Site Map

WELCOME TO TERRORLAND -- MOHAMED ATTA & THE 9-11 COVER-UP IN FLORIDA

CHAPTER EIGHT:  MOHAMED ATTA, CYBER-TERRORIST

After their non-stop three day Key West bash, the revelers headed back to North Port in Atta's rented white Grand-Am.

Having decided to move in with Mohamed, Amanda now faced the difficult hurdle of retrieving her clothes and other possessions from the apartment she shared with soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend Robert. As she suspected, Robert turned out to not be a very good sport.

"Mohamed asked me to get an apartment when we got back from Key West," she explained. "He asked if I would find an apartment and split rent with him. He was an option for me to run and never look back, so I said OK."

What happened next culminates in a twist of fate so cruel and ironic -- or cruelly-ironic -- that it should be in the dictionary.

After listening to North Port landlord Tony LaConca describe what he knew about Atta, FBI agents wanted to know more about Amanda.

So LaConca took them to see the local police. From the September 14, 2001 Charlotte Sun: "In an effort to locate Keller, the agent accompanied Tony LaConca to the North Port Police Department to pick up a Feb. 25 police report in which Keller had called police about harassing cell phone calls," the Sun reported.

The 'harassing phones calls' were from boyfriend Robert, who was threatening her with physical violence if she left him, she explained.

"The night we came back from Key West I got arrested right in front of Vonnie and Tony's apartment. Mohamed bailed me out of jail. It was $150 bucks."

"What happened was Mohamed drove me to pick up my stuff," she recalled. "And Robert came out and hit me. I had told him I was leaving him before leaving for Key West, and he said he would 'fucking kill me.' He started wailing on me, and I was bloody. I had cuts on my arms and everything," she said. "And Mohamed did nothing, just sat there in the car. He was a big pussy."

It was strange to hear this young American woman coolly describe a man responsible for 3,000 deaths as 'a big pussy.'

But maybe he was. We'll soon hear more tales portraying him in a less than manly light. Back in North Port, what happened next isn't the cruelly-ironic thing yet. But it is ironic:

"So I called the police in front of Vonnie and Tony's apartment." Amanda told us. "And the police came out and arrested me!"

"According to the police report, after Keller called police about the calls, a computer check was conducted and showed an outstanding warrant from Marion County on a worthless check charge," the Charlotte Sun reported.

"The police ran my name, and a check I'd written at an animal shelter had bounced, so they arrested me," Amanda explained.

So instead of her ex-boyfriend being arrested for assault, it was Amanda who got popped and had to 'go downtown.'

"Mohamed bailed her out of South County Jail," Vonnie LaConca had told reporters. "We told agents this because we thought they (FBI) might be able to get his last name from the reports."

That must have been what the FBI wanted: the bail document which Atta had to sign to get Amanda released. They were erasing any paper trail.

Her bounced check was for a small amount, to the Humane Society in Bradenton, for charges incurred when she went there to adopt a cat, she stated.

Amanda said the checking account Atta used to bail her out was in the name of Mohamed Arajaki.

Now here's the cruelly-ironic part.

Mohamed Atta bailed Amanda Keller out of jail for bouncing a check which she wrote to the Humane Society to adopt a cat ... Two months later Atta dismembered that same cat and left it gutted on her kitchen table during his rampage through her apartment.

***

Atta rented the LaConca's place in North Port for a week, just the time it took Amanda to find the apartment at the Sandpiper across the street from the Venice Airport.

At this point in telling us her story, she made a chance comment which turned the direction of our investigation southward from Venice to North Port and neighboring Charlotte County.

Amanda had helped Atta move to the LaConca's rental house from the house where Atta and six other men were being evicted, both in North Port, she said. But something about where Atta had been living didn't add lip.

"The house was huge inside," Amanda said. "It was immense and beautiful, nicely and very expensively furnished. Their landlady was kicking them out, Atta said, because she wanted the house back. She was getting $300 a week from seven different people."

Seven guys paying 300 apiece is $2,100 per week, which may not be much in L.A. or New York but is virtually unheard of in an area which caters, as we've seen, to seniors.

Why was the rent so high? Another 'terrorist surcharge?'

Atta told Amanda, when they 'hooked up' at the end of February, that he had lived in the "immense and beautiful" North Port home for just two months.

