Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley
Posted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 8:40 am
PART 1 OF 3
CHAPTER V: COULD THE ALLEGED HIJACKERS FLY THE PLANES?
We must now begin to discuss the specific patsies of 9/11. Much detail about them will have to be ignored; much of it is disinformation which deserves to be ignored anyway. This entire area is dominated by hearsay evidence purveyed by the fiction-mongers of the FBI. Many of the identities offered are frauds, composites, or legends. What will interest us in the stories of the patsies are those singularities which show them for what they are, and which point beyond the superficial world of the patsies towards the underlying reality shaped by intelligence agencies and moles.
Five of the persons accused by the FBI of being implicated in the 9/11 actions apparently turned out to be alive; the FBI has never provided any proof that those accused were actually involved. Indeed, FBI Director Muller has admitted that his case against the notorious nineteen would never stand up in a real court of law. It would therefore be perfectly proper to reject the entire list of nineteen out of hand as just another effluvium of the FBI molehill -- and, in effect, we do. At the same time, we find that at least some of the nineteen are double agents and tainted by criminal intent. But we also wish to examine the list of nineteen to discover the inherent complicities and contradictions in the government's case. In this way, the list of the nineteen can be used to cast light upon the operations of moles and terrorist controllers.
The FBI and the 9/11 commission have uniformly alleged that the leader of the mythic 19 hijackers who commandeered the aircraft was Mohammed Atta, a well-to-do Egyptian who they say was a very intolerant, puritanical, and doctrinaire Moslem. Reality looks much different, and rules out any notion that Atta could have accepted the mission of a suicide pilot because of profound religious convictions. He was in fact not a practicing Moslem, but rather a devotee of alcohol, cocaine, call girls, and pork chops. These biographical details are vital because they demolish any notion of Atta as a fanatic kamikaze. He was a sybaritic playboy or worse, addicted to the pleasures of the flesh, and no ascetic to immolate himself for a cause of faith. He emerges rather as a much more complicated figure, surely a sociopath, and in all probability a patsy who was being told one thing by his patrons and controllers while he was steered to act in ways which set him up in the role he played, and in all probability for liquidation.
In order to be accused of playing the role of suicide pilots, the 9/11 patsies needed to have a smattering of flight training. What actual expertise they were able to acquire in this process is something that we will examine, but it is already clear that the flight lessons were mostly for show. Ironically, they were conducted in south Florida, in a neighborhood which is redolent of the CIA covert operations of yesteryear, from the Bay of Pigs to Watergate to Iran-contra. The school for patsies was located in the back yard of CIA Miami station, and just down the road from the US Central Command.
These matters have been illuminated by the reporting of former network newsman Daniel Hopsicker of the Mad Cow Morning News, who has shown much more real interest in the behavior and personality of Atta and his associates than the FBI ever has. Hopsicker has documented that Atta in particular was a piece of human refuse, a mixture of bungling ineptitude with psychopathic rage. Atta's mental impairment is such that it is very hard to attribute to him the remarkable feats of aviation skill which are ascribed to him by the mythmakers of the FBI and the 9/11 commission. Yet Hopsicker insists that Atta was indeed capable of flying his plane into the WTC north tower by the seat of his pants. Hopsicker also appears focused on the Saudi Arabian track, which leads away from the essential role played by the network of moles operating within the US government.
FLIGHT SCHOOLS FOR PATSIES
Atta, along with Shehhi, trained at the Huffman Aviation flight school in Venice, Florida, a small town on the Gulf coast between Tampa and Naples, where most of the population consists of retired persons. Ramzi Binalshibh, who the official version claims was destined to be the twentieth hijacker, was on his was to Venice when he was stopped because of visa problems. Venice had two flight schools, and both of these flight schools were owned and operated by newly emigrated Netherlands nationals. Huffman Aviation was run by Rudi Dekkers, while Florida Flight Training Center, another school located at Venice airport, was run by Arne Kruithof, also from the Netherlands. The third accused suicide pilot, Siad al Jarrah, trained at Kruithof's Florida Flight Training Center. Kruithof claimed privately that he had been trained at a US military installation in southeast Missouri. Atta and al Shehhi supposedly paid Dekkers more than $:38,000, hardly the bargain rates that supposedly drew the two to Huffman in the first place. Two Dutch nationals running flight schools at the same small airport which were attended by three out of the four alleged hijackers is a remarkable pattern. Both Dutchmen arrived in Venice in 1998. According to intelligence sources quoted by Hopsicker, "two Dutch boys buying adjacent flight schools which shortly thereafter get overrun by terrorists is one Dutch boy too many." Three alleged terrorists at two flight schools located at one small airport, when there are some 200 flight schools in Florida, is also a curious circumstance. (Hopsicker, Mad Cow Morning News 2, 7, 8)
On March 6, 2002 the US Immigration and Naturalization Service sent Dekkers letters telling him that Atta and Shehhi - -now allegedly deceased -- had met the necessary requirements and were now eligible to apply for extensions of their visas in to stay in the US. How had the INS made this blunder in two of the best-known cases having to do with 9/11? "The error seemed particularly difficult to explain, sniffed the New York Times, because Mr. Atta and Mr. Shehhi were among the most infamous of the 19 hijackers." Media coverage focused on the "troubled" INS, but this incident totally consistent with the hypothesis that the names of Atta and Shehhi had been flagged in government computers with national security overrides, which had served to make them virtually immune from watch lists, criminal checks, and the like. A lazy mole had evidently neglected to remove the override when the usefulness of these two patsies had come to an end, and so the posthumous visa approval forms were sent out. A similar case is the CIA cable announcing the presence of accused hijacker Al Hazmi in the US in March 2000, which was marked "Action Required: None." (JICI, September 20, 2002)
Atta's name had been on the CIA-FBI-INS watch list for many years, since an older person with the same name bombed an Israeli bus in the occupied territories of the West Bank on October 12, 1986. (Hopsicker 144-145) This indicates that the name was flagged with a national security override to allow him to enter the country. Atta was stopped by police for a traffic violation in Broward County, Florida on the night of April 26, 2001; he was even arrested for not having a drivers license. But he was soon released on bail - presumably the national security override again.
The FBI arrived at Venice airport no later than 2:30 AM in the morning of September 12, which indicates that they had known something about Atta's and Shehhi's being there. According to some accounts, the FBI arrived within a few hours, by the middle of the afternoon. According to an aviation businessman and employee of Huffman interviewed by Hopsicker, "They [the FBI] were outside my house four hours after the attack." This suggested that the FBI had known where Atta and Shehhi were all along. Hopsicker adds: "Like many eyewitnesses we spoke with, this longtime aviation executive spoke of being intimidated and harassed by FBI agents. They didn't strong-arm him to make him think harder and cough up some useful leads, but to ensure he kept his mouth shut. We've heard about this from other people, haven't we? It's becoming a refrain." This source had the following to say about Atta and his friends: "I thought these guys [Atta & Co.] were double agents." (Hopsicker 150) But Dekkers, who might easily have been arrested as a material witness, instead became a media personality, appearing on the Larry King interview program on CNN.
THE FALSE FLAG AIR FORCE
According to some press accounts, as many as 27 al Qaeda operatives took flying lessons in the US in the months before 9/11. Before 2001, Dekkers had launched an aggressive marketing campaign in Europe to get foreigners to come to his flight school for training. One of his selling points was that it cost less to learn to be a pilot in the US than in Europe. Soon 80% of the students enrolled at Huffman Aviation were from abroad, and many were Arabs. About 400 foreign nationals were graduating every year from Huffman. According to some reports, some Arab flight trainees who had been taking lessons at Huffman disappeared around the time of 9/11 -- either a few days in advance or more or less simultaneously with the terror attacks. This is a hint of the hidden hands pulling the strings: intelligence agencies love to have a few spare patsies around who can be thrown into action at a moment's notice if some other patsy is arrested, killed, or incapacitated. After John Hinckley Jr.'s attempt to kill President Reagan in 1981, more than a dozen deranged loners with obsessions similar to Hinckley's were reported from police blotters in various parts of the US, according to intelligence reports at that time.. The organizers of that hit, like the organizers of 9/11, took no unnecessary chances; they had redundant backup echelons of patsies ready to go in case they were needed.
Working with Dekkers and providing most of the funds was Wally J. Hilliard, who also had an interest in a nearby Lear Jet rental service. Hilliard had a special interest in Rum Cay in the Bahamas, a suspicious island patrolled by a single policeman. This island was said to be the scene of operations linked to Saudi moneybags Adnan Kashoggi, who figured prominently in Bush 41's and Oliver North's Iran-contra gun-running operations during the 1908s. A Lear jet belonging to Hilliard was seized by the DEA in July 2000 when it was found to be carrying 15 kilos of heroin on a flight back from Venezuela -- a sizable amount. Hilliard and his company alleged that they were unaware of the narcotics, which they said had been brought on board by a passenger without their knowledge. Hilliard appeared also to have operated a more or less regular commuter air link with Havana, Cuba, something that is theoretically illegal because of the US embargo on all trade and other contacts with Castro's island -- suggesting an operation sanctioned by the shadow world. (Mad Cow Morning News 32)
General aviation and commuter air services between Florida and the nearby islands are inextricably linked with drug-running, which was highlighted during the Iran-contra hearings of the late 1980s, and which of course has never ceased. These operations are associated in the popular mind with Oliver North, but it should be recalled that the covert operations czar of the Reagan administration was of course Vice President George Bush, who directed every phase of Iran-contra with the help of figures like Felix Rodriguez. (Tarpley 1992) This pattern was later confirmed by former DEA agent Celerino Castillo, who personally confronted Bush about drug running, but got no response. The DEA estimates that two thirds of the illegal drugs coming into the US pass through the Bahamas.
