icepick
08-12-2004, 10:55 AM
don't know if this has been covered yet ....but look at #50
Mohamed Atta loved pork chops,
and 49 other things you may not know
BreakForNews.com,
10th June, 2004 by Minstrel Boy Democratic Underground
21st July, 2004 Amended by BreakForNews.com
I just finished Daniel Hopsicker's Welcome to Terrorland. He exposes the cover story of the Florida flight schools, and the ongoing cover-up.
The whole thing stinks of Iran/Contra and CIA drugs. It's the same, bloody game.
Though his style can be annoyingly breezy, I highly recommend the book. There's original research you won't find anywhere else but here and on his website: http://www.madcowprod.com.
FYI, here are some notes I kept while reading the book:
• 1. In Venice Florida, Mohamed Atta lived for two months with an American stripper/lingerie model named Amanda Keller.
• 2. Atta loved to party. He was out with Keller nearly every night they were together. He was a heavy drinker, snorted coke, was a stylish dresser and wore expensive jewelry.
• 3. According to Keller, Atta loved pork chops.
• 4. Keller dumped him after he embarrassed her at a night club by dancing, poorly, atop a speaker ("doing that old 'Roxbury head bob' thing, you know"?)
• 5. Atta revenged himself later on Keller by returning to the apartment they’d shared and killing her cat and kittens, disemboweling and dismembering them in her apartment for her to find.
• 6. In Miami, Atta consorted with women known to be linked to the Mafia.
• 7. Atta’s email list included names of people who worked for defense contractors. One, for instance, worked for Canadian firm Virtual Prototypes, which helped develop the avionics for F-15, F-22 and B-2.
• 8. Atta was enrolled as a student at the International Officer’s School of Maxwell Airforce Base, and witnesses recall him having been introduced around at an officers' club party.
• 9. Atta was fluent in at least Arabic, English, German, French and Hebrew.
• 10. One day when Atta was rummaging through his flight bag, Keller got a look inside. Her words:
"The thing the FBI was most interested in was his pilot bag. They asked about it a lot. He kept it locked, and they wanted to know whether I had ever seen anything in it. I told them yes. One day he opened it briefly, and there were a lot of papers in it, and there was a blue log book in a different language. Mohamed was fluent in almost any language you can think of. He had a kind of Daytimer in there, too. And a folder with all these different ID’s in it. And that’s when I saw one – because it fell out – a little blue and white thing the size of a driver’s license. It had his picture on it, and it looked like a mug shot, or a prison shot. And it didn’t look like him, and I asked him, 'Who is this?'
"And he said, 'that’s me.' He told me it had been taken back when he was in some kind of militia-type deal, like a military-type deal, he said. He compared it to our military only they teach you different tactics. He didn’t elaborate.
"He didn’t say where it was from, either. But the writing looked like a cross between Hebrew and Arabic, those frilly little lines. He told me he spoke Hebrew. I said bullshit. So he started speaking it, and I guess he did.
"He told me that he went to different countries and studied. He had pilot’s license from several different countries. But all the pictures looked different. All the names were different. He had a license to fly from just about every country he had been to. He went to pilot’s school in all these countries."
• 11. Atta, Keller, a stripper named Linda and two Germans partied for three days in Key West. Atta paid for everything. Rented three rooms, one just for the men’s luggage, which Keller says contained drugs. The men had a business meeting the women were not permitted to attend. Met with people, Keller says, who flew in just to meet Atta. Somber and quiet after meeting. (Key West Airport a known drug transit point. The Sheriff used to be under orders to keep the dope sniffing dogs off airplanes, and at one time even sent patrol cars to escort the drugs to Miami.)
The German revelers in Key West were a brother team - two pilots from Munich who had known Atta for some years. They were Stephen and Peter Verhaaren. Amanda had been led to believe Stephan and Peter were Austrian. She only knew these European friends of Atta by first names. Through records from the various airport authorites Lois Ann Battuello, a researcher working with Hopsicker stumbled onto Wolfgang's last name; and through his sale of a business to Stephan, was able to identify these two, for example. With the last names in tow, Daniel then began making contacts at the Naples Airport where these individuals were well known.