So we now know that Mohamed Atta didn't move to Miami when he left Huffman Aviation in December of 2000. He shuffled down the block to nearby North Port, still on Florida's Gulf Coast, and still near Venice.

If he had rushed off to a place filled with tall European models, like South Beach, it might make sense.

But he didn't.

His appetite for infidel pleasures was certainly a healthy one. It took him from the Cheetah Club to the Pink Pony to Harry's Bar in New York So why was he still hanging around Venice? What was he doing?

Here's the answer: Mohamed Atta was going to flight school at the Charlotte County Airport, just a short drive from the "immense and beautiful" North Port home he was renting.

And once again we have a local official to thank for knowing about it. "Sheriff suspected terrorist may have lived in Charlotte County" was the headline of the September 21 story.

"Sheriff Clement told the Charlotte Sun-Herald that Atta had lived in the area and attended a flight school at Charlotte County Airport," the paper reported.

Clement told reporter Christy Arnold that the Sheriff's Office had forwarded several tips to the FBI about Atta, who used an alias in Charlotte County, but he would not discuss specifics.

"Gathered intelligence and a recently obtained e-mail contain ing a photo of a dead child may link suspected terrorist Mohamed Atta to Charlotte County and Punta Gorda, said Sheriff William E. Clement."

"'It gives me a bit of chill knowing they were here. Atta may have, at one time, resided in the Punta Gorda area, and may have attended flying lessons at Charlotte County Airport."'

"It looks like some of these terrorists were here and then went to Venice," Clement told reporters.

Whoa ... How could Atta have been in Charlotte County before moving to Venice, supposedly his first residence in the U.S.?

Local reporters understood the significance of the revelation. They asked the FBI to confirm or dispel reports about terrorist sightings in Charlotte County. The FBI's non-response was, as usual, non-instructive: "The FBI has information but the FBI cannot disclose the information because the investigation is pending," said Sara Oakes, the FBI's Tampa spokes woman. "I can confirm to you that the FBI has followed thousands of leads and interviewed people across the country."

We've heard them give this same speech several times already. When the FBI starts quoting statistics about how massive their investigation is, they're almost always hiding something.

When we interviewed Sheriff William Clement of Charlotte County, the source of the initial reports of Mohamed Atta having lived in Charlotte County, he was no more happy to see us than Longboat Fire Captain Mooneyhan had been.

Apparently there had been some serious thought given, locally, to the proposition that instead of talking about Mohamed Atta having lived in his jurisdiction, the Sheriff should have kept his mouth shut. Although Clement is a big man, as Southern Sheriff's tend to be, he appeared somewhat chastened by the experience.

But real Americans won't be silenced. And so he matter-of-factly confirmed to us that Atta had been in Punta Gorda in the Spring. The reports had it right: terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta had been living under an alias "in rural Charlotte County, just south of Venice on Florida's Gulf Coast."

That's a geographical description of North Port.

The Sheriff said right after the attack he began receiving phone calls from local business owners in Punta Gorda -- Charlotte County's only town -- who recognized Atta from his photograph in the newspaper. Soon he had learned enough to tell reporters that Atta had been in flight training at the Charlotte County Airport.

The owners of the flight schools at the Charlotte County Airport denied it, including David Byers, owner of Professional Aviation, where Atta was suspected of attending. The school had served an international clientele, including dozens of Tunisians, before suddenly going bankrupt at the end of February, 2001, the exact same time Amanda said Atta moved back to Venice with her, right across from the Venice Airport.

"He may have had friends here," Byers said. "Perhaps he was visiting, but he was not at our school as a student."

Byers was whistling in the dark. A little more than 48 hours after the attack, the school received a visit from the FBI.

"FBI agents seized records from a financially-troubled flight school at the Charlotte County Airport, Professional Aviation, that recruited students from Tunisia and went out of business in the spring of 2001, after tipsters said they saw Atta there late last year or early this year," the Sun reported.

Brian Ross of NBC News knew something was going on in Charlotte County. "And yet more evidence of the overseas money trail has been found at a flying school in Punta Gorda," he reported. "The owner says FBI agents seized records relating to at least 12 foreign students whose tuition was paid with foreign wire transfers."

"They were very interested in the German transfers, and they were very interested in the Middle Eastern transfers," Byers told him.