Journalists have speculated that Dekkers and Kruithof were cut-outs for a US intelligence operation at the Venice airport. Huffman Aviation was also the location of offices of Britannia Aviation, a small and undercapitalized company which surprisingly beat out better-known and better-connected firms to win a contract to provide maintenance services at Lynchburg Regional Airport in Virginia. At a hearing, one of Britannia Aviations executives, Paul Marten, said that one of his main customers was Caribe Air, a reputed CIA proprietary which reportedly took part in Iran-contra drug smuggling. Aircraft belonging to Caribe Air were seized by prosecutors at the airport in Mena, Arkansas, during that phase. Caribe Air had moved its headquarters to the island of Dominica. A source said that Britannia Aviation was a firm favored by the US Drug Enforcement Administration, from which it had received "a green light." In the summer of 2002, Kruithof narrowly escaped death when the Twin Beech E 18 aircraft in which he was flying to Cancun, Mexico, crashed. At the same time, deportation procedures and fraud charges were in progress against Dekkers, who was involved in a helicopter crash in January 2003. Efforts were clearly being made to intimidate these two key witnesses, or to silence them. The Kean-Hamilton Commission had no time for Dekkers and Kruithof. (Mad Cow Morning News)
The accused hijackers' choice of Venice, Florida also allows us to locate them better in the recent history of covert operations. If we take the Bay of Pigs (1961), the Kennedy assassination (1963), Watergate (1972-74), Iran-Contra (exposed in 1986), and 9/11, we find that there is a single common denominator: Florida, the Miami Cubans, and Cuba generally. For the Bay of Pigs, Watergate, and Iran-contra, the links are obvious: there is a continuity of people who populate these scandals, people like Felix Rodriguez who was part of the Bay of Pigs and then served as Bush 41 's operative in Iran-contra, or Frank Sturgis and his crew who link Howard Hunt's role in the Bay of Pigs with Watergate. In the case of the Kennedy assassination the links are not quite so evident, but evident enough: Oswald was an activist of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the Bay of Pigs survivors hated Kennedy, and there is a persistent connection between Operation Mongoose, the US government plan to assassinate Castro, and the killing of JFK. George Bush 41 allegedly chartered the ships used by the CIA in the Bay of Pigs invasion, was part of the Kennedy assassination coverup, was a leading Watergate figure, and directed most of what is known as Iran-contra. Underlying many of these connections is the sinister presence of CIA Miami Station, which was created in the early 1960s as the CIA's large-scale domestic facility. This is the infamous JM/WAVE which is described in the unauthorized biography of George Bush. (Tarpley 1992) Not far away is the Hobe Sound/Jupiter Island complex, the wintering place for some of the most prominent oligarchical masters of human destiny.
Venice Airport was built by the government during World War II for pilot training. Not far away in Tampa is the headquarters of US Central Command, which wages the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Central Command is located at McDill Air Force Base. There are indications of an NSA presence in Venice, as well. The legendary Mena, Arkansas airport was one of the airports used for gun running and drug running, but so was Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. In fact, there was hardly an airport in Florida and in the southern US generally that was not involved, and there is every reason to think that Venice was as well.
According to Hopsicker, "many of the flight trainers who had trained the Arab terrorist pilots had also flown missions out of the Venice-Sarasota airport for such Christian missionary services as televangelist Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing." One of the pilots who did the training at Huffrnan was Mike Mikarts, also a pilot for the fundamentalist "Agape Flights" of Sarasota which runs air missionary activity with obvious destabilization overtones in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. After Venice, Atta and Shehhi rented planes from Kemper Aviation at North Palm Beach Airport near Miami in August 2001. Owner Joe Kemper spent 20 years in Peru and Bolivia as a "missionary pilot" for the evangelical-run SAMAlR (South American Mission Air) which worked to bring fundamentalism to Andes mountains Indio tribes. SAMAIR is a part of an international evangelical/Pentecostal air wing, often drawing on former military pilots, who are not accidentally often found in areas in the middle of civil wars, drug gangs, and mercenary intelligence operations in Third World countries. Additionally, Joe Kemper's chief pilot trainer between 1989 and 1999 was Jean-Francois Buslik, who was later arrested on murder charges filed in Belgium, Buslik was implicated in the 1982-85 Brabant killings, a wave of serial killings and de facto strategy of tension which claimed the lives of over 30 victims at supermarkets in the Brussels suburbs. These were no ordinary flight schools. (Mad Cow Morning News 41; EIR, October 26, 2001)
MOHAMED ATTA, PORK CHOP FUNDAMENTALlST
Atta's father was a well-to-do Egyptian lawyer. Atta was a mediocre student of architectural engineering at Cairo University, and his family wanted him to obtain an advanced degree. Atta's life changed when he was selected to participate in an elite exchange program originally set up between the US and Germany which had been expanded to include engineers from other countries as well. Atta was befriended in Cairo in 1992 by an obscure German couple who had taken him under their wing. Between 1995 and 1997, Atta was a member of the Congress-Bundestag Program, a joint project of the US State Department and the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development. This program was administered by the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft. located in Koln. (FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung, "Atta Was Tutor For Scholarship Holders," October 18, 200 I; Chicago Tribune, March 7, 2003) Later, as a student in Hamburg, Atta had worked along with Shehhi and Binalshib for Hay Computing Service GmbH in Hamburg, Germany. There has been speculation that this company was a front for intelligence agencies.
Atta arrived in Venice in late April or early May 2000. Hopsicker shows that during his time in Venice, Atta did not behave like a puritanical Wahabite Islamic fundamentalist of the Bin Laden school. He rather appeared as a sybaritic hedonist and promiscuous playboy. He loved to attend topless bars, where he would order lap dances at the Pink Pony, or else stuff twenty dollar bills into the g-strings of the dancers at the Olympic Garden nightclub. He was also a regular at Harry's Bar in Naples. Atta's favorite nightspots were the Cheetah in Venice, and Margarita Maggie' s in Sarasota. FBI investigators showing pictures of Atta after 9/11 found that he had been drinking Stolichnaya vodka for three hours recently; with him was accused suicide pilot Marwan al Shehhi, who preferred rum. Atta was also a frequent cocaine user. He would habitually snort rows of cocaine with a dollar bill. His source of cocaine was apparently located at or near Kruithof's Florida Flight Training Center at Venice airport. When Atta went back to Hamburg, he was under surveillance by the CIA. (Mad Cow Morning News 27)
On one occasion Atta took Amanda and two other friends on a three-day orgy and bender of nightclubs, drinking, and cocaine in Key West. A waitress recalled seeing Atta wearing lots of jewelry, perhaps including a large crucifix -- "a big gaudy gold cross" and a "big watch." The waitress said that the conversation she overheard involving Atta and some others involved references to $200,000 and the need to answer to the "Family." Atta was also an eager eater of pork chops, another explicit violation of Islamic law. Atta's musical tastes inclined to the Beastie Boys. (Mad Cow Morning News 20, 30)
Atta also cohabited with a 22-year old call girl who may also have been a sex operative for one of the intelligence agencies. Amanda Keller worked for a "lingerie model escort service" in Sarasota called Fantasies & Lace. Her personal appearance was described as "slutty;" she dressed "like a hooker," according to published reports. Her hair was dyed hot pink during the time she was with Atta. This was Amanda Keller, who was inexplicably ignored by the tabloids and intimidated by the FBI. Her constant refrain was: "I can't really discuss anything. I'm afraid I'll get in trouble." Not just Keller, many witnesses in and around Venice have been harassed and intimidated by the FBI. (Hopsicker 63-68)
Atta and Amanda Keller lived together for two months. Keller says that her breakup with Atta began when he embarrassed her at the night club Margarita Maggie's in Sarasota. She recalled bitterly that "Mohammed, like a dumbass, was standing on top of a speaker dancing. The man could not dance to save his life. He was real stiff, just kind of shaking, doing the 'Roxbury head bob' thing. He just embarrassed me instantly with the people there, and I just pretended I didn't know him." Keller's attraction of Atta probably had something to do with money. Although he seemed to live in modest circumstances, Atta always had plenty of cash. He thought nothing of leaving a twenty dollar bill to cover a bar tab of $4.
According to Amanda Keller, Atta was also a cat-torturer. After she had thrown him out of the apartment they shared, Atta got back in and disemboweled her pet cat, leaving the remains on her kitchen table. He also dismembered five out of six kittens. As Keller remembered, "There were baby cat parts all over the place."
Atta was in Venice at least three times during the six weeks immediately before 9/11. He was seen in friendly conversation with Dekkers. Atta in particular had mastered the fine art of getting himself noticed and remembered when he wanted to. One witness spoke of Atta as a menacing presence: "He just stood back and glared at you with his dark eyes. It gave me a frightening feeling you wouldn't want to be caught in the parking lot at night with him." Another specialty was a nasty shout of "You do not speak to me unless I speak to you first" for anyone who approached him. Atta exchanged emails with employees at companies like Virtual Prototypes, a Canadian firm which works on sensitive projects for the Pentagon. He sent another email complaining that the American University in Cairo had dismissed a female student who had insisted on coming to class in her niqab, or face veil.
