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by Daniel Hopsicker
January 4, 2005 -Venice, FL.
While both of the terrorist pilots
who crashed into the World Trade Center were students at Venice
Florida’s Huffman Aviation, the flight school's owner Wallace J.
Hilliard, 72, of Naples, FL., was simultaneously pursuing his own
diplomatic opening to Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
A photograph (above) recently
made available to the MadCowMorningNews shows a smiling Hilliard
strapping a Rolex with the must-have diamond beveled-face onto the
presumably grateful wrist of one of Fidel Castro’s top aides, Guillermo
Garcia Frias, known in Cuba as "the Commandante of the Revolution."
For Hilliard, portrayed as a
retired-to-Florida Midwestern insurance executive-turned-befuddled
investor after the 9.11 attack, the new evidence confirms he had been
doing considerably more ''moving and shaking' than is customary for
seniors in the Sunshine State.
Former employees confirmed
Hilliard's curious Cuban venture. All expressed puzzlement, even after
working with him closely, about who Hilliard really worked for and what
he had been up to while Mohamed Atta frolicked on the tarmac at the
Venice Airport in front of his hanger.
'Use Airline start-up for 'cover:'
Check."
“I used to look at Wally and Rudi
and wonder what made them think they could start an airline,” said
former Director of Operations Bill Bersch. “I mean, I was on the
executive team, trying to start an airline, and from August 2000 to the
present we had all of four business meetings ...”
“Even when you could get a meeting
scheduled, somebody would tell you that it had been canceled ... because
Wally is in Havana.”
Hilliard was looking to cut a deal
with Castro, said Rob Tiller, who provided the photograph, to buy a
10,000 acre cattle ranch on the island for the Mormon Church in Utah,
reportedly in anticipation of the resumption of normal diplomatic
relations between Cuba and the United States.
"Wally was AARP's Very Own James
Bond"
Tiller, a colorful Florida
entrepreneur who felt unfairly cut out of the deal, responded like
untold colorful Florida entrepreneurs before him.
He's not getting mad. He's getting
even, providing still-more evidence that when the terrorists roamed
Florida things were not at all as they have been described to be by the
FBI.
While most retirees move to
Florida to play golf, when Hilliard alighted in Naples, Florida from
Green Bay, Wisconsin, he almost immediately purchased between 30 and 40
jets ... and then began courting Communist dictators reshaping the
Caribbean Basin. This colors our understanding of the nature of the 9.11
attack just a bit ...
Still, we don’t imagine there was
much testimony before the 9.11 Commission along these lines at all.
News of Hilliard’s highly-curious
mission again raises the question of whether he was an innocent flight
school owner victimized by wily terrorists, or James Bond with an AARP
card, an international operative flitting around the globe at whim.
And the answer is important … For
two crucial years Mohamed Atta’s Hamburg cadre frolicked on the tarmac
at the Venice Airport … right in front of his hangers.
When we first saw the
incriminating new photo of Hilliard, we wondered what had possessed him
to be indiscreet enough to allow himself to be caught on camera
strapping diamond-beveled Rolexes onto the wrists of Fidel Castro’s top
aides in Havana Cuba …
Hilliard had a bag-full of them,
we heard from one of his ex-employees. He was passing them out in Havana
as tokens of his and his client’s esteem.
One again we asked a crucial
question: Who is Wally Hilliard?
“Wally was manipulated by somebody
with a lot of power,” international jack-of-all-trades Mark Shubin had
said to us, in an interview at the Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport.
“He was blackmailed. Rudi was the
one person who knew what was going in.”
Was that true? And if it wasn't
... what was?
"Marx, Moroni ... We're all just
people, right?"
After attention was drawn to his
flight school, and eventually to Hilliard himself, he portrayed himself
as an innocent business investor, a retired-to-Florida businessman whose
only link to the 9.11 tragedy was a purely incidental one … as an
investor.
If you’ve read "Welcome to
TerrorLand" you know different …
During an interview recently
promoting the book we tried our best to convey the enormity of the
discovery to Court TV’s Catherine Crier.
While Atta was at his flight
school the retired Hilliard had amassed a fleet of between 30 and 40
jets. We wondered what was really going on: Keeping track of that many
planes struck us as seeming to cut down on your hammock time.
We viewed Hilliard with suspicion
… even before discovering the heroin bust: that, during the same month
Atta and Marwan had arrived in Florida to attend his flight school,
Hilliard’s Lear jet had been confiscated at Orlando Executive Airport by
DEA Agents who found 43 pounds of heroin onboard.
