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WELCOME TO TERRORLAND -- MOHAMED ATTA & THE 9-11 COVER-UP IN FLORIDA |
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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: THINK, IT AIN'T ILLEGAL YET Actions have consequences. At least they're supposed to. But the people, forces, and institutions in the U.S. before 9/11 that were dealing with, and doing business with Mohamed Atta and Osama bin Laden's terrorist thugs have yet to be named and identified, let alone face justice. Why was training narco-terrorists to fly, a growth industry in Southwest Florida a few short years ago? Even the FBI admitted knowing about it. "The FBI Knew Terrorists Were Using Flight Schools," read a Washington Post headline one week after the attack. What the FBI left unanswered -- both in the Post article and since -- is why they did nothing to shut it down. Maybe it was business. Maybe it was too lucrative to shut down. One former Huffman aviation executive said, "Early on I gleaned that these guys had Government protection. They were let into this country for a specific purpose. It was a business deal." Purchased in haste for top dollar and with no due diligence just a year before Arab terrorists began arriving, Hilliard and Dekker's flight schools, Huffman Aviation in Venice, and Ambassador Aviation in Naples, made "no business sense." So they must have made sense some other way ... Was there an officially-sanctioned drug trafficking operation run out of Venice, Florida concurrent with Mohamed Atta's presence? There has been a big taboo surrounding some of the most obvious questions. 9/11 has been treated as if it were an event that occurred in a vacuum, instead of in time, in a specific set of circumstances known only to the participants in the negotiation then said to be transpiring. 9/11 happened in a world in which Osama bin Laden controlled one commodity on this planet, a strategic one: opium. He was the King of Heroin. *** With the capture of Kandahar in October 1994 the Taliban gained command of the southern gate of the vast smuggling empire built during the Soviet war with assistance from the Pakistani ISI and the CIA. Later that same year Afghanistan scooted past Burma to become the world's leading producer, and the narcotics industry in Afghanistan continued to grow enormously, serving the interests of the new masters of Kabul and their "fundamentalist" friends. They were the world's only Islamic drug cartel. If its the end of the week, and George W. Bush announces its Friday, there are lots of people who'll still say he's lying. Yet some of these same people naively or disingenuously believe at face value Mullah Omar's pronouncement on July 27, 2000 'banning' the growing of opium in Afghanistan. Mullah Omar was lying. Satellite surveillance carried out for the United Nations revealed that the surface area devoted to growing opium poppies in Afghanistan had just grown by half, in one year. After the Soviet war, poppy growing in Afghanistan began to take on the characteristics of modern agro-business, according to professor Alfred McCoy's The Politics of Heroin (second ed., 1992). Opium production in Mullah Omar's home district doubled after the Taliban take-over, said Amnesty International in a November '96 report. What Mohammed Atta was really up to while he was in the U.S. can be seen in court documents and testimony concerning the transactions being engaged in by other bin Laden terrorists at the same time, doing business in the U.S. in a murky netherworld where government and organized crime intersect. In a New Jersey Stinger missile case, for example, Arab terrorists got caught trying to buy Stinger missiles from the Mob. The deal they got caught doing was typical, according to government prosecutors ... It involved oil and heroin for guns and training. Osama the Heroin King would definitely have been trading heroin into the U.S., the world's richest market. Wouldn't he? There always seems plenty of heroin on U.S. 'heroin store' shelves, which are probably re-stocked quicker than any convenience store. So somebody in the U.S., just logically, was doing business with him. America's heroin supply has to enter the U.S. someplace. Traffickers look for someplace congenial, someplace cozy. Someplace where they could do business ... Someplace like Florida. *** We've heard nothing about this from the FBI. It is a big taboo. Yet the pilot of Wally Hilliard's 'Heroin Express' told investigators he'd flown the exact same flight 30 times in the previous nine months, a weekly 'milk run' down and back to Venezuela. Hilliard's operation wasn't legitimate. They got paid after each flight in cash. Getting paid in cash by a Latin male for a once-a-week round-trip charter jet to Venezuela, in the unanimous opinion of law enforcement and aviation observers in Southwest Florida, is not a fact that will look very good at trial. "It's just blatant," said one aviation executive. "They obviously weren't even bothering to hide what they were doing." So the outlines of a case for a Continuing Criminal Conspiracy are visible to any prosecutor. Any courageous prosecutor, that is. Learning that Mohamed Atta was a coke-head had put the permanent kibosh on notions of Atta as any sort of recognizable "Islamic fundamentalist." Even if Al Qaeda's training manual urged them to blend in, that would mean having an occasional beer. Snorting cocaine was not part of Mohamed Atta's 'cover' ... It was part of his lift, or, if you prefer, his lift-style. Drug smugglers live that kind of life-style. Maybe spies do too. Do spies trade in drugs? *** Watching the Venice Airport for a year and a half felt like seeing the movie 'Casablanca' playing over and over. Apparently the DEA felt the same way we did. "The DEA rolls videotape from an apartment across from the Venice Airport," a business owner there informed us. Hell will freeze over before those DEA tapes ever become public. *** When Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992, his campaign stressed at every opportunity the message: "It's the economy, stupid!" When all of the nationalistic and "fundamentalist" jingoism is stripped out, we think the 9/11 attack will ultimately prove to be about what most wars are about: Money. Maybe the secret history of 9/11 is: "It's the drugs." A falling out between two business partners. A double-cross. A deal gone wrong. Wally Hilliard's own pilots talked freely about the nature of the endeavor going on around them. "I flew Wally's Turbo-Commander to Venezuela and then got detained in Haiti on the way back, because both U.S. Customs and the DEA wanted to inspect the aircraft," said one pilot