Byers' pupils soon became a focus of intense scrutiny from the FBI. At least eight of them were questioned at least several times each.

But what of the strange report of a "recently obtained e-mail containing a photo of a dead child?" What had that been about?

The e-mails, at least five, written and sent by Mohamed Atta, first came to light after being reported to authorities by Jim Kantor of Eastern Avionics at the Charlotte County Airport, we learned.

Kantor had corresponded by e-mail with Atta, who purchased some pilot gear from the firm. Another employee told local re porters they received e-mails from Atta containing Arabic writing with references to Allah.

Kantor turned the e-mails in to the police.

"The sheriff said he thought the e-mail was a political article written in both Arabic and English. He said it showed a photo of a dead child killed in a riot in the Middle East. He would not elaborate," the Sun-Herald reported.

The Sheriff told reporters that the names on the e-mail list of some 40 individuals would be the focus of intense scrutiny from the FBI. He was careful to point out to us that, for the record, his local law enforcement agency's investigation had ended when they turned over the e-mails to the FBI.

Later we came into possession of Atta's e-mail correspondence from a source close to the case, and immediately discovered that the names on Atta's e-mail list should receive intense scrutiny ... 

Some of them work for U.S. Defense contractors.

The e-mail addresses of several of the names on Atta's 'terrorist e-list' appear to have been, or still are, employees of U.S. defense contractors.

One name on Atta's e-mail list, for example, apparently works at a Canadian company called Virtual Prototypes. The firm's web site says the company helped prototype the avionics instruments in the F-15 jet fighter, the F-22 Raptor, the B-2 bomber and the Apache Longbow.

Another address on the list, [email protected], may be that of a female suicide bomber in Chechnya.

The correspondence contains information of a relatively mundane socio-political nature. In one, he bemoans the passing of a Muslim figure and asks for prayers. Another of Atta's e-mails reads today like a non-negotiable demand from Paradise ...

"I demand the decision-makers in the American University in Cairo withdraw their threats of dismissing a Muslim female student who refused to take off the Niqab ... and adhere to their claimed 'non-discrimination policy' printed in their catalogue," Atta wrote.

A "Niqab" is a face veil, according to Islamic sources, and a 'Niqaabi' is "a sister who covers her face and hands when in public or in the presence of any man outside her immediate family."

After verifying the authenticity of the Atta e-mails with local officials, we shared them with a reporter from a local news channel who had helped break the story of their existence. Amy Ochier's subsequent report led the local news that night on NBC's Charlotte County affiliate.

What was it about Charlotte County, and the Charlotte County Airport, that attracted the terrorists? When we asked one well- placed local official, the answer was a shock. The Charlotte County Airport and surrounding area were teeming with international activities of a distinctly 'spooky' kind, he said.

We get an inkling of how much strange activity goes on at the Charlotte County Airport when the Sheriff told us, a little sheepishly, that 23 helicopters have been stolen there in the last several years ... Stolen from the Sheriffs Department. Later, wags at the airport told us that the helicopters hadn't really been stolen ...

They'd just been "released on their own recognizance."

CHAPTER NINE: THE SECRET HISTORY: ATTA IN FLIGHT SCHOOL

The story of Mohamed Atta's stay in the U.S. has not yet begun to be told, but remains shrouded, deliberately hidden, part of this country's secret history, that history, in other words, in which lone gunmen play no role.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the official story about Mohamed Atta at American flight schools which is an exceed ingly simple one: he went to Huffman Aviation for six months. Period.

Following that experience, the FBI says his only additional train ing was in flight simulators, where he supposedly got the 'feel' of piloting an airliner

But the real history of Atta as a student pilot at U.S. flight schools is an altogether more elaborate tale than that. For example, Atta's first flight school in the U .S. has never been named. It's identity remains a mystery.

We're not sure why, but it does. After that he attended Huffman Aviation in Venice. Jones Aviation in Sarasota was next. Then Huffman Aviation again.

After leaving Huffman for the second time, Atta and Marwan trained during January and February of 2001 at Professional Aviation at the Charlotte County Airport.

When that school went suddenly and mysteriously bankrupt at the end of February 2001, Atta and Marwan returned to Huffman Aviation ... for the third time.

We discovered where Atta went after leaving Venice (and Huffman) at the end of December, 2000 when we learned of a post-9/11 investigation into suspected espionage by students at Professional Aviation which left a paper trail subsequently uncovered by reporters.

