask Dekkers where “elsewhere” had been? They did not.
The Washington Post reported a similar story on Sept. 19,2001 quoting Dekkers saying Atta and Al-Shehhi showed up complaining about the experience at “another school.” “Another school.” Located where?
Did the Post ask for the name of this flight school located elsewhere? They did not. Or if they did, they’re not telling us.
Making this omission seem even more sinister is the Post’s own headline. A headline like “Hijack Suspects Tried Many Flight Schools” promises, at a bare minimum, a story containing a list of the flight schools “tried.”
When two of the largest and most respected newspapers in America are both guilty of an omission this glaring, what other conclusion is there than that a massive cover-up is in progress?
“I said up North somewhere. Why do you want to know?”
Even in his sworn testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on March 19, 2002, Dekkers is vague about the earlier flight school attended by Atta and Al-Shehhi. This time he places it ‘up North.’ “They had stated they were unhappy with a flying school they attended up North,” Dekkers told the Committee.
Maybe they just weren’t all that interested. Maybe not. Maybe the reason officials insist with a straight face that Atta did not arrive before June of 2000 is that telling the truth will open up a big ‘can of worms.’
During April and May of 1999, for example, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Ft. Myers, FL. has accused Wally Hilliard and Rudi Dekkers of using three separate Lear jets to take 26 unsupervised and unauthorized passenger flights from Naples, Florida to numerous locations around the country. Reportedly, they were flying rich Saudi Princes around.
But whatever it was Hilliard and Dekkers were up to in 1999 proved more than a little dangerous to one man, Robert Michael Johnson. A six-passenger Cessna 210 belonging to Hilliard crashed in the Gulf two miles off the Naples Pier in early February, resulting in the death of the pilot. The cause of the deadly crash remains unclear.
Not by accident, either… “A federal investigation into a fatal plane crash offshore from Naples may be hampered because the aircraft’s owner has suspended salvage operations,” reported the Feb 9, 1999 Fort Myers News-Press. “AeroJet Service Center called off the salvage operation, apparently because it was costing more than the aircraft was worth.”
This news may not have helped the dead pilot’s mom gain closure. But hey… you have to break a few eggs, right?
One last example will have to suffice. We can feel a queasiness coming on, a need to excuse ourselves and go throw up.
Regular readers of the MadCowMorningNews are already well aware of Atta’s presence in Venice in April and May of 2001, where he lived right across from Rudi Dekker’s Huffman Aviation at the Venice Airport.
“Somebody didn’t get the memo, okay? It was an honest mistake.”
But that’s too easy. Poetic justice would be to let the FBI hoist itself with its own petard:
Mohamed Atta’s sojourn in Charlotte County is not even in the official story, which is really strange, because the FBI itself wrote a memo to the INS which was introduced in court during the deportation hearing of a Tunisian flight student at the Charlotte County Airport who was suspected of espionage.
If they had known anybody would be paying attention, they’d have probably remanded her to a military tribunal.
Professional Aviation at the Charlotte County Airport catered to a student body consisting mainly of foreign nationals from the small Mediterranean country of Tunisia, considered a moderate Arab state. There were so many Tunisians at the school that it made the news well before the 9/11 attack…
“From the steady hand on the throttle to the aviator sunglasses, Mariem Ezzahi looked every bit like the experienced pilot she hopes to be back in her native country of Tunisia,” reported the Charlotte Sun-Herald. “Mariem’s goal is to become a commercial pilot like her late father, who flew jets for Tunis Air, the country’s national airline.”
Alas, Mariem got stiffed by the owners of the school, who, come to think of it, just might get their paychecks from the same place as Rudi Dekkers and Wally Hilliard. Dozens of Tunisian students were left stranded by the bankrupting of the flight school at the Charlotte County Airport. Wally Hilliard, who knew Mohamed Atta personally while he was “attending” his flight school, pulled the same scam in Orlando.
Many student pilots lost their life savings. The story received a flurry of local media attention. Students picketed the company’s offices and staged a sit-in. Television news crews from Charlotte County and Fort Myers broadcast their plight.
Then three of the Tunisian students attending Professional Aviation were taken into custody during the week after the attack…
One of them was 21 year-old Maryem Bedoui.
When Professional Aviation went under, Bedoui moved to Venice and took lessons from the “Quiet” Magic Dutch Boy, Arne Kruithof, located two doors down from the loudmouth Magic Dutch Boy’s school, Huffman Aviation.
During a deportation hearing in Bradenton, Florida Bedoui told the Judge that she had been friends with one of Atta’s roommates, but she denied knowing Atta, and denied involvement or knowledge of the 9/11 plot.
But the FBI wrote a letter to the immigration judge presenting evidence for why Bedoui should be deported. The letter said Bedoui attended flight schools in Punta Gorda at the Charlotte County Airport and in Venice at the same time hijackers Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi were there.
And this is where the FBI get caught telling a Big Lie. Because according to the FBI’s chronology Atta and Al-Shehhi were only at Huffman Aviation from July to December 2000.
And Maryem Bedoui didn’t enter the U.S. until 2001.
The revelation that this nations chief investigative agency has knowingly fabricated their chronology of Atta’s time in the U.S. might be cause for nothing but a shrug. After all, Democratic Republics have had trouble with their own Praetorian Guards since Roman times.
But looking at the “Big Picture” may provide little solace to anyone who saw a loved one hanging half-in and half-out of a window 100 stories above the earth on the morning of September 11, 2001.
If some find it difficult to stomach taking the long view, who can blame them?
Maybe what the FBI is really trying to say is: “It just can’t be helped.”
We’ll see…
