Mounting evidence in the investigation into the terror flight schools in Venice FL is raising questions of whether an officially-sanctioned drug trafficking operation there discouraged the FBI from taking action against the terrorists that might have averted the World Trade Center disaster. 

The dark specter of the drug trade is throwing an increasingly long shadow across the terrorist conspiracy’s activities in Venice, where Mohamed Atta and his close associates, many of whom were German, frequently used cocaine. According to a credible eyewitness, when their supplies ran low they would procure more from a flight school at the Venice Airport.

In an exclusive 3-hour videotaped interview at a secret location, 21-year old Amanda Keller, Mohamed Atta’s former live-in girlfriend, revealed that supposed “Islamic fundamentalist” Mohamed Atta and his closest associates in Venice were habitual cocaine users. 

“They were always drinking,” Keller told us. “Always. Beer or wine, or sometimes rum. Once I had met everyone there (at a ‘ safe house’ located in an condominium owned by Rudi Dekkers across the street from the Venice Airport)  they felt comfortable with me and pulled out the coke.”

“You saw Mohamed Atta do coke?”

“Yeah. The first time I saw him use it he borrowed a dollar from me to roll up as a straw, and then asked me if I wanted to do a line laid out on a glass table in the living room they used to cut it on. I said no. To me it was like something you’d see in a movie. It was the first time I’d ever even seen cocaine.”

Numerous eyewitnesses, including their apartment manager, their next-door neighbors, and a former Huffman Aviation insider, who vividly remembers her then-hot pink hair, have verified Amanda Keller’s relationship with Mohamed Atta. The two shared an apartment together for two months across the street from the Venice Airport.

“These guys had money flowing out their ass,” Keller stated. “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 (a German friend of Atta’s) to see where they were going, and saw them go into Florida Flight Training.”

The Florida Flight Training Center is owned by Arne Kruithof, one of the two ‘Magic Dutch Boys’ who run flight schools at the Venice Airport.
“Being ‘Connected’ Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry.”

In an incredible development, Federal court documents obtained by the MadCowMorningNews  reveal that the Learjet belonging to Huffman Aviation owner Wallace J. Hilliard, confiscated with 45 pounds of heroin onboard on July 25, 2000 at Orlando Executive Airport, was procured by Hilliard from the same source which—two decades earlier—provided the Learjet used by famous drug smuggler and CIA agent Barry Seal.

Moreover, affidavits filed by machine-gun toting DEA agents who surrounded the Learjet also indicate that Wally Hilliard’s involvement in the operation was much deeper than has so far been reported.

The Federal court records show that Hilliard got his Learjet from World Jet, Inc., owned by the notorious drug smuggling Whittington brothers of Fort Lauderdale, FL., who in their heyday in the early 1980’s commanded fleets of fishing trawlers, sailboats,  power boats, and jets. After being indicted for smuggling and tax evasion, their prized Learjet had gone to a man soon to become the biggest drug smuggler in American history, Barry Seal.

Small world.

The new revelations heighten concern that the true reason for the FBI’s failure to take action against terrorists which the Bureau has acknowledged knowing were training in Venice may have been their historical reluctance to meddle on another Federal Agency’s turf.

Nor was the FBI the only Federal Agency protecting the drug trafficking operation, court documents reveal. 

Though the Justice Department, through the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Orlando, declined to prosecute, the affidavits filed by DEA agents after the heroin trafficking arrests make clear their belief that the pilot of the plane, who worked directly for the Lear’s owner Wally Hilliard, was also involved and should have been charged along with the five Venezuelan and Colombian nationals who eventually pled guilty in the case, called “the largest-ever seizure of heroin in Central Florida” by the Orlando Sentinel.
“Reach out and touch someone.”

While machine-gun toting DEA agents swarmed around the plane, states the affidavit, “the pilot of the aircraft, DIEGO LEVINE-TEXAR, frantically attempted to make a telephone call using a cellular phone. LEVINE-TEXAR ignored agents and police officers who repeatedly ordered him to drop the telephone.”

“Agents had to physically remove the telephone from LEVINE-TEXAR’S hands,” the affidavit goes on. “Based on my experience I know that narcotics traffickers maintain frequent contact with one another while transporting narcotics and currency. I believe LEVINE-TEXAR attempted to contact other accomplices as to the presence of agents and other law enforcement officials.”

The affidavit confirms information the MadCowMorningNews had learned from sources at the Naples, FL Airport about the frequency of the plane’s trips to South America. (Flight School Owner’s Plane Seized for Heroin Trafficking) It states pilot Levine-TEXAR “stated he had known (Venezuelan) VALLES-DIAZ for approximately nine months. He has flown VALLES-DIAZ to New York and Fort Lauderdale approximately 30 times during that time.”