That's the big picture. Here's the big question: was Atta actually undergoing flight training at all of the flight schools he attended?

Whether Atta was actually a student pilot during all of the time he spent at the just-mentioned flight schools is still unanswered.

But the reason for its importance is because there is another plausible explanation for how Atta spent his time in flight school. Instead of pilot training, Atta's status as 'foreign flight student' may have merely been a ' legend,' or 'cover' story, that allowed him to move freely around the United States while engaged in activities not limited to coordinating and readying the 9/11 attack.

Whatever he was up to while attending U.S. flight schools, learning to fly could not have been his only -- or maybe even chief -- motivation, because Mohamed Atta was already a licensed pilot when he arrived in the U.S., Amanda Keller told us. An experienced licensed pilot.

One day while Atta was rummaging through his flight bag -- the same bag important enough to warrant its own room in Key West -- Amanda got a look inside.

"The thing the FBI was most interested in was his pilot bag," she told us. "They asked about it a lot. He kept it locked, and they wanted to know whether I had ever seen anything in it."

"I told them 'yes' one day he opened it briefly, and there were a lot of papers in it, and there was a blue log book in a different language. Mohamed was fluent in almost any language you can think of," she continued. "He had a kind of Day timer in there, too. And a folder with all these different I.D.'s in it. And that's when I saw one -- because it fell out -- a little blue and white thing the size of' a drivers license. It had his picture on it, and it looked like a mug shot, or a prison shot. And it didn't look like him, and I asked him, 'Who is this?"'

"And he said, 'that's me.' He told me it had been taken back when he was in some kind of militia- type deal, like a military-type deal, he said. He compared it to our military only they teach you different tactics. He didn't elaborate."

"He didn't say where it was from, either" she said. "But the writing looked like a cross between Hebrew and Arabic, those little frilly lines. He told me he spoke Hebrew. I said bullshit. So he started speaking it, and I guess he did."

We longed for a fuller explanation of the "militia-type deal" to which Mohamed Atta belonged, and wished he had dropped the I.D. in front of an eyewitness who might have recognized the is suing organization.

Still, this is crucial information. What Amanda said next shed even more light: "He told me that he went to different countries and studied. He had pilot's licenses from several different countries. But all the pictures looked different. All the names were different. He had a license to fly from just about every country he had been to. He went to pilot's school in all these countries."

"He said no matter where he decided to live, he could always fly," she said, "because he said it was his path, he had always wanted to be a pilot."

"I asked him, and he told me his last name was spelled different in different languages, but he always kept the first name Mohamed. There was one (pilot's license) from France, one from Germany ... He also had one in the Homeland, he called it," she said.

'Homeland' is a word we've all grown used to since 9/11. But it was strange to hear that Atta used it too.

What Mohamed Atta told Amanda Keller about himself was what a spy tells a civilian: a cover story, a legend. He probably had a number of them ... "He said his father was a commercial jet pilot from France," said Amanda.

***

"His mom was from the Homeland. He said they ran from there, moved to France, and that he went to Lebanese private schools."

"I didn't know what to think," she said. "I don't know what countries connect to what other countries. If you were to show me a globe, I could pick out the U.S. and Canada, but not much more. I never paid any attention."

That Amanda believed his story wasn't too surprising. Most of us accept other people at more or less face value. Amanda wasn't trained to spot spies, and she clearly wasn't a geography major.

And there's another thing worth mentioning ... Keller wasn't all that interested in Mohamed Atta while she knew him, she told us candidly. He was a very brief way station on her own personal journey, her time with him had been a matter of convenience. If he hadn't become instantly infamous after the 9/11 attack, Amanda told us, she would probably have never thought about him again.

***

The official story of Mohamed Atta's progression through American flight schools in the run-up to the Sept. 11th attack begins when he and Marwan Al-Shehhi arrived at the squat beige hangar of the Airman School in Oklahoma early in July of 2000, and asked to take a look around.

Although Venice would receive most of the media spotlight, two days after the attack a school official in Oklahoma confirmed that Atta and Al-Shehhi had first visited their school, the Airman Flight School, staying overnight at the school's dormitory in the nearby Sooner Inn, before deciding to train at another facility.

