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by Daniel Hopsicker
October 14, 2001
EXCLUSIVE— Despite earlier
denials, terrorists in the Sept. 11 attacks received training at secure
U.S. military bases, a Defense Department spokesman admitted in an
interview Friday.
Three days after the WTC
disaster, Newsweek, the Washington Post and the Knight Ridder newspapers
reported claims that five of the terrorist hijackers in the Sept 11
attacks received training at secure U.S. military installations during
the 1990s. The reports also claimed three of the terrorists had listed
their address as the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla., and had
participated in military exchange programs for foreign officers at the
Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida.
In an interview with a reporter
questioning the vaguely-worded Sept 16 Pentagon denial, the Defense Dept
spokesman was asked to explain the particulars of fuzzy statements in
which officials said "name matches may not necessarily mean the students
were the hijackers, and that discrepancies in biographical data indicate
"we are probably not talking about the same people." (Italics added.)
Pressed repeatedly to provide
specifics, the spokesperson finally admitted, "I do not have the
authority to tell you who (which terrorists) attended which schools."
So it appears certain that at
least some of the previous denials have been rendered inoperative, and
that a list exists in the Defense Dept which names Sept 11 terrorists
who received training at U.S. military facilities, a list the Pentagon
is in no hurry to make public. This admission has significant import.
Consider:
Foreign nationals training at secure U.S. facilities do so almost solely
at the behest of governments considered friendly to the United States.
Gaining
admittance to the International Officer’s School at Maxwell AFB in
Montgomery—which terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta was reported to have
attended—would have required Atta to be someone well-connected with a
friendly Arab government. (For the record, the spokesperson denied that
the International Officer’s School attendee named Mohamed Atta is the
same Mohamed Atta who piloted a passenger plane into the WTC, while
repeatedly declining requests for biographical details about a second
Arab pilot with the same name as the terrorist.)
Take the (online) resume of
someone who indisputably did attend the U.S. Air Forces’ International
Officers School, for example, as an illustration of just how connected
these foreign nationals must be.
Colonel and Staff Pilot
Mohammed Ahmed Hamel Al Qubaisi is currently a Defense Military Naval &
Air Attache at the United Arab Emirates Embassy U.S. embassy, after
previous stints in his country’s Embassy & Security Division as Chief of
Intelligence, and in the UAE’s Security Division/Air Force Intelligence
& Security Directorate Security Officer/Air Force Intelligence &
Security Directorate.
Arab Emirate-wise,
International Officer's School graduate Al Qubaisi is a
homeland-security kind of guy.
A former Navy pilot quoted in
Newsweek’s Sept 15 report stated that during his years on the Pensacola
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 du jour" at U.S.
military installations during the 1990’s, according to numerous reports,
was Saudi Arabia. Newsweek’s prematurely "dis-credited" report, for
example, states that according to a Pentagon source at least two of the
terrorists trained at U.S. military facilities were former Saudi Air
Force pilots. Mohammed Atta had a Saudi passport, early reports also
indicated. Waleed Alshehri and Marwan Alsherhri had been living in Saudi
Arabia before they arrived in Florida to train for their missions.
Alleged associates had listed
Saudi Arabian Airlines’ post office box in the Saudi city of Jeddah as
their home address on their commercial pilots' licenses. And some of the
pilots had licenses indicating they were sponsored or employed by Saudi
Arabian Airlines, owned by the Saudi government.
Then, too, Crown Prince
Abdullah of Saudi Arabia told Washington 10 days before the September 11
terror attacks that U.S. policy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict had
become untenable. And the Oct 12 Times of London reports that the White
House is frustrated with the lack of help from Saudi Arabia in freezing
Osama bin Laden’s assets and tracking those behind the September 11
hijackings, and that the Saudi regime has so far refused to clamp down
on the assets of bin Laden or other al-Qaeda figures, despite repeated
requests from Washington.
This official admission—that
the "Terrorist 19" have suspicious connections that are
still-unexplored—puts even more of a spotlight on the two Dutch-owned
flight schools in Venice, Florida which were the initial "port of entry"
for terrorist pilots inducted into the U.S. flight training program.
The Two Venice Dutch Boys
There are over 200 flight
schools in Florida. Every terrorist pilot chose one of the two in
Venice, Florida. The two Venice flight schools were the terrorist’s
American beachhead.
Rudi Dekkers’ Huffman Aviation
was the terrorist’s Omaha Beach.
What made these two schools so
popular with the terrorist cadre?
Some flight schools may be
slightly more equal than others, as it happens...
"Some schools are authorized by
the Immigration and Naturalization Service to issue highly coveted I-20M
immigration forms that help foreign students acquire visas to enter the
United States as vocational students," read one early report about the
Florida flight schools.
Guess who had one of those
"highly-coveted" "vocational status" visas?
Mohammed Atta, the alleged
mastermind of the most vicious terrorist attack in the history of the
world...
Guess who gave it to him? Rudi
Dekkers’ flight school, Huffman Aviation.
Under the glare of TV lights on
the apron of the Venice airport the day after the tragedy, Dekkers had
denied any responsibility for the terrorists student visas, saying
"foreign students must apply through Immigration and Naturalization
Services, which he believes performs background checks.
"We send them the paperwork and
they go to their embassies," said Dekkers. But Richard Nyren, a British
classmate of the terrorist pilots in Venice, had told reporters at the
same time that it's not all that easy to get a student visa, even with
the help of the school.
How did Mohamed Atta happen to
get so ‘lucky’ in the mangrove swamps of Southwest Florida?
He got his "highly-coveted"
I-20M immigration because "some" schools are authorized by the
Immigration and Naturalization Service to issue them.
Not "all" schools. "Some"
schools. Schools like Rudi Dekkers’ Huffman Aviation.
The question is: what made
Dekker’s school so special?
In a wire service report three
days after the WTC disaster, Dekkers was quoted saying, "I can tell you
that there's definitely some flaws in the system." It has been one of
his few completely truthful statements.
FACT: Some of the terrorists
had enough ‘juice,’ enough access, to have gained admittance to training
at secure U.S. military facilities. That argues official government
complicity—leaving aside exactly which government for the moment—at a
level the current FBI investigation has not even hinted at.
So far, the investigation
conducted around the world since Sept. 11 has resulted in a finger being
pointed directly at an obscure outfit most people had never even heard
of, and their Taliban backers. Did Al Qaeda and the Taliban bring down
the World Trade Center towers all by themselves?
Or should the FBI’s
investigators be looking at other, larger groups and even nations?
When the FBI was actively
looking for "international networks" which assisted and harbored the
terrorists, were any suspects overlooked? Were any protected from
scrutiny?
Were Rudi Dekker and Arne
Kruithof acting as "cut-outs" for a U.S. intelligence operation at the
Venice, Florida airport? Were they ‘funneling’ Arab pilots into further
pilot training?
If the past 40 years of
American history serves as any guide, we will very likely never know.
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