FIFTEEN MONTHS before the 9/11 attack a 26-year old Moroccan man whose name and multiple aliases appear on numerous terrorist watch lists started a company in Florida with a man who is today the Chief Military Attaché for the Moroccan Embassy in Washington, DC.
On June 30, 2000, as Atta and Al-Shehhi began flight training at Huffman Aviation, terror list suspect Mohammed Arara joined Colonel Ahmed Arara, the Military Attaché of the Embassy of the Kingdom of Morocco, and a third man, “Joseph El Sheik,” to incorporate Titim Holdings, Inc. with the Florida Department of Corporations, at an address just a stone’s throw from an apartment in Coral Springs used by Atta and Marwan.
“Titim” is a verb in Gaelic, we discovered. It means “to fall down.”
The Moroccan military attaché and his two Arab companions had just launched “Falling Down Inc.”
Were there two “Mohammed Arara's?” On the Finnish Banking Authorities Terrorist Watch list—so called because after being distributed worldwide by the FBI it was inadvertently made public by Finland in Oct of 2001—the terror suspect has the same vital statistics as the "Mohammed Arara" in business with the Moroccan Kingdom’s Defense Attaché in Washington.
As can be seen on documents recreated here, both the ‘Mohammed Arara’ on the watch list and the ‘Mohammed Arara’ in business with Col Arara, for example, list the same home address: 117 Westwood Ct., in Lake Worth, FL. This same address is also used by the Moroccan Embassy’s Col. Arara.
Six weeks after the attack, on October 25, 2001, the Palm Beach Daily Business Review reported Titim's Holdings Inc. paid $2.9 million for a 22,735-square-foot office building in nearby Coral Springs, FL.
Col. Arara has not returned calls to the Moroccan Embassy in Washington D.C. for comment.
"Just don't use my name in Haiti"
In addition to being business partners, Colonel Ahmed Arara and Mohammed Arara (whose family relationship if any remains unknown at this time) share the same home address, according to documents filed with the state of Florida, where both men used the same address in Atlantis, FL, just outside the Palm Beach County Park Airport.
During the final month of preparation before the attack, terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta flew out of this airport on numerous unexplained flights with still-unidentified companions. Mohammed Arara may have been one of these companions.
"Colonel, this is Guido. Guido, meet the Colonel"
But Mohammed Arara has other unexplained ties that are equally startling.
Three of the addresses on the Terrorist Watch List for suspected terrorist pilot Mohammed Arara also lead back to a mysterious German national, who we have until now identified as Pascal Schreier, 32, and his wife, Sandra Hamouda, a French-Tunisian woman who took over a flight school at Charlotte County Airport when it went bankrupt in February 2001, stranding dozens of foreign flight students, most of them, curiously, Moroccan or Tunisian.
Terror suspect Arara’s listed addresses include 514 El Vernona Ave in Sarasota FL; 1670 Via Bianca in Punta Gorda FL; and 117 Mooney Ave., also in Punta Gorda FL.
All three properties belong to Hamouda and Schreier. Called "Guido Pascal Schreier" in court documents, he was responsible for spearheading the European recruiting efforts of the Dutch-owned flight schools in Venice, FL..
The newly-disclosed ties of the couple, neither of whom returned phone calls for comment, also throws a spotlight on their little-known home port of call, Punta Gorda.
"Singing de 'Whiffenpoof Song' all de day long"
"The 9/11 terror plot intersected with the activities of a drug trafficking network of international scope, in ways that form a "crystal clear" picture of what was going on.” –Sibel Edmonds.
So… what's up with Punta Gorda? Located half-way between Naples and Venice, and home to Charlotte County Airport, where the smell of hay from nearby ranches mixes into an atmosphere of intrigue, the town’s pedigree explains a lot…
“The town of Punta Gorda, once a fishing village that drew the likes of a Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Ford in search of tarpon, has survived many a boom and bust period since its beginnings in the 1880s…” reported the Washington Post on September 10, 1977.
“The (Punta Gorda Isles) development was the brainchild of two retired Central Intelligence Agency men who met while on duty in the Far East, Wilbur (Bud) Cole and Al Johns, now president and chairman of the board, respectively.”
Flash-forward 40 years to the present. Not much has changed…
From the June 4, 2004 Charlotte Sun-Herald: "Punta Gorda City Councilman Tom Poole, who served with U.S. Army Special Forces during the Vietnam War and spent more than 20 years as a CIA clandestine services officer, said he finds no fault in Goss' record of public service or policies."
When we first reported that 23 helicopters had been stolen in Charlotte County it had seemed an aviation crime. Even though we've since become, it still isn't normal. And its definitely not normal to steal 23 helicopters from just one owner: The Sheriff’s Department.
Wags at the Airport insisted that the 23 missing helicopters hadn't been stolen, exactly… They’d just been released on their own recognizance.
It must be hard enough being a Southern Sheriff to begin with…what with all the stereotyping. And the Charlotte County's Sheriff's Department does an admirable job of keeping their heads held high and carrying on with their jobs even while being robbed blind.
But the stress of "having a flyable helicopter in Chile" and not being able to interest anyone in the Federal Government in going down and picking it up is not something most criminology majors at Florida State contemplate before choosing a career in law enforcement.
Which is why Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi must have felt right at home at the Charlotte County Airport when they moved down the road from Huffman Aviation in Venice in January of 2001, spending most of the next two months in a luxury pad in nearby Deep Creek which seems to somehow have escaped the FBI's attention.
The first thing the two young Arab pilots saw, every time they drove into the Charlotte County Airport after exiting Interstate 75 onto a rural county road running alongside it, no doubt reminded them that they were treading on the periphery of the Spook Hall of Fame…
They saw an Ark. A Flying Ark.
Atta & Marwan' s Deep Creek residence. Charlotte County Airport is bottom right.
"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.