The school's admissions director told reporters she gave them her standard half-hour tour: the six flight simulators, the classrooms, the airfield. The two men then thanked her and left.

"They did a school visit in July of 2000 but went elsewhere for whatever reason.

After this brief mention of the terrorists visit, media interest in the Oklahoma flight school quickly waned.  This is strange because -- just like Huffman Aviation -- the Airman Flight School in Norman, Okla. was something of a magnet for associates of Osama bin Laden.

The most famous of the terrorists who have been identified as having trained there is Zacarias Moussaoui, the French national and so-called "20th hijacker" accused of conspiracy in the Sept. 11 terror attacks, who spent three months there during 2001. Yet the Oklahoma school's involvement with Al Qaeda terrorists begins much earlier than that ...

At the trial of four men charged with the 1998 bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, prosecutors introduced evidence that an Orlando, Florida, cabdriver named Ihab Ali, bin Laden's personal pilot, trained at Airman Flight School in the early 90's. Ali was indicted for refusing to answer questions about his ties to the bin Laden organization, including his "pilot training in Oklahoma," according to court papers.

There is something strange about the FBI's relationship with Airman Flight School. It provides a striking example of what looks like willful failure -- despite specific warnings -- to detect the terror threat before it happened.

Since the FBI was aware that a number of suspected terrorists had attended the Oklahoma facility, a reasonable assumption would be that agents must have taken extra-special interest in the school, and especially its Arab students.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

"Two agents were sent to Moussaoui's Airman Flight School in Oklahoma to investigate," said a September 25, 2002 story in the New York Daily News, "including one who had been sent to the same school two years earlier, to check on someone identified as Osama Bin Laden's personal pilot. The agent said he had forgotten about the connection."

Two weeks before the 9/11 attack, an FBI agent arrived at Air man Flight School to investigate Moussaoui. The same agent had been to the school two years earlier on a case involving Osama bin Laden's personal pilot, but claims to have forgotten when visiting the school the second time.

Does this pass the 'smell' test? If your answer is "no, it does not," join the growing ranks of those who doubt the government's explanations for the 9/11 disaster.

It is arguably the biggest "dropped ball" in American investigative history. Even the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Com mittee felt the stirrings of something otherworldly going on.

Calling for hearings to look into whether U .S. intelligence missed warnings that could have prevented the attacks, Republican of Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby told reporters, "You go back and see what was the evidence ... that maybe we missed."

"Maybe they didn't miss it. Maybe they didn't go after it."

This is shocking stuff. Shelby appears to be suggesting deliberate malfeasance.

During the emotional chaos in the aftermath of the attack, no one noticed that the Airman Flight Schools director gave a description of the so-called 20th hijacker which used the same verbiage Huffman Aviation's Rudi Dekkers used when speaking to reporters about Mohamed Atta.

"He was pretty bad in the plane. He was just difficult to teach," she told reporters. "Every conversation with him was difficult. He was demanding and arrogant -- not a nice guy."

Both Dekkers and his Oklahoma counterpart stressed that their terrorist students had a bad attitude. Their message seemed to be "terrorists are not nice people."

No one questioned why these two particular flight schools had done such land office business with Osama bin Laden's henchmen.

***

Whatever their reservations about Oklahoma, Florida would offer an inviting welcome and prove to be a congenial place for terrorists to learn to fly, and Atta and Al-Shehhi signed up for flight training at Huffman Aviation in Venice in early July.

But between their visit in Oklahoma and when they showed up in Venice three weeks later is a span of time that is a real mystery.

That's because the flight school Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi first attended in the U.S. has not been named.

It is unknown. It is a mystery flight school.

The name of the first school Atta attended would seem to be one of the first facts uncovered in the 9/11 investigation. But it hasn't been.

Although the FBI said Huffman Aviation was the first flight school Atta attended, the owner of Huffman Aviation, Rudi Dekkers, denied it. He declaimed responsibility for the terror ists having been allowed into the U.S., passing any blame onto the flight school the terrorists first attended. It was this school, Dekkers said, which held responsibility for Atta's INS paperwork and visas, not his.

On the morning after the disaster anchor Jane Clayson of the CBS Morning News asked Dekkers: "How was it that they (Atta and Marwan) could gain access and admittance to your school?

"Well, they didn't came through our paperwork," Dekkers replied. "Like if they were calling from Europe and we know two months ahead and we know they are showing up. As I say, they came from another flight school out of Florida. Probably that flight school did all the INS paperwork with them in their country."