TERRORISTS FROM US MILITARY BASES
The other peculiarity about the alleged hijackers of 9/11 is that so many of them were directly linked to US military bases. According to press accounts, Atta attended the International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. Abdulaziz Alomari had attended the Aerospace Medical School at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas. Saeed Alghamdi had been to the Defense Language Institute at Monterrey, California. (Washington Post, September 15 and 17, 2001) According to Newsweek three of the FBI's group of 19 terror suspects had received training at Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida, and listed their address as locations on that base. Most foreign students at these facilities are there because they are sponsored by governments within the US orbit. But some may be sponsored by the US directly¬ especially if agent recruitment is the object.
The Newsweek coverage, entitled "Alleged Hijackers May Have Trained at U.S. Bases: The Pentagon has turned over military records on five men to the FBI," by George Wehrfritz, Catharine Skipp and John Barry, is especially instructive, and reads in part:
US government spokesmen issued less than ironclad denials, alleging that because of confusion among Arabic names, the accused hijackers had "probably" not been part of activities on the military bases cited. They were being confused with other Arabs with the same names, the military spokespersons suggested. The controlled corporate media soon stopped paying attention to this story. The Newsweek story quoted a former Navy pilot's comment that, during his years on the base, "we always, always, always trained other countries' pilots. When I was there two decades ago, it was Iranians. The shah was in power. Whoever the country du jour is, that's whose pilots we train." The country dujour was now, by implication, the "al Qaeda."
The intelligence community record in regard to two accused 9/11 suicide operatives was less than sterling. According to Michael Isikoff, these two were for a time the roommates of a seasoned informer. The two hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, had been known to the CIA since January 2000, when the two Saudi nationals showed up at a Qaeda summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. One had been a part of the attack on the USS Cole. As Isikoff reports:
The FBI, of course, came up with the cover story that their paid informer had failed to inform the Bureau of the true identity of his two mysterious houseguests. The informant's name was Abdusattar Shaikh. The FBI later refused to let the JICI Congressional investigators talk to him, claiming that he could not add anything of interest. The JICI did not exercise its power of subpoena in order to hear this important witness. Nor did the 9/11 commission.
But the FBI also had to admit that the San Diego case agent involved knew that visitors were renting rooms in the informant's house. On one occasion, a source reported, the case agent called up the informant and was told he couldn't talk because 'Khalid' -- a reference to Almihdhar -- was in the room. This makes it look like the case officer knew precisely who Khalid was. Isikoff cited I. C. Smith, a former top FBI counterintelligence official, as commenting that the case agent should have been more carefully supervising the people with whom his informant was fraternizing with -- among other things, to recruit the houseguests as possible informants. "They should have been asking, 'Who are these guys? What are they doing here?' This strikes me as a lack of investigative curiosity." He is on firm ground there; other counter-intelligence people were "stunned" by the FBI's lassitude.
About six weeks after moving into the house, Almihdhar left town, explaining to the landlord he was going back to Saudi Arabia to see his daughter. Alhazmi moved out at the end of 2000. It was not until August 23, 2001, that the CIA sent out an urgent cable to U.S. border and law- enforcement agencies identifying the two men as possible terrorists. By then it was too late. The FBI did not realize the San Diego connection until a few days after 9-11, when the informant heard the names of the Pentagon hijackers and called his case agent. "I know those guys," the informant purportedly said, referring to Almihdhar and Alhazmi. "They were my roommates."
FBI Director Mueller has repeatedly insisted there was nothing the bureau could have done differently to penetrate the 9-11 plot. That claim is patently absurd. In addition to the FBI, the alleged future hijackers were also under the scrutiny of the Israeli Mossad. The Mossad maintained a stakeout in Hollywood, Florida, and operated a safe house of their own close to the apartment where Atta and Shehhi lived. (Die Zeit, October 1, 2002)
COULD ATTA, SHEHHI, HANJOUR AND JARRAH PILOT LARGE AIRLINERS?
In addition to whether they were US agents or not, the big question regarding Atta, Shehhi, Hanjour, and Jarrah, just as it was in regard to Lee Harvey Oswald and Timothy McVeigh, is still: were they physically and mentally capable of carrying out the criminal actions ascribed to them? Patsies can always talk the talk -- but can they walk the walk, meaning, is it within their power, above and beyond all criminal intent, to create the effects observed? If not, we have a case of physical impossibility -- as we had in the cases of Oswald and McVeigh -- and we must look further for the true culprits. Here is an account from the mainstream press:
Atta, the alleged hijacker of Flight 11, and Shehhi, alleged hijacker of Flight 175, both of which crashed into the World Trade Center, attended hundreds of hours of lessons at Huffman Aviation. They also took supplementary lessons at Jones Aviation Flying Service Inc., which operates from the Sarasota Bradenton International Airport. According to the Washington Post, neither experience was successful. A flight instructor at Jones who asked not be identified said Atta and Al Shehhi arrived in September or October [2000] and asked to be given flight training. Atta, the instructor said, was particularly difficult. "He would not look at your face," the instructor said. "When you talked to him, he could not look you in the eye. His attention span was very short." The instructor said neither man was able to pass a Stage I rating test to track and intercept. After offering some harsh words, the instructor said, the two moved on "We didn't kick them out, but they didn't live up to our standards." (Washington Post, September 19, 2001) Could these substandard pilots execute the difficult feat of hitting the towers at high speed, flying by the seat of their pants?
HANI HANJOUR, MISFIT
So far we have heard little of Hani Hanjour, who is accused by the FBI of piloting American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon. According to press reports, Hanjour had visited Bowie's Maryland Freeway Airport just north of Washington DC three times since mid-August 2001 as he attempted to get permission to use one of the airport's planes. But Hani Hanjour was simply too clumsy, too inept. The question is crucial, because the plane that hit the Pentagon performed a stunning maneuver of which many a seasoned pilot would have been proud. But instead, Hani Hanjour turns out to have been a pathetic misfit. The following account is from The Prince George's Journal (Maryland), September 18, 2001:
Hani Hanjour is supposed to have executed a breathtaking 270 degree turn while descending from an altitude of 7,000 feet to below treetop level to hit the Pentagon, probably the most difficult maneuver performed by any of the kamikaze planes on 9/11. But he was not considered capable of flying solo in a Cessna! And what of Jarrah, the accused suicide pilot of United Airlines flight 93, the plane that was destroyed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania? He was not much better as a pilot. Arne Kruithof later explained that, when Jarrah arrived to start taking lessons, "We had to do more to get him ready than others. His flight skills seemed to be a little bit out there." Jarrah did succeed in getting a pilot's license, but he was never able to qualify as a commercial pilot, despite 200 hours of flight time logged. According to Kruithof, "he was a guy who needed some more."
Jarrah's roommate was Thorsten Biermann of Germany. Although Biermann got along fairly well with Jarrah, he soon refused to fly anywhere if Jarrah was to be at the controls. This was because of Jarrah's foolhardy refusal to refuel before a flight in bad weather. When they landed, the tank was almost empty. Biermann: "I decided I did not want to fly with him any more. Everyone I knew who flew with him felt the same way." (Longman 91-92)
AL QAEDA STALWARTS: DUMB AND DUMBER
Alleged hijackers Nawaq al-Hazmi (Flight 77), Khalid AI-Midhar (Flight 77) and Hani Hanjour (Flight 77) all spent time in San Diego, where they sought flight training. According to published accounts, "Two of the men, Alhazmi and Al-Midhar, also briefly attended a local fight school, but they were dropped because of their limited English and incompetence at the controls [In the spring of 2001], two of the men visited Montgomery Field, a community airport ...and sought flying lessons. They spoke to instructors at Sorbi's Flying Club, which allowed them to take only two lessons before advising them to quit. 'Their English was horrible, and their mechanical skills were even worse,' said an instructor, who asked not to be named. 'It was like they had hardly even ever driven a car ... They seemed like nice guys,' the instructor said, 'but in the plane, they were dumb and dumber."' (Washington Post, September 24, 2001) Rick Garza, Sorbi's chief flight instructor, told Al Midhar and AI Hamzi after two flights: "This is not going to work." Garza later said that the two "had no idea what they were doing." (Washington Post, September 30,2001) They were always prattling about flying big jets, but when Garza asked one of them to draw a picture of a plane, "He drew the wings on backwards." (Chicago Tribune, September 30, 2001) "It was clear they weren't going to make it as pilots." (London Observer, October 7, 2001) These two would-be pilots, although they were allegedly the most experienced and hardened terrorists in the entire group of 19, were subject to panic attacks in the cockpit, at which time they would begin praying out loud. The official version does not assert that they acted as pilots, but the basis of this part of the official story is wrapped in mystery, like the rest of it.
In addition to the supposed four suicide pilots, the story told by the 9/11 commission also includes some 15 "muscle hijackers." These were the members of the suicide teams whose task it would be to break into the cockpits, overpower the pilot, copilot and other flight personnel using box cutters and knives, keep the passengers under control, and guard the door to the cockpit once it had been seized. According to the 9/11 commission, "the so-called muscle hijackers actually were not physically imposing, as the majority of them were between 5'5" and 5'7" in height and slender in build." (Staff Statement No. 16, 8) These, then, were the ferocious fighters that were expected to quell the resistance of US airline pilots, most of whom come from military aviation, and many of whom are war veterans, to say nothing of flight attendants, stewardesses, and the general public.