• 12. Atta was a licensed pilot at least during the months of March and April 2001 when he lived with Amanda Keller. He had the privileges of an instructor while he was at Huffman Aviation, and may have helped pilot South American drug runs.
• 13. The FBI timeline says Atta left Venice Florida in December 2000 after completing his flight training. But he didn’t. Dozens of locals say different – his landlord, neighbours, cab drivers, restaurant employees and his girlfriend, for a few instances – and have been told not to talk about it by federal authorities. The FBI publicly sought information regarding Atta’s time in various US locations, but not Venice Florida, where he spent most of his time in the US. Why the intentional misdirection? What are they trying to keep hidden?
• 14. Under pressure from the FBI, and despite numerous witnesses who had known them together, Keller publicly retracted her story of having lived with Atta, saying he’d been another hijacker named Mohammed, no last name, who seems to have only existed to get Atta out of this story that didn’t fit the official version.
• 15. On September 8th, 2004 --the Saturday before the 9/11 attacks, at a bar called Shuckums in Ft Lauderdale, Atta and two companions got drunk. The FBI showed up at the bar just 12 hours after the attack with pictures of two of them, one Atta, saying only “they were on the plane and passed away.” Manager Tony Amos and bartender Patricia Idrissi identified both. Manager Amos said they’d gotten "wasted," Atta drank Stoli vodka for three straight hours. Atta blasphemed: "F*ck God!" he’s said to have cursed.
• 16. The witnesses then retracted the story of Atta being drunk. They now said he’d only drank cranberry juice the entire evening. Both Amos and Idrissi have gone, no one knows where, but the current bartender says she believes their leaving was somehow 9/11 related.
• 17. Fourteen of the 9/11 hijackers made Florida their base of operation, and clustered around two flight schools. What is it about Florida, and these flight schools, that drew them?
• 18. Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi paid $28,000 each to Rudi Dekkers’ Huffman Aviation for flight instruction that, the chief instructor of a neighbouring school said, was available at dozens of other nearby locations for a fraction of the price. Why did they pay an inflated price to Dekkers?
• 19. Dekkers’ and his financier, Wally Hilliard, purchased the flight school just months before Atta and the other hijackers began arriving. Before their purchase, the flight school catered to largely American students. After, student body became 80% foreign, mostly Middle Eastern. Yeslam bin Laden, Osama’s brother, sent students there for his business.
• 20. Atta also frequented Arne Kruithof's Florida Flight Training Center, a block away from Huffman Aviation. Amanda Keller says it is where he would go to replenish his cocaine stash.
• 21. Though Dutchmen Dekkers and Kruithof claimed they had not known each other before each coincidently purchased flight training schools in Venice shortly before terrorists began arriving for training, witnesses claim the two had known each other well for years before.
• 22. Wally Hilliard is a supposedly-retired, born again insurance executive from the Midwest (motto for his insurance company had been "Hate Sin, Fight Communism, Back the Pack!"), who upon arriving in Florida entered into aviation businesses with an assortment of criminal and covert intelligence elements.
• 23. Dekkers and Hilliard had not been in the flight school business before they made the purchase. They paid an inflated price for the school, and did no due diligence before the purchase. They lost millions, but this was apparently not a problem. Charlie Voss, former employee of Dekkers and an Iran/Contra pilot who’d also flown "Northern Alliance guys" in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and who had given Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi a place to stay for a few weeks when they first arrived in Venice Florida: "Rudi’s greedy, and when you’re greedy you can be used for something.... When something doesn’t make obvious business sense, sometimes it’s because things are being done for another reason that doesn’t have a lot to do with dollars and cents. His business did not add up."
• 24. Dekkers went from broke to flush very quickly, without having business success with the flight school. One observer said “He didn’t even have the money to buy gas for an airplane… and yet a year later he shows up and plops a million seven, a million eight or two million dollars on the table as if it were paper money.”