who flew for Hilliard. "When I asked them what was up, they said the plane you are flying is known to be smuggling drugs in and out of the country." "Another time, one of our planes was being serviced in Jamaica, and they called and said 'You need to pay us $10,000 to get the log books back," recalled the pilot and aviation executive. "There's a fee involved.' When I asked why, they said, 'Because the plane was supposed to fly a drug run and something had gone wrong and it hadn't kept its commitment." *** U.S. officials spoke of the drug connection to 9/11 only in the immediate aftermath of the attack. "Frankly, we can't differentiate between terrorism and organized crime and drug dealing," Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff told a Senate Banking Committee hearing about the terrorists' money trail. Osama bin Laden controlled the heroin trade in Afghanistan. And Afghanistan controlled the heroin trade worldwide, producing as much as the rest of the world combined. His organization was said by officials to derive much of its funding from heroin and opium. Even today, two years after being deposed, the Taliban are said to be deeply involved in a trade which last year generated sums said to be at least equal to the amount being spent on reconstruction aid for the country. Today we think back to a comment made to us by a Special Forces Commander who was working out of McDill AFB in Tampa, and who'd just returned from Afghanistan. He offered an off-the-cuff but candid assessment of the reasons for the hostility between the U.S. and the "Evil Ones" that led to the heinous September 11 attack. "The Taliban were launching an effort to take over the worldwide heroin trade," stated this grizzled veteran of recent rescue missions behind enemy lines matter-of-factly. "They were going to use that as a basis to move into cocaine distribution as well. They were planning on supplanting the Cali Cartel." We Wondered: Whose nose might have gotten bent out of joint over that? *** Nothing better illustrated how pathetically-little we know about the circumstances surrounding the 9/11 attack than the fact that Rudi Dekkers and Wallace J. Hilliard, whose Florida flight schools were "marching Arabs across the tarmac," are not who they pretend to be. We have seen through each man's 'cover.' Who could have guessed that the man who owned the school where Mohamed Atta hung out was at the same time pursuing a diplomatic opening to Fidel Castro's Cuba? "While Wally was supposedly flying Missionary flights to Havana, he was passing out Rolex watches instead," explained John Villada, Hilliard's former jet manager. "And somebody turned him in to the State Department for flying illegal charters to Cuba, and the State Department seized his account." We heard the same story from four separate sources, each of whom added colorful detail. Those weren't just any ol' Rolexes Wally was handing out in Havana, either ... They were Presidential Rolexes. "Did you know that Wally Hilliard went illegally over to Cuba providing money and Presidential Rolex watches?" asked an indignant aviation exec in Naples. "He said he was going over there to do a missionary job for his church, but nobody knew what he was doing." Hilliard knew people in Naples politically well-connected with Fidel Castro. "They got Wally involved in Cuba," confirmed another source. "Rob has a DC-3 at the Immoklakee Airport. They're the one's who got Wally involved in Cuba. They got busted for running illegal charters to Cuba." Odd behavior for a 'retired Midwestern insurance executive.' "Somebody turned him in to the State Department for flying illegal charters to Cuba," stated one source. "How he got caught was one of his pilots turned in an expense report, and Wally's accountant, Stuart Burchill, actually wrote on the expense report: Expenses for Cuba." Then this source, a man involved in aviation in Naples for several decades, spent a long moment looking down at his feet. When he lifted his eyes he asked: "Can you believe this shit?" Our sentiments exactly. The evidence added up. Testimony from our eyewitnesses corroborated that of others. For example, from one source we'd learned, just in passing, that Wally and Rudi had formed a fictitious company to keep Rudi in the U.S. back in the mid-90's, and that Wally also had an aircraft maintenance facility in Nassau in the Bahamas, run by a South African man named Alfonso Bowe. "Nobody knows for sure who Wally works for," the source had said. "He owns an FBO in Nassau called Executive Jet Support with a guy named Alfonso Bowe, whose sister is married to the Prime Minister of the Bahamas. He (Bowe) also runs a flight school he started with Pervez Kahn." We filed this away. We didn't need to go to the Bahamas to find the story. It was all around us in Venice. Then months later someone told us something Bowe said about Rudi Dekkers. "When Alfonso Bowe heard that the terrorists had trained at Rudi Dekkers' flight school, he said, 'It figures that out of all the flight schools in the nation the terrorists would go to Rudi."' Nothing could be more clear. Wally Hilliard was not who he pretended to be. "I think common sense should prevail," said Coy Jacob. "And I think if you are a thinking person and you have common sense I think that you examine the person making the statement and see if there is any reason for falsehoods." "It all looks pretty suspicious to me." *** It appears increasingly likely that one of History's Greatest Crimes -- the September 11 terrorist attack -- is being followed by one of History's Greatest Cover-Ups. We don't even have the satisfaction of having brought to justice the killers of our 3000 dead. Although President Bush is careful to avoid mentioning his name these days, Osama bin Laden is still on the minds of Americans, whose thinking is Biblically-simple. They want his head. As I write these words it's been almost 800 days since hundreds of millions watched 3,000 of our number perish in gruesome and terrible ways. Late on the day of the attack, NBC anchor Brian Williams opined: "There will be many people asking tonight just what it is we are getting for all those tens of billions of dollars being spent on intelligence." Almost 800 days later, the question still seems valid. And now we have others as well. *** The brutal reality of American life at the beginning of the 21st century seems to be the same as that faced by the citizens of Rome 2,000 years ago, as they looked with despair at the swaggering and corrupt Praetorian Guard which had made a mockery of their once proud Republic, and asked out loud the question which echoes down to us across the centuries: "Who will guard the guards?' |