What was the caliber and actual effectiveness of these figures? US propaganda has a vested interested in building them up as capable, even formidable individuals who had the ability to carry out the spectacular terrorism of 9/11. But sometimes the pathos of the patsies comes through. In Staff Report 16, "Outline of the 9/11 Plot," we read that Khalid Sheikh Mohamed (KSM, touted by the Bush regime as the "mastermind of the entire plot) "and Binalshibh have both stated that, in early 2000, Shehhi, Atta, and Binalshibh met with KSM in Karachi for training that included learning about life in the United States and how to read airline schedules." If they were still unable~ to read airline schedules on their own in the spring of 2000, these strange figures had a long way to go before 9/11. Be that as it may, the eyewitness accounts collected just after 9/11 seem to converge on the diagnosis that they were bunglers. According to one wag, they were the sort of people who could probably not obtain a drivers license in any state except New Jersey.
Accounts inspired by the official story generally try to portray the feats of Atta, Shehhi, and Hanjour as relatively easy. But when it comes to United 93 over Shanksville, the tone suddenly changes. Now the official version has to explain why the passengers, assuming they had already succeeded in taking back the cockpit from Jarrah & Co., were not able to land the plane. One of the passengers on United 93 was an experienced pilot of light planes who had also trained on a Falcon corporate jet simulator. Could this passenger have landed United 93? In his book on United 93, Jere Longman of the New York Times quotes Hank Krakowski, a 737 captain who was responsible for United's flight operations on 9/11. According to Krakowski, "If the guy was a professional pilot flying all the time, it would have been possible. If he was an occasional pilot, it would have been a pretty big challenge. You can get a boat into a dock, but it's a lot harder getting a cruise ship into a dock. The problem is the mass of the machine, the energy, the feel. It doesn't have the response of a smaller plane. It has much more kinetic energy. It takes training to get a feel for that." (Longman 188) These are of course the same problems that would have been faced by the hijackers, not in landing, but in hitting their targets. The prognosis for success in their case, without some form of outside help, could hardly have been much better.
WHY WERE THEY NOT ARRESTED?
During the summer of 2001, US intelligence agencies received numerous warnings from their foreign counterparts about the danger of coming terror attacks. MI-6 says that it alerted the US in 1999 to al Qaeda plans to use commercial aircraft as "flying bombs." In early August 2001, this warning was reiterated, this time specifying multiple airliner hijackings. Around the same time, the Cayman Islands told the us that al Qaeda was "organizing a major terrorist act against the US via an airline or airliner." In late July, Egypt informed the US that 20 al Qaeda agents were in the US, and that four had received flight training. In June, Germany warned the US that Middle Eastern terrorists were planning to use commercial airliners as weapons to attack "American and Israeli symbols which stand out." On September 7, Italy sent word of an attack on the US and UK using airplanes as weapons; the source was Father Jean Marie Benjamin, a leading expert on the Moslem world. In the late summer, Jordan sent the contents of an intercepted message, according to which a major attack, code named the Big Wedding, was imminent. It was to take place inside the US and employ aircraft, says this report.
In August, Russia alerted the US to an attack by about 25 terrorists, including suicide pilots, who would attack "important buildings like the Pentagon." In July, Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed, Muttawikil discovered that Bin Laden is planning a "huge attack" inside the US. He sent an emissary to convey this information to the US consul general, and also to a US intelligence officer. In late July 2001, the Argentine Jewish community obtained news of a coming big attack against the US, Argentina, or France. This was passed on to the US. On July 16, MI-6 report to Tony Blair that al Qaeda is "in the final stages" of a serious terrorist attack against the west. This was based on a reading of information from GCHQ, the British NSA, and also from the CIA and the NSA, which the British share according to a long- standing agreement with the US. In June, three Pakistani men in the Cayman Islands were overheard discussing a hijacking attack on New York. US intelligence was alerted. At the end of August, Egyptian President Mubarak personally warned US officials that Bin Laden was about to attack an American target inside the US. France sent a generic warning in late August that something big was up. India adds its own warning in mid-July. Israel, in early August, said that 50 to 200 al Qaeda terrorists are inside the US and intended "a major assault" aimed at "a large scale target." On August 23, Israel sent a list of 23 terrorists which contained the names of four later fingered by the FBI, including Atta. Also in August, Morocco warned of large scale operations in New York in the autumn, possibly targeting the World Trade Center. Also in August, a Gulf prince told CIA veteran Robert Baer that a "spectacular terrorist operation" would take place shortly. Baer tells a senior CIA official and the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center. ( http://www.cooperativeresearch.org )
Naturally, every government that could do so wanted to look good after 9/11, and putting out a report that they had tipped off the US in advance did wonders for the amour-propre of MI-6, Mossad, SDECE, SISMI, FSB, and the other agencies involved. So we have to take these reports cum grano salis. US officials deny that some of these reports were ever delivered, even the one than came from Mubarak personally, and that might even be true in some cases. But if even a quarter of these after the fact claims are true, that is a damning revelation for CIA, FBI, NSA, and the rest of the bloated, $40 billion per year intelligence community. And of course the 9/11 commission had no interest in foreign intelligence warnings; their report has no mention whatever of the intelligence superpowers MI-6 and Mossad, two of the most formidable and dangerous organizations on the planet, which any serious report would carefully scrutinize.
The reader should not be confused by the fact that many of their reports refer to al Qaeda and/or Bin Laden. This organization exists after a fashion, but it exists in the specific form of a false flag operation: the sign above the door and the badges of the members, so to speak, say al Qaeda, and the ranting motivational speaker more often than not Bin Laden. It is therefore perfectly possible for a witting mole, sitting in the CIA or FBI offices, to be edified by reading incoming reports about what his own patsies have been observed preparing. And we must remember that one of the specialties of patsies is getting noticed.
In the spring of 2002, the Bush regime went through an orgy of breast-beating about how impossible it would have been to stave off the 9/11 attacks. "I don't think that anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the world trade center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile," said the scowling Miss Rice. (May 16, 2002) Bush chimed in that "based on everything I've seen, I do not believe that anyone could have prevented the horror of September the 11th." (June 7, 2002) This is self-serving rhetoric.
However, in the summer of 2001, the Italian government received and acted on a similar series of warnings. At the time of the July 2001 world economic summit of the G-8 countries, the Italians cordoned off large areas of downtown Genoa which were declared off limits to unauthorized persons. Fighter jet patrolled overhead, while brigades of riot police dominated the streets. One can be sure that all leaves were cancelled for Italian police and troops in the area, and that no maneuvers were scheduled during those days to compete for manpower and attention with the anti- terror deployment. The entire air space above Italy's busiest port city was closed. Bush for his part stayed overnight on a US warship offshore. Some approximation of these measures might have materially altered the outcome on September 11.
WHAT DID THE HIJACKERS THINK THEY WERE DOING?
Patsies are led by deception, and deception is the art of making a person do something for one reason when the real reason is something quite different. If we are willing to make the rather large assumption that the 19 hijackers indeed boarded the four lost planes, of which there is no proof: they must have thought they were doing something. That is, they must have had some subjective intent of some kind. Did they believe that they were on a suicide mission? We are in the realm of pure speculation here, but there is no real proof that they thought they were on a suicide mission. Quite to the contrary: it is hard to imagine Atta, the assiduous drinker of vodka and frequenter of strip clubs, as a suicide operative, and the same goes for his confreres. Perhaps they thought this was going to be a traditional hijacking of some kind, from which they could hope to escape alive. In any case, they took care to leave an abundant trail of evidence designed specifically to be found. This applies to the contents of the rented car found at the airport in Maine, and of the luggage supposedly left behind by Atta when his flight took off. Here the inventory includes an alleged last will and testament by Atta, which betrays the amateurish attempt of some half-baked area specialist to sound Islamic, as Robert Fisk and others have shown. We will not attempt to explain the miraculous discovery of Atta's passport, which was alleged to have been found near the World Trade Center after the fact. In order to fulfill their function, patsies must be directed to leave a trail of clues and evidence which will tie them and the larger target group they supposedly represent to the heinous actions they will be accused of having committed. But in the 9/11 case, none of this material rises to the level of being convincing. We are left with the enigmatic question: what did the hijackers, assuming that there were any, think they were doing on 9/11?
CHAPTER V: COULD THE ALLEGED HIJACKERS FLY THE PLANES?
Bertram: Well, how are they gonna bring it down?
Byers: Same way a dead man can drive a car.
-- The Lone Gunmen
We must now begin to discuss the specific patsies of 9/11. Much detail about them will have to be ignored; much of it is disinformation which deserves to be ignored anyway. This entire area is dominated by hearsay evidence purveyed by the fiction-mongers of the FBI. Many of the identities offered are frauds, composites, or legends. What will interest us in the stories of the patsies are those singularities which show them for what they are, and which point beyond the superficial world of the patsies towards the underlying reality shaped by intelligence agencies and moles.
Five of the persons accused by the FBI of being implicated in the 9/11 actions apparently turned out to be alive; the FBI has never provided any proof that those accused were actually involved. Indeed, FBI Director Muller has admitted that his case against the notorious nineteen would never stand up in a real court of law. It would therefore be perfectly proper to reject the entire list of nineteen out of hand as just another effluvium of the FBI molehill -- and, in effect, we do. At the same time, we find that at least some of the nineteen are double agents and tainted by criminal intent. But we also wish to examine the list of nineteen to discover the inherent complicities and contradictions in the government's case. In this way, the list of the nineteen can be used to cast light upon the operations of moles and terrorist controllers.