• 50. According to his girlfriend, Atta was a big Beastie Boys fan.
Mohamed Atta loved pork chops,
and 49 other things you may not know
BreakForNews.com,
10th June, 2004 by Minstrel Boy Democratic Underground
21st July, 2004 Amended by BreakForNews.com
I just finished Daniel Hopsicker's Welcome to Terrorland. He exposes the cover story of the Florida flight schools, and the ongoing cover-up.
The whole thing stinks of Iran/Contra and CIA drugs. It's the same, bloody game.
Though his style can be annoyingly breezy, I highly recommend the book. There's original research you won't find anywhere else but here and on his website: http://www.madcowprod.com.
FYI, here are some notes I kept while reading the book:
• 1. In Venice Florida, Mohamed Atta lived for two months with an American stripper/lingerie model named Amanda Keller.
• 2. Atta loved to party. He was out with Keller nearly every night they were together. He was a heavy drinker, snorted coke, was a stylish dresser and wore expensive jewelry.
• 3. According to Keller, Atta loved pork chops.
• 4. Keller dumped him after he embarrassed her at a night club by dancing, poorly, atop a speaker ("doing that old 'Roxbury head bob' thing, you know"?)
• 5. Atta revenged himself later on Keller by returning to the apartment they’d shared and killing her cat and kittens, disemboweling and dismembering them in her apartment for her to find.
• 6. In Miami, Atta consorted with women known to be linked to the Mafia.
• 7. Atta’s email list included names of people who worked for defense contractors. One, for instance, worked for Canadian firm Virtual Prototypes, which helped develop the avionics for F-15, F-22 and B-2.
• 8. Atta was enrolled as a student at the International Officer’s School of Maxwell Airforce Base, and witnesses recall him having been introduced around at an officers' club party.
• 9. Atta was fluent in at least Arabic, English, German, French and Hebrew.
• 10. One day when Atta was rummaging through his flight bag, Keller got a look inside. Her words:
"The thing the FBI was most interested in was his pilot bag. They asked about it a lot. He kept it locked, and they wanted to know whether I had ever seen anything in it. I told them yes. One day he opened it briefly, and there were a lot of papers in it, and there was a blue log book in a different language. Mohamed was fluent in almost any language you can think of. He had a kind of Daytimer in there, too. And a folder with all these different ID’s in it. And that’s when I saw one – because it fell out – a little blue and white thing the size of a driver’s license. It had his picture on it, and it looked like a mug shot, or a prison shot. And it didn’t look like him, and I asked him, 'Who is this?'
"And he said, 'that’s me.' He told me it had been taken back when he was in some kind of militia-type deal, like a military-type deal, he said. He compared it to our military only they teach you different tactics. He didn’t elaborate.
"He didn’t say where it was from, either. But the writing looked like a cross between Hebrew and Arabic, those frilly little lines. He told me he spoke Hebrew. I said bullshit. So he started speaking it, and I guess he did.
"He told me that he went to different countries and studied. He had pilot’s license from several different countries. But all the pictures looked different. All the names were different. He had a license to fly from just about every country he had been to. He went to pilot’s school in all these countries."
• 11. Atta, Keller, a stripper named Linda and two Germans partied for three days in Key West. Atta paid for everything. Rented three rooms, one just for the men’s luggage, which Keller says contained drugs. The men had a business meeting the women were not permitted to attend. Met with people, Keller says, who flew in just to meet Atta. Somber and quiet after meeting. (Key West Airport a known drug transit point. The Sheriff used to be under orders to keep the dope sniffing dogs off airplanes, and at one time even sent patrol cars to escort the drugs to Miami.)
The German revelers in Key West were a brother team - two pilots from Munich who had known Atta for some years. They were Stephen and Peter Verhaaren. Amanda had been led to believe Stephan and Peter were Austrian. She only knew these European friends of Atta by first names. Through records from the various airport authorites Lois Ann Battuello, a researcher working with Hopsicker stumbled onto Wolfgang's last name; and through his sale of a business to Stephan, was able to identify these two, for example. With the last names in tow, Daniel then began making contacts at the Naples Airport where these individuals were well known.