"Another flight school out of Florida." He was equally vague later that day on ABC's Good Morning America, except he had changed the location of the unnamed first school. Correspondent Jim Mora asked Dekkers: "Now, how did they get to you? Did they apply to the school? Did they just show up?"

"No, they just walked up into the front door," Dekkers replied.

"Apparently they were flying at another school -- I've heard Tampa; I can't confirm that."

This is a really obscure flight school. It has no name. Its located somewhere out of Florida near Tampa. Strangely, Dekkers' reference to Atta's first flight school -- attended before he came to Huffman Aviation -- went completely unremarked upon in the national media.

Dekkers didn't just mention the mystery flight school once or twice. He did it numerous times. "The two men were clearly from the Middle East," he was quoted as saying in the September 13 New York Times. "They complained that they had begun instruction elsewhere but didn't like the school."

Did the New York Times ask Dekkers where "elsewhere" had been? They did not. The Washington Post reported a similar story on Sept. 19, quoting Dekkers saying Atta and Al-Shehhi showed up complaining about the experience at "another school."

"Another school elsewhere."

Did the Post ask for the name of this flight school located elsewhere? They did not. Or if they did, they're not letting us in on it. The Washington Post, like the New York Times, forgot to ask.

Making this omission seem even more sinister is the Posts own headline: "Hijack Suspects Tried Many Flight Schools" promising, at a bare minimum, a story containing a list of the flight schools "tried."

When two of the largest and most respected newspapers in America are both guilty of an omission this glaring, what other conclusion is there than that a massive cover-up is in progress?

Even in his sworn testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on March 19, 2002, Dekkers is vague about the earlier flight school attended by Atta and Al-Shehhi. This time he places it 'up North.'

"They had stated they were unhappy with a flying school they attended up North," Dekkers told the Committee. None of the members of Congress in attendance asked about this first school.

It's as if the Warren Commission had said Lee Harvey Oswald lived some place before moving to Dallas ... and left it at that.

What remains unclear is how Atta and Al-Shehhi qualified for flight instruction in the first place. As foreigners, while studying at Huffman Aviation the men would have been required to obtain student visas.

Dekkers said the school helps students obtain the visas. "We send them the paperwork and they go to their embassies."

Richard Nyren, a British classmate of Atta and Marwan, told a reporter that it's not easy to get a student visa, even with the help of the school. He said he had to provide bank statements to show he had money to cover his lessons and living expenses and a house mortgage to prove he would return to the United Kingdom. His student visa was rejected the first time he applied because he hadn't submitted enough information, he said.

Yet Mohamed Atta and Marwan A1-Shehhi, who Dekkers identified as being from Afghanistan, waltzed right in.

Imagine that.

From July through December they were at Huffman Aviation, with a brief three-week stint at nearby Jones Aviation in Sarasota. Then in December the terrorist duo moved 40 miles south to Professional Aviation at the Charlotte County Airport, where they underwent flight training the FBI has chosen not to tell us about.

Atta's sojourn in Charlotte County is not in the official story, which is really strange, because it is the FBI itself which is the source of this knowledge, in a memo from the Bureau to the INS introduced in court during the deportation hearing of a Tunisian student suspected of espionage. (If they had known we would be paying attention, they'd have probably used a military tribunal.)

Professional Aviation at the Charlotte County Airport catered to a student body consisting mainly of foreign nationals from the small Mediterranean country of Tunisia, considered a moderate Arab state.

There were so many Tunisians at the school that it made the news well before the 9/11 attack.

"From the steady hand on the throttle to the aviator sunglasses, Mariem Ezzahi looked every bit like the experienced pilot she hopes to be back in her native country of Tunisia," reported the Char lotte Sun-Herald in a feature story. "Mariem's goal is to become a commercial pilot like her late father, who flew jets for Tunis Air, the country's national airline."

Alas, Mariem would get stiffed by the owners of the school. So would dozens of other Tunisian students left stranded by the bankrupting of a flight school there.

Local news was filled with accounts of the scandal at the Charlotte Airport. Some foreign students had lost their life savings. Amid a flurry of media attention, students picketed the company's offices and staged a sit-in. Television news crews from Charlotte County and Fort Myers broadcast their plight.