The FBI and the 9/11 commission have uniformly alleged that the leader of the mythic 19 hijackers who commandeered the aircraft was Mohammed Atta, a well-to-do Egyptian who they say was a very intolerant, puritanical, and doctrinaire Moslem. Reality looks much different, and rules out any notion that Atta could have accepted the mission of a suicide pilot because of profound religious convictions. He was in fact not a practicing Moslem, but rather a devotee of alcohol, cocaine, call girls, and pork chops. These biographical details are vital because they demolish any notion of Atta as a fanatic kamikaze. He was a sybaritic playboy or worse, addicted to the pleasures of the flesh, and no ascetic to immolate himself for a cause of faith. He emerges rather as a much more complicated figure, surely a sociopath, and in all probability a patsy who was being told one thing by his patrons and controllers while he was steered to act in ways which set him up in the role he played, and in all probability for liquidation.
In order to be accused of playing the role of suicide pilots, the 9/11 patsies needed to have a smattering of flight training. What actual expertise they were able to acquire in this process is something that we will examine, but it is already clear that the flight lessons were mostly for show. Ironically, they were conducted in south Florida, in a neighborhood which is redolent of the CIA covert operations of yesteryear, from the Bay of Pigs to Watergate to Iran-contra. The school for patsies was located in the back yard of CIA Miami station, and just down the road from the US Central Command.
These matters have been illuminated by the reporting of former network newsman Daniel Hopsicker of the Mad Cow Morning News, who has shown much more real interest in the behavior and personality of Atta and his associates than the FBI ever has. Hopsicker has documented that Atta in particular was a piece of human refuse, a mixture of bungling ineptitude with psychopathic rage. Atta's mental impairment is such that it is very hard to attribute to him the remarkable feats of aviation skill which are ascribed to him by the mythmakers of the FBI and the 9/11 commission. Yet Hopsicker insists that Atta was indeed capable of flying his plane into the WTC north tower by the seat of his pants. Hopsicker also appears focused on the Saudi Arabian track, which leads away from the essential role played by the network of moles operating within the US government.
FLIGHT SCHOOLS FOR PATSIES
Atta, along with Shehhi, trained at the Huffman Aviation flight school in Venice, Florida, a small town on the Gulf coast between Tampa and Naples, where most of the population consists of retired persons. Ramzi Binalshibh, who the official version claims was destined to be the twentieth hijacker, was on his was to Venice when he was stopped because of visa problems. Venice had two flight schools, and both of these flight schools were owned and operated by newly emigrated Netherlands nationals. Huffman Aviation was run by Rudi Dekkers, while Florida Flight Training Center, another school located at Venice airport, was run by Arne Kruithof, also from the Netherlands. The third accused suicide pilot, Siad al Jarrah, trained at Kruithof's Florida Flight Training Center. Kruithof claimed privately that he had been trained at a US military installation in southeast Missouri. Atta and al Shehhi supposedly paid Dekkers more than $:38,000, hardly the bargain rates that supposedly drew the two to Huffman in the first place. Two Dutch nationals running flight schools at the same small airport which were attended by three out of the four alleged hijackers is a remarkable pattern. Both Dutchmen arrived in Venice in 1998. According to intelligence sources quoted by Hopsicker, "two Dutch boys buying adjacent flight schools which shortly thereafter get overrun by terrorists is one Dutch boy too many." Three alleged terrorists at two flight schools located at one small airport, when there are some 200 flight schools in Florida, is also a curious circumstance. (Hopsicker, Mad Cow Morning News 2, 7, 8)
On March 6, 2002 the US Immigration and Naturalization Service sent Dekkers letters telling him that Atta and Shehhi - -now allegedly deceased -- had met the necessary requirements and were now eligible to apply for extensions of their visas in to stay in the US. How had the INS made this blunder in two of the best-known cases having to do with 9/11? "The error seemed particularly difficult to explain, sniffed the New York Times, because Mr. Atta and Mr. Shehhi were among the most infamous of the 19 hijackers." Media coverage focused on the "troubled" INS, but this incident totally consistent with the hypothesis that the names of Atta and Shehhi had been flagged in government computers with national security overrides, which had served to make them virtually immune from watch lists, criminal checks, and the like. A lazy mole had evidently neglected to remove the override when the usefulness of these two patsies had come to an end, and so the posthumous visa approval forms were sent out. A similar case is the CIA cable announcing the presence of accused hijacker Al Hazmi in the US in March 2000, which was marked "Action Required: None." (JICI, September 20, 2002)
Atta's name had been on the CIA-FBI-INS watch list for many years, since an older person with the same name bombed an Israeli bus in the occupied territories of the West Bank on October 12, 1986. (Hopsicker 144-145) This indicates that the name was flagged with a national security override to allow him to enter the country. Atta was stopped by police for a traffic violation in Broward County, Florida on the night of April 26, 2001; he was even arrested for not having a drivers license. But he was soon released on bail - presumably the national security override again.
The FBI arrived at Venice airport no later than 2:30 AM in the morning of September 12, which indicates that they had known something about Atta's and Shehhi's being there. According to some accounts, the FBI arrived within a few hours, by the middle of the afternoon. According to an aviation businessman and employee of Huffman interviewed by Hopsicker, "They [the FBI] were outside my house four hours after the attack." This suggested that the FBI had known where Atta and Shehhi were all along. Hopsicker adds: "Like many eyewitnesses we spoke with, this longtime aviation executive spoke of being intimidated and harassed by FBI agents. They didn't strong-arm him to make him think harder and cough up some useful leads, but to ensure he kept his mouth shut. We've heard about this from other people, haven't we? It's becoming a refrain." This source had the following to say about Atta and his friends: "I thought these guys [Atta & Co.] were double agents." (Hopsicker 150) But Dekkers, who might easily have been arrested as a material witness, instead became a media personality, appearing on the Larry King interview program on CNN.
THE FALSE FLAG AIR FORCE
According to some press accounts, as many as 27 al Qaeda operatives took flying lessons in the US in the months before 9/11. Before 2001, Dekkers had launched an aggressive marketing campaign in Europe to get foreigners to come to his flight school for training. One of his selling points was that it cost less to learn to be a pilot in the US than in Europe. Soon 80% of the students enrolled at Huffman Aviation were from abroad, and many were Arabs. About 400 foreign nationals were graduating every year from Huffman. According to some reports, some Arab flight trainees who had been taking lessons at Huffman disappeared around the time of 9/11 -- either a few days in advance or more or less simultaneously with the terror attacks. This is a hint of the hidden hands pulling the strings: intelligence agencies love to have a few spare patsies around who can be thrown into action at a moment's notice if some other patsy is arrested, killed, or incapacitated. After John Hinckley Jr.'s attempt to kill President Reagan in 1981, more than a dozen deranged loners with obsessions similar to Hinckley's were reported from police blotters in various parts of the US, according to intelligence reports at that time.. The organizers of that hit, like the organizers of 9/11, took no unnecessary chances; they had redundant backup echelons of patsies ready to go in case they were needed.
Working with Dekkers and providing most of the funds was Wally J. Hilliard, who also had an interest in a nearby Lear Jet rental service. Hilliard had a special interest in Rum Cay in the Bahamas, a suspicious island patrolled by a single policeman. This island was said to be the scene of operations linked to Saudi moneybags Adnan Kashoggi, who figured prominently in Bush 41's and Oliver North's Iran-contra gun-running operations during the 1908s. A Lear jet belonging to Hilliard was seized by the DEA in July 2000 when it was found to be carrying 15 kilos of heroin on a flight back from Venezuela -- a sizable amount. Hilliard and his company alleged that they were unaware of the narcotics, which they said had been brought on board by a passenger without their knowledge. Hilliard appeared also to have operated a more or less regular commuter air link with Havana, Cuba, something that is theoretically illegal because of the US embargo on all trade and other contacts with Castro's island -- suggesting an operation sanctioned by the shadow world. (Mad Cow Morning News 32)
General aviation and commuter air services between Florida and the nearby islands are inextricably linked with drug-running, which was highlighted during the Iran-contra hearings of the late 1980s, and which of course has never ceased. These operations are associated in the popular mind with Oliver North, but it should be recalled that the covert operations czar of the Reagan administration was of course Vice President George Bush, who directed every phase of Iran-contra with the help of figures like Felix Rodriguez. (Tarpley 1992) This pattern was later confirmed by former DEA agent Celerino Castillo, who personally confronted Bush about drug running, but got no response. The DEA estimates that two thirds of the illegal drugs coming into the US pass through the Bahamas.