• 12. Atta was a licensed pilot at least during the months of March and April 2001 when he lived with Amanda Keller. He had the privileges of an instructor while he was at Huffman Aviation, and may have helped pilot South American drug runs.
• 13. The FBI timeline says Atta left Venice Florida in December 2000 after completing his flight training. But he didn’t. Dozens of locals say different – his landlord, neighbours, cab drivers, restaurant employees and his girlfriend, for a few instances – and have been told not to talk about it by federal authorities. The FBI publicly sought information regarding Atta’s time in various US locations, but not Venice Florida, where he spent most of his time in the US. Why the intentional misdirection? What are they trying to keep hidden?
• 14. Under pressure from the FBI, and despite numerous witnesses who had known them together, Keller publicly retracted her story of having lived with Atta, saying he’d been another hijacker named Mohammed, no last name, who seems to have only existed to get Atta out of this story that didn’t fit the official version.
• 15. On September 8th, 2004 --the Saturday before the 9/11 attacks, at a bar called Shuckums in Ft Lauderdale, Atta and two companions got drunk. The FBI showed up at the bar just 12 hours after the attack with pictures of two of them, one Atta, saying only “they were on the plane and passed away.” Manager Tony Amos and bartender Patricia Idrissi identified both. Manager Amos said they’d gotten "wasted," Atta drank Stoli vodka for three straight hours. Atta blasphemed: "F*ck God!" he’s said to have cursed.
• 16. The witnesses then retracted the story of Atta being drunk. They now said he’d only drank cranberry juice the entire evening. Both Amos and Idrissi have gone, no one knows where, but the current bartender says she believes their leaving was somehow 9/11 related.
• 17. Fourteen of the 9/11 hijackers made Florida their base of operation, and clustered around two flight schools. What is it about Florida, and these flight schools, that drew them?
• 18. Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi paid $28,000 each to Rudi Dekkers’ Huffman Aviation for flight instruction that, the chief instructor of a neighbouring school said, was available at dozens of other nearby locations for a fraction of the price. Why did they pay an inflated price to Dekkers?
• 19. Dekkers’ and his financier, Wally Hilliard, purchased the flight school just months before Atta and the other hijackers began arriving. Before their purchase, the flight school catered to largely American students. After, student body became 80% foreign, mostly Middle Eastern. Yeslam bin Laden, Osama’s brother, sent students there for his business.
• 20. Atta also frequented Arne Kruithof's Florida Flight Training Center, a block away from Huffman Aviation. Amanda Keller says it is where he would go to replenish his cocaine stash.
• 21. Though Dutchmen Dekkers and Kruithof claimed they had not known each other before each coincidently purchased flight training schools in Venice shortly before terrorists began arriving for training, witnesses claim the two had known each other well for years before.
• 22. Wally Hilliard is a supposedly-retired, born again insurance executive from the Midwest (motto for his insurance company had been "Hate Sin, Fight Communism, Back the Pack!"), who upon arriving in Florida entered into aviation businesses with an assortment of criminal and covert intelligence elements.
• 23. Dekkers and Hilliard had not been in the flight school business before they made the purchase. They paid an inflated price for the school, and did no due diligence before the purchase. They lost millions, but this was apparently not a problem. Charlie Voss, former employee of Dekkers and an Iran/Contra pilot who’d also flown "Northern Alliance guys" in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and who had given Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi a place to stay for a few weeks when they first arrived in Venice Florida: "Rudi’s greedy, and when you’re greedy you can be used for something.... When something doesn’t make obvious business sense, sometimes it’s because things are being done for another reason that doesn’t have a lot to do with dollars and cents. His business did not add up."
• 24. Dekkers went from broke to flush very quickly, without having business success with the flight school. One observer said “He didn’t even have the money to buy gas for an airplane… and yet a year later he shows up and plops a million seven, a million eight or two million dollars on the table as if it were paper money.”
• 50. According to his girlfriend, Atta was a big Beastie Boys fan.