The students claimed that they had paid more than $170,000 for flight training and received virtually nothing.

"With the promise of quicker, cheaper training, Florida flight schools recruited students from the Arab nation," reported the Charlotte Sun-Herald in March 2001. "But what a group of young Tunisians ended up with was an education in far more than fly ing. Many of them lost tens of thousands of dollars each when the school they paid to attend, Professional Aviation in Punta Gorda, closed."

"Many of the students had given its owner, David Byers, thousands of dollars in advance to cover training and housing costs," the paper reported. "Now their money was gone."

Students protested for days outside Professional Aviation's offices, holding signs with messages reading, "Where is our money, what about our future?"

The story of Zouhiaer Sdiri, a Tunisian student, was typical, said the paper. He left his wife and job in Tunisia to acquire his pilot's license in Charlotte County in the hope of someday flying commercially. But he received little instruction for the amount of money he paid.

"I have built so many dreams on this endeavor," Sdiri said. "I have only had 3-1/2 hours of flight time and a headset to show for the $7,000 I paid."

"He (Byers) thinks because I am not from this country, I don't know the law," former student Fares Smaoui told reporters. "But I know what fraud means."

"I paid $17,000," said another Tunisian student. "They stole it from me. I lost my future."

The story of stranded and bilked Arab student pilots received extensive local coverage. But in the days after the 9/11 attack when national reporters asked questions about reports of numerous foreigners training at the Charlotte County Airport, an airport official there had the presence of mind to cover it up.

"I don't think either (school) had international students," said airport director Cindy Anderson.

If the stakes are high enough, and the press docile enough, you can get away with almost anything in 21st century America. Cindy Anderson did.

While Mohamed Atta and his band of terrorists were making themselves at home in Florida, some of their American 'hosts' were preying on the flood of Arab flight students turning up in large numbers, joining the ranks of German and Dutch flight trainees.

When Professional Aviation went bankrupt a number of Arab student pilots there, including many of the dozens of Tunisian students who had paid as much as $25,000 upfront for flight train ing, moved up the road to begin attending flight school in Venice. Mohamed Atta was one of them. It marked the third occasion he and Marwan returned to Venice.

The FBI says they were only there once.

***

So Amanda Keller's testimony that Atta was living for two months in North Port, close to the Charlotte County Airport, before moving into the Sandpiper Apartments across from the Venice Airport in early March with her, dovetails perfectly with these accounts of Arab students moving up to Venice in March 2001 after Professional Aviation ceased operations.

In the flush of full disclosure Sheriff Clement had told reporters that Atta had been in flight training at the Charlotte County Air port. Though news accounts noted the flight schools denied he had been there, the connection had been made.

Atta and Al-Shehhi, the Sun-Herald reported, "often flew to the Charlotte County Airport where Professional Aviation was located, and authorities have linked some of the e-mail sent by the two hijackers to a Professional Aviation computer."

In an attempt to pin the blame for the bankruptcy on the students' shoulders, a mechanic at the defunct school told reporters that one student was involved in an incident at a local dance club that Amanda told us she and Atta had frequented together.

"One of the students damaged a school car in the parking lot of Area 51," the mechanic said.

News accounts also contained what is likely a direct reference to Atta's eviction from the "immense well-furnished house" which Amanda said he was living in when she met him.

"Students also claimed they have received an eviction notice at one of the homes where they reside in Deep Creek," reported the Sun-Herald.

Three of the Tunisian students who had attended Professional Aviation were taken into custody during the week after the attack.

One of them was 21 year-old Mariem Bedoui. Bedoui had been one of the Tunisians who moved to Venice when Professional Aviation went under. There she studied at Dutch national Arne Kruithof's Florida Flight Training Center, a block from Huffman Aviation.

During a deportation hearing in Bradenton, Florida, three months after the attack, Bedoui told the Judge that she was friends with one of Atta's roommates, but she denied knowing Atta, and denied as well any involvement or knowledge of the 9/11 plot.

However, the FBI noted in a letter to the immigration judge about the case that Bedoui attended flight schools in Punta Gorda and Venice, Florida, at the same time that hijackers Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi trained at a nearby flight school, inadvertently revealing information indicating they have knowingly fabricated their own chronology of Atta's time in the U.S.

