It’s déjà vu all over again…
And enough to give anyone old enough to remember Vietnam a nightmarish sense of having been right there—exactly there—before.
The surge in Iraq is not what it was advertised to be—a last gasp effort to clutch victory from the jaws of defeat—but a transparent ploy to subvert the will of the American people as expressed in the last election.
A bait and switch tactic successfully employed in 1968 to make Richard Nixon President was dusted off. Nixon was elected because he had—he said—a secret plan to end the Vietnam War, and Americans, rocked by a decade of assassinations and what was nearly a nuclear war over Cuba, were desperate to convince themselves that —for once—he 'might could' be telling the truth.
It didn't start with 9/11… Or Iraq
Of course, he wasn’t. By the time the last helicopter left the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon, it had taken longer to end the Vietnam war than it took to fight and win World War II.
(And even that wasn’t long enough for Howard Hughes, who was reportedly frantically looking for someone to bribe to keep it going a little longer.)
There is a direct echo of this today in Iraq.
Allied armies swept across France and Germany, across North Africa, up the Burma Trail in South Asia, and island-hopped across the Pacific in less time than its taken to clear the road in from the airport in Baghdad.
During our lifetimes America has begun measuring its wars—not in years—but in generations. Baby boomers were the Vietnam Generation. Whatever they’re calling teenagers today will one day be remembered as the Iraq Generation. Or maybe the Iraq-Iran Generation.
The question that needs to be asked isn’t why they do it… It’s how. How did we get here?
Out-Orwelling Orwell
“Those who control the present, control the past,” George Orwell wrote.
How they do it is by “preparing the battlefield.”
We’ve just finished a summer-long post-graduate course in how they do it, facing the very real prospect of being hounded out of business after being hauled (once again) into court.
Instead of reporting the latest in the various outrages we’d normally be following: the 5.5 -ton Homeland Security Cocaine One DC9; the murder beef in South Florida for which Jack Abramoff is apparently getting a “pass;” the criminal dereliction of our national press in covering the story of the 9/11 terrorist conspiracy at its base of operations in Venice, Florida…
We spent our summer vacation preparing to go to court. And what we learned there is that–right now– they are preparing the battlefield for a struggle that will take place after the Bush Administration leaves office, over what happened in Venice, Florida in the 18 months before the 9/11 attack.
How I Spent My Summer Vacation
A Sarasota County Courthouse was the site two weeks ago of the latest skirmish in the organized effort to suppress, discredit, and/or remove from the public record evidence unearthed during our investigation into the activities and associates in Florida of Mohamed Atta’s cadre of terrorist hijackers during the 18-month run-up to the 9/11 attack.
A roll call of the effort to date includes:
- two lawsuits;
- the emergence of a “second Mohamed" in Venice, a French-Tunisian man who—despite looking nothing like Mohamed Atta—claimed it was he who had been misidentified as the terrorist ringleader by numerous witnesses, including an American girl, Amanda Keller, with whom he lived for several months;
- a brief and unconvincing retraction of her highly-detailed account from Keller herself, in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, one of three newspapers which initially reported her account, and the corroborating accounts of a half-dozen credible eyewitnesses;
- and a concerted attempt to roll back the startling information that a half-dozen of Atta’s closest associates while he was in Florida weren’t Arabs, but German, Swiss, and Austrian.
Pecked to Death by Ducks
What New Orleans was to the Kennedy Assassination, Venice is to the 9/11 terrorist conspiracy: the operation’s nerve center.
Instead of Clay Shaw, picture secretive financier Wallace J. Hilliard. For David Ferrie, pencil in Rudi Dekkers.
But because there has been no courageous prosecuting attorney like Jim Garrison exposing elements of the conspiracy, it’s unlikely the story will ever have an Oliver Stone to bring it to life.
Jim Garrison discovered that the faint outline of what really happened in Dallas was still visible in New Orleans several years after the murder of JFK. Today some of the wiring for what became the 9/11 attack is still exposed in Venice, FL.
Therein lies the rub, and the reason we’re being pecked to death by ducks.
The minions of a huge, shadowy, and unnamed organization—the ducks— hauled us back into court for a hearing in front of Robert Bennett, Jr., the Chief Judge of the Sarasota Circuit Court. He was considering a motion to hold us in contempt of the settlement agreement reached last year with one of the German pilots we’d identified, in “Welcome to TERRORLAND,” as a close associate of Atta’s.
Inconvenient facts I'm still allowed to mention
The Miami lawyer representing the German pilot indignantly told the Sarasota Herald Tribune at the time, "He's constantly reporting that my client somehow has had something to do with terrorists, which is a total lie.”
The pilot who sued us—who we’d admitted we’d been in error in identifying as an associate of Atta’s—is a convicted smuggler, who was living, at the time he sued, in the Naples, Florida home of a Hungarian Mobster convicted of money laundering in 1991 while serving as the manager of the Indian Casino on the reservation of the Morongo Indian Tribe in Cabazon, CA.
It’s a little far afield for a Hungarian Mobster to be running an Indian Casino in California. Or perhaps its just an 
excellent example of the globalization of organized crime.
This same German pilot—who, again, wasn’t an associate of Mohamed Atta’s—bought a business in Naples, Florida, from another German pilot, a man named Wolfgang Bohringer.
Return of the Snake-Oil Standard
Subsequently, the mysterious Bohringer became the subject of a terror alert issued by the FBI in the South Pacific last summer. Exposing the fact that a close associates of Atta’s in Florida included non-Arabs, like Wolfgang Bohringer, will be seen someday to have been as important to the true story of the 9/11 attack as the exposure of New Orleans as the operations center for the pre-assassination planning for the Kennedy Assassination.
It was Amanda Keller’s identification of Bohringer as a close associate of Atta’s, combined with his suspicious activities, which formed the basis for the terror alert.
But despite—or maybe because of—that fact the Sarasota Herald Tribune offered no explanation for why any woman would want to pass herself off as the former girlfriend of a man responsible for murdering almost 3000 innocent people.
“They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard again,” Kurt Vonnegut once said.
“It was ‘my bad,’” Amanda Keller supposedly said.