Journalists have speculated that Dekkers and Kruithof were cut-outs for a US intelligence operation at the Venice airport. Huffman Aviation was also the location of offices of Britannia Aviation, a small and undercapitalized company which surprisingly beat out better-known and better-connected firms to win a contract to provide maintenance services at Lynchburg Regional Airport in Virginia. At a hearing, one of Britannia Aviations executives, Paul Marten, said that one of his main customers was Caribe Air, a reputed CIA proprietary which reportedly took part in Iran-contra drug smuggling. Aircraft belonging to Caribe Air were seized by prosecutors at the airport in Mena, Arkansas, during that phase. Caribe Air had moved its headquarters to the island of Dominica. A source said that Britannia Aviation was a firm favored by the US Drug Enforcement Administration, from which it had received "a green light." In the summer of 2002, Kruithof narrowly escaped death when the Twin Beech E 18 aircraft in which he was flying to Cancun, Mexico, crashed. At the same time, deportation procedures and fraud charges were in progress against Dekkers, who was involved in a helicopter crash in January 2003. Efforts were clearly being made to intimidate these two key witnesses, or to silence them. The Kean-Hamilton Commission had no time for Dekkers and Kruithof. (Mad Cow Morning News)
The accused hijackers' choice of Venice, Florida also allows us to locate them better in the recent history of covert operations. If we take the Bay of Pigs (1961), the Kennedy assassination (1963), Watergate (1972-74), Iran-Contra (exposed in 1986), and 9/11, we find that there is a single common denominator: Florida, the Miami Cubans, and Cuba generally. For the Bay of Pigs, Watergate, and Iran-contra, the links are obvious: there is a continuity of people who populate these scandals, people like Felix Rodriguez who was part of the Bay of Pigs and then served as Bush 41 's operative in Iran-contra, or Frank Sturgis and his crew who link Howard Hunt's role in the Bay of Pigs with Watergate. In the case of the Kennedy assassination the links are not quite so evident, but evident enough: Oswald was an activist of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the Bay of Pigs survivors hated Kennedy, and there is a persistent connection between Operation Mongoose, the US government plan to assassinate Castro, and the killing of JFK. George Bush 41 allegedly chartered the ships used by the CIA in the Bay of Pigs invasion, was part of the Kennedy assassination coverup, was a leading Watergate figure, and directed most of what is known as Iran-contra. Underlying many of these connections is the sinister presence of CIA Miami Station, which was created in the early 1960s as the CIA's large-scale domestic facility. This is the infamous JM/WAVE which is described in the unauthorized biography of George Bush. (Tarpley 1992) Not far away is the Hobe Sound/Jupiter Island complex, the wintering place for some of the most prominent oligarchical masters of human destiny.
Venice Airport was built by the government during World War II for pilot training. Not far away in Tampa is the headquarters of US Central Command, which wages the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Central Command is located at McDill Air Force Base. There are indications of an NSA presence in Venice, as well. The legendary Mena, Arkansas airport was one of the airports used for gun running and drug running, but so was Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. In fact, there was hardly an airport in Florida and in the southern US generally that was not involved, and there is every reason to think that Venice was as well.
According to Hopsicker, "many of the flight trainers who had trained the Arab terrorist pilots had also flown missions out of the Venice-Sarasota airport for such Christian missionary services as televangelist Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing." One of the pilots who did the training at Huffrnan was Mike Mikarts, also a pilot for the fundamentalist "Agape Flights" of Sarasota which runs air missionary activity with obvious destabilization overtones in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. After Venice, Atta and Shehhi rented planes from Kemper Aviation at North Palm Beach Airport near Miami in August 2001. Owner Joe Kemper spent 20 years in Peru and Bolivia as a "missionary pilot" for the evangelical-run SAMAlR (South American Mission Air) which worked to bring fundamentalism to Andes mountains Indio tribes. SAMAIR is a part of an international evangelical/Pentecostal air wing, often drawing on former military pilots, who are not accidentally often found in areas in the middle of civil wars, drug gangs, and mercenary intelligence operations in Third World countries. Additionally, Joe Kemper's chief pilot trainer between 1989 and 1999 was Jean-Francois Buslik, who was later arrested on murder charges filed in Belgium, Buslik was implicated in the 1982-85 Brabant killings, a wave of serial killings and de facto strategy of tension which claimed the lives of over 30 victims at supermarkets in the Brussels suburbs. These were no ordinary flight schools. (Mad Cow Morning News 41; EIR, October 26, 2001)
MOHAMED ATTA, PORK CHOP FUNDAMENTALlST
Atta's father was a well-to-do Egyptian lawyer. Atta was a mediocre student of architectural engineering at Cairo University, and his family wanted him to obtain an advanced degree. Atta's life changed when he was selected to participate in an elite exchange program originally set up between the US and Germany which had been expanded to include engineers from other countries as well. Atta was befriended in Cairo in 1992 by an obscure German couple who had taken him under their wing. Between 1995 and 1997, Atta was a member of the Congress-Bundestag Program, a joint project of the US State Department and the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development. This program was administered by the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft. located in Koln. (FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung, "Atta Was Tutor For Scholarship Holders," October 18, 200 I; Chicago Tribune, March 7, 2003) Later, as a student in Hamburg, Atta had worked along with Shehhi and Binalshib for Hay Computing Service GmbH in Hamburg, Germany. There has been speculation that this company was a front for intelligence agencies.
Atta arrived in Venice in late April or early May 2000. Hopsicker shows that during his time in Venice, Atta did not behave like a puritanical Wahabite Islamic fundamentalist of the Bin Laden school. He rather appeared as a sybaritic hedonist and promiscuous playboy. He loved to attend topless bars, where he would order lap dances at the Pink Pony, or else stuff twenty dollar bills into the g-strings of the dancers at the Olympic Garden nightclub. He was also a regular at Harry's Bar in Naples. Atta's favorite nightspots were the Cheetah in Venice, and Margarita Maggie' s in Sarasota. FBI investigators showing pictures of Atta after 9/11 found that he had been drinking Stolichnaya vodka for three hours recently; with him was accused suicide pilot Marwan al Shehhi, who preferred rum. Atta was also a frequent cocaine user. He would habitually snort rows of cocaine with a dollar bill. His source of cocaine was apparently located at or near Kruithof's Florida Flight Training Center at Venice airport. When Atta went back to Hamburg, he was under surveillance by the CIA. (Mad Cow Morning News 27)
On one occasion Atta took Amanda and two other friends on a three-day orgy and bender of nightclubs, drinking, and cocaine in Key West. A waitress recalled seeing Atta wearing lots of jewelry, perhaps including a large crucifix -- "a big gaudy gold cross" and a "big watch." The waitress said that the conversation she overheard involving Atta and some others involved references to $200,000 and the need to answer to the "Family." Atta was also an eager eater of pork chops, another explicit violation of Islamic law. Atta's musical tastes inclined to the Beastie Boys. (Mad Cow Morning News 20, 30)
Atta also cohabited with a 22-year old call girl who may also have been a sex operative for one of the intelligence agencies. Amanda Keller worked for a "lingerie model escort service" in Sarasota called Fantasies & Lace. Her personal appearance was described as "slutty;" she dressed "like a hooker," according to published reports. Her hair was dyed hot pink during the time she was with Atta. This was Amanda Keller, who was inexplicably ignored by the tabloids and intimidated by the FBI. Her constant refrain was: "I can't really discuss anything. I'm afraid I'll get in trouble." Not just Keller, many witnesses in and around Venice have been harassed and intimidated by the FBI. (Hopsicker 63-68)
Atta and Amanda Keller lived together for two months. Keller says that her breakup with Atta began when he embarrassed her at the night club Margarita Maggie's in Sarasota. She recalled bitterly that "Mohammed, like a dumbass, was standing on top of a speaker dancing. The man could not dance to save his life. He was real stiff, just kind of shaking, doing the 'Roxbury head bob' thing. He just embarrassed me instantly with the people there, and I just pretended I didn't know him." Keller's attraction of Atta probably had something to do with money. Although he seemed to live in modest circumstances, Atta always had plenty of cash. He thought nothing of leaving a twenty dollar bill to cover a bar tab of $4.
According to Amanda Keller, Atta was also a cat-torturer. After she had thrown him out of the apartment they shared, Atta got back in and disemboweled her pet cat, leaving the remains on her kitchen table. He also dismembered five out of six kittens. As Keller remembered, "There were baby cat parts all over the place."
Atta was in Venice at least three times during the six weeks immediately before 9/11. He was seen in friendly conversation with Dekkers. Atta in particular had mastered the fine art of getting himself noticed and remembered when he wanted to. One witness spoke of Atta as a menacing presence: "He just stood back and glared at you with his dark eyes. It gave me a frightening feeling you wouldn't want to be caught in the parking lot at night with him." Another specialty was a nasty shout of "You do not speak to me unless I speak to you first" for anyone who approached him. Atta exchanged emails with employees at companies like Virtual Prototypes, a Canadian firm which works on sensitive projects for the Pentagon. He sent another email complaining that the American University in Cairo had dismissed a female student who had insisted on coming to class in her niqab, or face veil.
TERRORISTS FROM US MILITARY BASES
The other peculiarity about the alleged hijackers of 9/11 is that so many of them were directly linked to US military bases. According to press accounts, Atta attended the International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. Abdulaziz Alomari had attended the Aerospace Medical School at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas. Saeed Alghamdi had been to the Defense Language Institute at Monterrey, California. (Washington Post, September 15 and 17, 2001) According to Newsweek three of the FBI's group of 19 terror suspects had received training at Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida, and listed their address as locations on that base. Most foreign students at these facilities are there because they are sponsored by governments within the US orbit. But some may be sponsored by the US directly¬ especially if agent recruitment is the object.
The Newsweek coverage, entitled "Alleged Hijackers May Have Trained at U.S. Bases: The Pentagon has turned over military records on five men to the FBI," by George Wehrfritz, Catharine Skipp and John Barry, is especially instructive, and reads in part:
Sept. 15 -- U.S. military sources have given the FBI information that suggests five of the alleged hijackers of the planes that were used in Tuesday's terror attacks received training at secure U.S. military installations in the 1990s. Three of the alleged hijackers listed their address on drivers licenses and car registrations as the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla -- known as the "Cradle of U.S. Navy Aviation," according to a high-ranking U.S. Navy source.
Another of the alleged hijackers may have been trained in strategy and tactics at the Air War College in Montgomery, Ala" said another high- ranking Pentagon official. The fifth man may have received language instruction at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Tex. Both were former Saudi Air Force pilots who had come to the United States, according to the Pentagon source. But there are sli~1ht discrepancies between the military training records and the official FBI list of suspected hijackers- either in the spellings of their names or with their birthdates. One military source said it is possible that the hijackers may have stolen the identities of the foreign nationals who studied at the U.S. installations.