Presenting evidence for why Bedoui should be deported, the FBI's letter stated Bedoui had attended Florida Flight Training Center in Venice at the same time that Atta and Al-Shehhi were just blocks away at another school.

But Maryem Bedoui didn't enter the U.S. until 2001. And ac cording to the FBI's chronology Atta and Al-Shehhi were at Huff man only from July to December 2000.

So according to the FBI's own reckoning, Atta was in Venice months after they say he left for good. The Sun-Herald reporter noted the contradiction, and went to federal authorities seeking answers to give their readers.

"FBI spokeswoman Sara Oakes declined to comment Friday about the discrepancy," reported the paper.

Why had the FBI shown their hand? Probably because they didn't think anyone would catch the slip. And they must have been a little anxious about Bedoui, who, during a solo flight two weeks before the attack, made an unauthorized nighttime landing at a Lockheed Martin airstrip near Orlando. The site is the headquarters for Lockheed Martin's Missiles and Fire Control Division, which develops advanced combat, missile, rocket and space systems, all of which are deemed somewhat sensitive to national security.

Bedoui told the judge she had run out of fuel and landed rather than risk crashing.

"I was out of fuel," Bedoui said. "If I don't land, I crash.""

Since the facility was closed, Bedoui said she spent the night there in her plane.

An immigration judge ordered her to return to Tunisia.

"In ordinary times," the judge told Bedoui, "that may not be a big thing. But these are not ordinary times."

Federal authorities never made public any details of the arrests of the three Tunisians. The matter was cloaked in such secrecy that two federal agencies were fighting over who was in charge.

Each pointed the finger at the other. FBI spokeswoman Sara Oakes in Tampa said the FBI had only assisted the INS in making the arrests.

"They were not arrested on FBI violations," Oates said.

But in Miami, regional INS spokesman Rodney Germain told reporters: "We are assisting the FBI. Because of the sensitivity of the investigation and the importance of the information, we can not release any information."

In the end, the big losers were the flight students, who were out large sums of money. Some of the students filed a criminal complaint against the company with the Charlotte County Sheriff's office, after trying to question Professional Aviation's owner, David Byers, about flight time and a refund of their money.

"We were supposed to meet with David this morning at 8 a.m., but he did not show up. He told us not to worry, that he wasn't going out of business," Youssef Abdelkrim told reporters.

Byers did not return phone calls or requests to answer the door at his Port Charlotte home. Maybe that was because the situation involving the Tunisian students was not the only problem Byers faced ...

"David is past due on the rent at the Charlotte County Airport for January, February, March and April, so we are in litigation on that matter," said Fred Watts, Charlotte County Airport executive director.

Was this just a case of a hard-working small businessman who couldn't make it work? Not to the local paper, it wasn't. They smelled fraud.

"The records imply that Byers simply did not pay his bills or taxes. Among other creditors are phone companies such as Sprint, MCI Worldcom and Qwest Communications, utilities such as Florida Power & Light, Charlotte County Utilities and the Charlotte Harbor Water Association, and cable company Comcast, Florida's Department of Revenue and Department of Labor, as well as the Internal Revenue Service."

"Among the rest of the 116 people and businesses who have claims against Professional are services such as gas companies, exterminators, air conditioner repairmen, body shops and aviation companies such as national giant Raytheon and Punta Gorda's Mod Works."

David Byers, owner of Professional Aviation, slipped out the back door with a lot of foreign student's money. In a later chapter we will see an Orlando flight school do the exact same thing. Although on the surface the two flight schools are not in any way related, we believe both will be shown to have been covertly associated with each other ... and to Huffman Aviation in Venice as well.

There are strong similarities between Professional Aviation in Charlotte County and Huffman Aviation in Venice, each supposedly a free-standing business in competition with the other.

Professional Aviation had been going bankrupt at exactly the same time that Huffman Aviation's Rudi Dekkers was generating embarrassing coverage in the local press for his inability to pay his rent at the Venice Airport.

Numerous witnesses at the Charlotte County Airport had con firmed reports that Mohamed Atta was there during a time when the FBI says he was somewhere else.

What was going on? Why didn't the FBI just quietly change their chronology to accommodate the facts? Why were they ignoring an elephant in the living room? What were they trying to hide?

We discovered that they weren't trying to hide an elephant. That would be silly.

They were trying to hide an Ark.

Go to Next Page