The affidavit continues, “LEVINE-TEXAR said that he and his company were paid a total of $600,000 for those trips, and that he was going to be paid $80,000 for the current trip after arriving in Orlando.”

Numerous aviation observers indicated that thirty flights in nine months—a weekly ‘milk run’ down and back to Venezuela—would ignite grave suspicions from any legitimate charter jet company. 

The discovery that Hilliard’s operation was paid cash for each of the flights, in the unanimous opinion of aviation observers in Southwest Florida, removes any question about the legitimacy of the enterprise.

“It’s just blatant,” said one. “They obviously weren’t even bothering to hide what they were doing.”
FBI inactivity explained?

As early as one week after September 11, the FBI was pointedly stating that they knew about terrorists rotating through Rudi Dekkers’ flight school in Venice, Florida.

“The FBI Knew Terrorists Were Using Flight Schools,” read a Washington Post headline one week after the attack. “Federal authorities have been aware for years that suspected terrorists with ties to Osama bin Laden were receiving flight training at schools in the United States,” the article stated.

What they left unanswered was why they did nothing to shut it down.

Indications of the FBI’s “guilty knowledge” were widespread in the aftermath of the attack, including the widely-reported fact that the FBI was at Huffman Aviation with search warrants at 2.30 a.m. the night after the attack. 

Now we have uncovered evidence indicating that the FBI was on the scene even earlier…

“How do you think the FBI got here (Huffman Aviation) so fast after the attack?” asked one Huffman Aviation insider. “They knew what was going on here. Hell, they were parked in a white van outside my house less than four hours after the buildings collapsed.”

“We heard that 16 of the 19 terrorists had been on Interpol’s Most Wanted list,” this aviation executive continued. “But early on I gleaned that these guys had Government protection. They were let into this country for a specific purpose. It was a business deal.”
A “Green Light” from the DEA

The new information adds to long-standing suspicions of drug trafficking held by aviation observers at the Venice Airport, who more than six months ago told us the Hilliard/Dekkers operation  had a ‘green light’ from the DEA at the Venice Airport.

“The local Venice Police Department (which mounted round-the-clock patrols at the Airport after Sept.11) were warned to leave them alone,” said one aviation executive at the time.

Further evidence of sinister currents swirling around the Venice Airport includes testimony from eyewitnesses indicating that Rudi Dekkers was in trouble with the DEA while still located at the Naples Airport in the mid-1990’s.

The notion of a Federal “hands-off” policy towards the Venice operation also helps explain a suspicious circumstance which has provoked much speculation in the local aviation community…

How did ‘ Magic Dutch Boy’ Rudi Dekkers, whose various businesses have all been utter and abject failures, manage to live in a $2.5 million mansion in a private gated community?

The rumor has long been that Dekkers has other sources of income.

A more important question is whether—were it not for the drug trafficking—the World Trade Center attack could have been prevented through the simple expedient of arresting known terrorist Mohamed Atta.
“Welcome to Casablanca.” 

Far from merely being negligent or asleep at the switch—the thrust of allegations expected to be aired in hearings by an Independent Commission currently being thwarted by the Bush Administration—the evidence indicates the CIA was not only aware of the thousands of Arab student pilots who began pouring into the U.S. to attend flight training beginning in 1999, but was in truth running the operation.

“The American people must know the full story has yet to be told,” Senator Richard Shelby, a Republican member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said at a hearing last month.

And U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham said on Sunday he is seeking to declassify ‘the most important information’ obtained in a congressional probe of the Sept. 11 attacks.

‘Frankly, there is a piece of information which is still classified which I consider to be the most important information that’s come to the attention of the joint committee,’ Graham said on CBS’s ‘Face the Nation.’ 

‘We hope that it will be declassified,’ Graham said. ‘I think it is an important part of our judgments as to where our greatest threats are and what steps we need to do to protect the American people here at home.’ 

Suspicions expressed by an unexpected source, Republican Senator  Shelby, indicate bipartisan unease with the continuing cover-up. 

“Time is not on our side,” Shelby said. “You know, we were told that there would be cooperation in this investigation, and I question that. I think that most of the information that our staff has been able to get that is real meaningful has had to be extracted piece by piece.” 

The Republican Senator, quoted in the New York Times on September 10, 2002, stated “there is explosive information that has not been publicly released. I think there are some more bombs out there … I know that.” 

Here here.