The five men were on a list of 19 people identified as hijackers by the FBI on Friday. The three foreign nationals training in Pensacola appear to be Saeed Alghamdi and Ahmad Alnami, who were among the four men who allegedly commandeered United Airlines Flight 93, That flight crashed into rural Pennsylvania. The third man who may have trained in Pensacola, Ahmed Alghamdi, allegedly helped highjack United Airlines Flight 175, which hit the south tower of the World Trade Center. Military records show that the three used as their address 10 Radford Boulevard, a base roadway on which residences for foreign-military flight trainees are located. In March 1997, Saeed Alghamdi listed the address to register a 1998 Oldsmobile; five months later he used it again to register a second vehicle, a late model Buick. Drivers licenses thought to have been issued to the other two suspects in 1996 and 1998 list the barracks as their residences. (Newsweek, September 15, 2001)
US government spokesmen issued less than ironclad denials, alleging that because of confusion among Arabic names, the accused hijackers had "probably" not been part of activities on the military bases cited. They were being confused with other Arabs with the same names, the military spokespersons suggested. The controlled corporate media soon stopped paying attention to this story. The Newsweek story quoted a former Navy pilot's comment that, during his years on the base, "we always, always, always trained other countries' pilots. When I was there two decades ago, it was Iranians. The shah was in power. Whoever the country du jour is, that's whose pilots we train." The country dujour was now, by implication, the "al Qaeda."
The intelligence community record in regard to two accused 9/11 suicide operatives was less than sterling. According to Michael Isikoff, these two were for a time the roommates of a seasoned informer. The two hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, had been known to the CIA since January 2000, when the two Saudi nationals showed up at a Qaeda summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. One had been a part of the attack on the USS Cole. As Isikoff reports:
Upon leaving Malaysia, Almihdhar and Alhazmi went to San Diego, where they took flight-school lessons. In September 2000, the two moved into the home of a Muslim man who had befriended them at the local Islamic Center. The landlord regularly prayed with them and even helped one open a bank account. He was also, sources tell Newsweek, a 'tested' undercover 'asset' who had been working closely with the FBI office in San Diego on terrorism cases related to Hamas. (Newsweek, September 15, 2001)
The FBI, of course, came up with the cover story that their paid informer had failed to inform the Bureau of the true identity of his two mysterious houseguests. The informant's name was Abdusattar Shaikh. The FBI later refused to let the JICI Congressional investigators talk to him, claiming that he could not add anything of interest. The JICI did not exercise its power of subpoena in order to hear this important witness. Nor did the 9/11 commission.
But the FBI also had to admit that the San Diego case agent involved knew that visitors were renting rooms in the informant's house. On one occasion, a source reported, the case agent called up the informant and was told he couldn't talk because 'Khalid' -- a reference to Almihdhar -- was in the room. This makes it look like the case officer knew precisely who Khalid was. Isikoff cited I. C. Smith, a former top FBI counterintelligence official, as commenting that the case agent should have been more carefully supervising the people with whom his informant was fraternizing with -- among other things, to recruit the houseguests as possible informants. "They should have been asking, 'Who are these guys? What are they doing here?' This strikes me as a lack of investigative curiosity." He is on firm ground there; other counter-intelligence people were "stunned" by the FBI's lassitude.
About six weeks after moving into the house, Almihdhar left town, explaining to the landlord he was going back to Saudi Arabia to see his daughter. Alhazmi moved out at the end of 2000. It was not until August 23, 2001, that the CIA sent out an urgent cable to U.S. border and law- enforcement agencies identifying the two men as possible terrorists. By then it was too late. The FBI did not realize the San Diego connection until a few days after 9-11, when the informant heard the names of the Pentagon hijackers and called his case agent. "I know those guys," the informant purportedly said, referring to Almihdhar and Alhazmi. "They were my roommates."
FBI Director Mueller has repeatedly insisted there was nothing the bureau could have done differently to penetrate the 9-11 plot. That claim is patently absurd. In addition to the FBI, the alleged future hijackers were also under the scrutiny of the Israeli Mossad. The Mossad maintained a stakeout in Hollywood, Florida, and operated a safe house of their own close to the apartment where Atta and Shehhi lived. (Die Zeit, October 1, 2002)
COULD ATTA, SHEHHI, HANJOUR AND JARRAH PILOT LARGE AIRLINERS?
In addition to whether they were US agents or not, the big question regarding Atta, Shehhi, Hanjour, and Jarrah, just as it was in regard to Lee Harvey Oswald and Timothy McVeigh, is still: were they physically and mentally capable of carrying out the criminal actions ascribed to them? Patsies can always talk the talk -- but can they walk the walk, meaning, is it within their power, above and beyond all criminal intent, to create the effects observed? If not, we have a case of physical impossibility -- as we had in the cases of Oswald and McVeigh -- and we must look further for the true culprits. Here is an account from the mainstream press:
Atta, the alleged hijacker of Flight 11, and Shehhi, alleged hijacker of Flight 175, both of which crashed into the World Trade Center, attended hundreds of hours of lessons at Huffman Aviation. They also took supplementary lessons at Jones Aviation Flying Service Inc., which operates from the Sarasota Bradenton International Airport. According to the Washington Post, neither experience was successful. A flight instructor at Jones who asked not be identified said Atta and Al Shehhi arrived in September or October [2000] and asked to be given flight training. Atta, the instructor said, was particularly difficult. "He would not look at your face," the instructor said. "When you talked to him, he could not look you in the eye. His attention span was very short." The instructor said neither man was able to pass a Stage I rating test to track and intercept. After offering some harsh words, the instructor said, the two moved on "We didn't kick them out, but they didn't live up to our standards." (Washington Post, September 19, 2001) Could these substandard pilots execute the difficult feat of hitting the towers at high speed, flying by the seat of their pants?
HANI HANJOUR, MISFIT
So far we have heard little of Hani Hanjour, who is accused by the FBI of piloting American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon. According to press reports, Hanjour had visited Bowie's Maryland Freeway Airport just north of Washington DC three times since mid-August 2001 as he attempted to get permission to use one of the airport's planes. But Hani Hanjour was simply too clumsy, too inept. The question is crucial, because the plane that hit the Pentagon performed a stunning maneuver of which many a seasoned pilot would have been proud. But instead, Hani Hanjour turns out to have been a pathetic misfit. The following account is from The Prince George's Journal (Maryland), September 18, 2001:
Marcel Bernard, the chief flight instructor at the airport, said the man named Hani Hanjour went into the air in a Cessna 172 with instructors from the airport three times beginning the second week of August and had hoped to rent a plane from the airport .... Hanjour had his pilot's license, said Bernard, but needed what is called a 'check-out' done by the airport to gauge a pilot's skills before he or she is able to rent a plane at Freeway Airport, which runs parallel to Route 50.
Instructors at the school told Bernard that after three times in the air, they still felt he was unable to fly solo and that Hanjour seemed disappointed ... Published reports said Hanjour obtained his pilot's license in April of 1999, but it expired six months later because he did not complete a required medical exam. He also was trained for a few months at a private school in Scottsdale, Ariz., in 1996, but did not finish the course because instructors felt he was not capable.
Hanjour had 600 hours listed in his log book, Bernard said, and instructors were surprised he was not able to fly better with the amount of experience. Pete Goulatta, a special agent and spokesman for the FBI, said it is an on- going criminal investigation and he could not comment.
Hani Hanjour is supposed to have executed a breathtaking 270 degree turn while descending from an altitude of 7,000 feet to below treetop level to hit the Pentagon, probably the most difficult maneuver performed by any of the kamikaze planes on 9/11. But he was not considered capable of flying solo in a Cessna! And what of Jarrah, the accused suicide pilot of United Airlines flight 93, the plane that was destroyed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania? He was not much better as a pilot. Arne Kruithof later explained that, when Jarrah arrived to start taking lessons, "We had to do more to get him ready than others. His flight skills seemed to be a little bit out there." Jarrah did succeed in getting a pilot's license, but he was never able to qualify as a commercial pilot, despite 200 hours of flight time logged. According to Kruithof, "he was a guy who needed some more."
Jarrah's roommate was Thorsten Biermann of Germany. Although Biermann got along fairly well with Jarrah, he soon refused to fly anywhere if Jarrah was to be at the controls. This was because of Jarrah's foolhardy refusal to refuel before a flight in bad weather. When they landed, the tank was almost empty. Biermann: "I decided I did not want to fly with him any more. Everyone I knew who flew with him felt the same way." (Longman 91-92)
AL QAEDA STALWARTS: DUMB AND DUMBER
Alleged hijackers Nawaq al-Hazmi (Flight 77), Khalid AI-Midhar (Flight 77) and Hani Hanjour (Flight 77) all spent time in San Diego, where they sought flight training. According to published accounts, "Two of the men, Alhazmi and Al-Midhar, also briefly attended a local fight school, but they were dropped because of their limited English and incompetence at the controls [In the spring of 2001], two of the men visited Montgomery Field, a community airport ...and sought flying lessons. They spoke to instructors at Sorbi's Flying Club, which allowed them to take only two lessons before advising them to quit. 'Their English was horrible, and their mechanical skills were even worse,' said an instructor, who asked not to be named. 'It was like they had hardly even ever driven a car ... They seemed like nice guys,' the instructor said, 'but in the plane, they were dumb and dumber."' (Washington Post, September 24, 2001) Rick Garza, Sorbi's chief flight instructor, told Al Midhar and AI Hamzi after two flights: "This is not going to work." Garza later said that the two "had no idea what they were doing." (Washington Post, September 30,2001) They were always prattling about flying big jets, but when Garza asked one of them to draw a picture of a plane, "He drew the wings on backwards." (Chicago Tribune, September 30, 2001) "It was clear they weren't going to make it as pilots." (London Observer, October 7, 2001) These two would-be pilots, although they were allegedly the most experienced and hardened terrorists in the entire group of 19, were subject to panic attacks in the cockpit, at which time they would begin praying out loud. The official version does not assert that they acted as pilots, but the basis of this part of the official story is wrapped in mystery, like the rest of it.
In addition to the supposed four suicide pilots, the story told by the 9/11 commission also includes some 15 "muscle hijackers." These were the members of the suicide teams whose task it would be to break into the cockpits, overpower the pilot, copilot and other flight personnel using box cutters and knives, keep the passengers under control, and guard the door to the cockpit once it had been seized. According to the 9/11 commission, "the so-called muscle hijackers actually were not physically imposing, as the majority of them were between 5'5" and 5'7" in height and slender in build." (Staff Statement No. 16, 8) These, then, were the ferocious fighters that were expected to quell the resistance of US airline pilots, most of whom come from military aviation, and many of whom are war veterans, to say nothing of flight attendants, stewardesses, and the general public.
What was the caliber and actual effectiveness of these figures? US propaganda has a vested interested in building them up as capable, even formidable individuals who had the ability to carry out the spectacular terrorism of 9/11. But sometimes the pathos of the patsies comes through. In Staff Report 16, "Outline of the 9/11 Plot," we read that Khalid Sheikh Mohamed (KSM, touted by the Bush regime as the "mastermind of the entire plot) "and Binalshibh have both stated that, in early 2000, Shehhi, Atta, and Binalshibh met with KSM in Karachi for training that included learning about life in the United States and how to read airline schedules." If they were still unable~ to read airline schedules on their own in the spring of 2000, these strange figures had a long way to go before 9/11. Be that as it may, the eyewitness accounts collected just after 9/11 seem to converge on the diagnosis that they were bunglers. According to one wag, they were the sort of people who could probably not obtain a drivers license in any state except New Jersey.
Accounts inspired by the official story generally try to portray the feats of Atta, Shehhi, and Hanjour as relatively easy. But when it comes to United 93 over Shanksville, the tone suddenly changes. Now the official version has to explain why the passengers, assuming they had already succeeded in taking back the cockpit from Jarrah & Co., were not able to land the plane. One of the passengers on United 93 was an experienced pilot of light planes who had also trained on a Falcon corporate jet simulator. Could this passenger have landed United 93? In his book on United 93, Jere Longman of the New York Times quotes Hank Krakowski, a 737 captain who was responsible for United's flight operations on 9/11. According to Krakowski, "If the guy was a professional pilot flying all the time, it would have been possible. If he was an occasional pilot, it would have been a pretty big challenge. You can get a boat into a dock, but it's a lot harder getting a cruise ship into a dock. The problem is the mass of the machine, the energy, the feel. It doesn't have the response of a smaller plane. It has much more kinetic energy. It takes training to get a feel for that." (Longman 188) These are of course the same problems that would have been faced by the hijackers, not in landing, but in hitting their targets. The prognosis for success in their case, without some form of outside help, could hardly have been much better.
WHY WERE THEY NOT ARRESTED?
During the summer of 2001, US intelligence agencies received numerous warnings from their foreign counterparts about the danger of coming terror attacks. MI-6 says that it alerted the US in 1999 to al Qaeda plans to use commercial aircraft as "flying bombs." In early August 2001, this warning was reiterated, this time specifying multiple airliner hijackings. Around the same time, the Cayman Islands told the us that al Qaeda was "organizing a major terrorist act against the US via an airline or airliner." In late July, Egypt informed the US that 20 al Qaeda agents were in the US, and that four had received flight training. In June, Germany warned the US that Middle Eastern terrorists were planning to use commercial airliners as weapons to attack "American and Israeli symbols which stand out." On September 7, Italy sent word of an attack on the US and UK using airplanes as weapons; the source was Father Jean Marie Benjamin, a leading expert on the Moslem world. In the late summer, Jordan sent the contents of an intercepted message, according to which a major attack, code named the Big Wedding, was imminent. It was to take place inside the US and employ aircraft, says this report.
In August, Russia alerted the US to an attack by about 25 terrorists, including suicide pilots, who would attack "important buildings like the Pentagon." In July, Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed, Muttawikil discovered that Bin Laden is planning a "huge attack" inside the US. He sent an emissary to convey this information to the US consul general, and also to a US intelligence officer. In late July 2001, the Argentine Jewish community obtained news of a coming big attack against the US, Argentina, or France. This was passed on to the US. On July 16, MI-6 report to Tony Blair that al Qaeda is "in the final stages" of a serious terrorist attack against the west. This was based on a reading of information from GCHQ, the British NSA, and also from the CIA and the NSA, which the British share according to a long- standing agreement with the US. In June, three Pakistani men in the Cayman Islands were overheard discussing a hijacking attack on New York. US intelligence was alerted. At the end of August, Egyptian President Mubarak personally warned US officials that Bin Laden was about to attack an American target inside the US. France sent a generic warning in late August that something big was up. India adds its own warning in mid-July. Israel, in early August, said that 50 to 200 al Qaeda terrorists are inside the US and intended "a major assault" aimed at "a large scale target." On August 23, Israel sent a list of 23 terrorists which contained the names of four later fingered by the FBI, including Atta. Also in August, Morocco warned of large scale operations in New York in the autumn, possibly targeting the World Trade Center. Also in August, a Gulf prince told CIA veteran Robert Baer that a "spectacular terrorist operation" would take place shortly. Baer tells a senior CIA official and the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center. ( http://www.cooperativeresearch.org )
Naturally, every government that could do so wanted to look good after 9/11, and putting out a report that they had tipped off the US in advance did wonders for the amour-propre of MI-6, Mossad, SDECE, SISMI, FSB, and the other agencies involved. So we have to take these reports cum grano salis. US officials deny that some of these reports were ever delivered, even the one than came from Mubarak personally, and that might even be true in some cases. But if even a quarter of these after the fact claims are true, that is a damning revelation for CIA, FBI, NSA, and the rest of the bloated, $40 billion per year intelligence community. And of course the 9/11 commission had no interest in foreign intelligence warnings; their report has no mention whatever of the intelligence superpowers MI-6 and Mossad, two of the most formidable and dangerous organizations on the planet, which any serious report would carefully scrutinize.
The reader should not be confused by the fact that many of their reports refer to al Qaeda and/or Bin Laden. This organization exists after a fashion, but it exists in the specific form of a false flag operation: the sign above the door and the badges of the members, so to speak, say al Qaeda, and the ranting motivational speaker more often than not Bin Laden. It is therefore perfectly possible for a witting mole, sitting in the CIA or FBI offices, to be edified by reading incoming reports about what his own patsies have been observed preparing. And we must remember that one of the specialties of patsies is getting noticed.
In the spring of 2002, the Bush regime went through an orgy of breast-beating about how impossible it would have been to stave off the 9/11 attacks. "I don't think that anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the world trade center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile," said the scowling Miss Rice. (May 16, 2002) Bush chimed in that "based on everything I've seen, I do not believe that anyone could have prevented the horror of September the 11th." (June 7, 2002) This is self-serving rhetoric.
However, in the summer of 2001, the Italian government received and acted on a similar series of warnings. At the time of the July 2001 world economic summit of the G-8 countries, the Italians cordoned off large areas of downtown Genoa which were declared off limits to unauthorized persons. Fighter jet patrolled overhead, while brigades of riot police dominated the streets. One can be sure that all leaves were cancelled for Italian police and troops in the area, and that no maneuvers were scheduled during those days to compete for manpower and attention with the anti- terror deployment. The entire air space above Italy's busiest port city was closed. Bush for his part stayed overnight on a US warship offshore. Some approximation of these measures might have materially altered the outcome on September 11.
WHAT DID THE HIJACKERS THINK THEY WERE DOING?
Patsies are led by deception, and deception is the art of making a person do something for one reason when the real reason is something quite different. If we are willing to make the rather large assumption that the 19 hijackers indeed boarded the four lost planes, of which there is no proof: they must have thought they were doing something. That is, they must have had some subjective intent of some kind. Did they believe that they were on a suicide mission? We are in the realm of pure speculation here, but there is no real proof that they thought they were on a suicide mission. Quite to the contrary: it is hard to imagine Atta, the assiduous drinker of vodka and frequenter of strip clubs, as a suicide operative, and the same goes for his confreres. Perhaps they thought this was going to be a traditional hijacking of some kind, from which they could hope to escape alive. In any case, they took care to leave an abundant trail of evidence designed specifically to be found. This applies to the contents of the rented car found at the airport in Maine, and of the luggage supposedly left behind by Atta when his flight took off. Here the inventory includes an alleged last will and testament by Atta, which betrays the amateurish attempt of some half-baked area specialist to sound Islamic, as Robert Fisk and others have shown. We will not attempt to explain the miraculous discovery of Atta's passport, which was alleged to have been found near the World Trade Center after the fact. In order to fulfill their function, patsies must be directed to leave a trail of clues and evidence which will tie them and the larger target group they supposedly represent to the heinous actions they will be accused of having committed. But in the 9/11 case, none of this material rises to the level of being convincing. We are left with the enigmatic question: what did the hijackers, assuming that there were any, think they were doing on 9/11?