When news broke last week that
European authorities suspect Yeslam bin laden has been lying about his
supposed lack of contact and involvement with his famous terrorist
brother …
We immediately thought of Wally
Hilliard, who’d been doing business with Yeslam bin Laden as well.
Yeslam has admitted funneling an unknown number of Arab pilots to
Huffman Aviation in Venice, supposedly for pilot training.
But its Hilliard’s involvement
with ADNAN KHASHOGGI, THE SAUDI BILLIONAIRE and international fugitive,
which is most intriguing. We learned of it from a business rival of the
two men, both vying for rights to build a casino on a remote island in
the Bahamas.
"A reputation for corruption to be
proud of."
Like a 'bandit cab' in the air,
Hilliard's Lear jet was flying without any apparent official sanction.
Though the FAA license under which it operated has been suspended, (that
of Air Florida, belonging to Pakistani Perez Khan) the plane was making
regular runs to the Bahamas.
We received a photo taken in Rum
Cay attesting to its presence bolstering one side in a struggle for
control of the isolated island and its coveted runway, which had
recently been upgraded for jets.
Located 375 miles to the southeast
of Ft. Lauderdale in the remote southeastern Bahamas, Rum Cay, we soon
learned, is the very definition of 'secluded.'
In fact, that’s its charm.
The island once served as a refuge
for pirates, and had been a center of gun-running during the American
Civil War before growing to true prominence during Prohibition as a port
used for boot-legging.
What was going on Rum Cay was that
there was a new runway, which now allowed private jets like Hilliard's
Lear to land on the island. Local newspapers were running regular items
with headlines like "COPS SEIZE $50 MILLION IN DRUGS."
The reputed head of one group
vying for control was a South African named Lesley Greyling, reportedly
fronting for Khashoggi. News accounts about Mr. Greyling relied rather
heavily on the "M" word … Mobster.
But not a mobster of the 'dese dem
& dose' variety …
Greyling helmed a Palm Beach
company, Members Service Corp., whose chairman was former Republican
Governor of Florida Claude Kirk, and included noted attorney F. Lee
Bailey, and Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.
Greyling was said to be also
considering helping the Saudi arms merchant and Iran-Contra middleman
build a casino on the Gaza Strip.
Saudis and the Mob and terror
flight school owner Wally Hilliard all bumping chests together in the
world's Bermuda Triangle of narcotics trafficking. It’s a Strange Brew.
None of this has anything to do
with 9/11.
(More) Democratic Weak Tea
The troubling and sometimes
criminal associations revealed in recent weeks about the shady pasts of
the big election companies counting America’s vote can be seen to
overlap with the cast of characters in the saga of the 9.11 terrorist
hijackers associates while in America.
But what makes the Hilliard
revelation particularly interesting are his associations with figures
involved, not in 9.11, but in the current election intrigue.
Hilliard is in business, to cite
one example, with Saudi billionaire arms dealer and international
fugitive Adnan Khashoggi, whose name has now surfaced in connection with
at least one, and possibly two, American election companies mired in
controversy.
The story which follows is of
vital current interest only for what it reveals about the milieu in
which the 2004 election was fixed.
But first a word about methodology
…
When the Cleveland Plain Dealer
reluctantly concluded “System to Blame for Ballot Debacle” in a recent
headline, the ‘system’ they chose to ‘blame’ was one which mishandled
provisional ballots.
Nothing about allegations that one
of the major election companies responsible for Ohio’s ballot debacle,
Diebold, was being run by a handful of convicted felons!
Similarly, when Democratic Party
leaders recently announced the launching of an investigation into the
2004 elections in OHIO, they referenced faulty machines, ballot
shortages, polling place changes, understaffed polling places, untrained
personnel, voter intimidation, misinformation and other anomalies.
At the MadCowMorningNews, we’ve
been all over the “other anomalies.”
The idea of widespread vote fraud
in the U.S. presidential election became vastly more plausible when one
considers how easily the ‘macro’ mechanisms of vote fraud were put in
place before the election.
What would those “macro
mechanisms” have been? If you were going to fix an election, what would
you do? From this simple query we have been able to identify two “macro”
mechanisms: First, go right to the source …
1. Buy up the companies which
count the votes.
Its simple. Its clean. Its neat.
And it works. And the second macro mechanism we will be examining works
hand-in-velvet glove with the first …
2. Bribe Anything That Moves.
Bribery is a time-honored
technique: a simple but trusty old standby. Its a universal language …
If we found wholesale bribery of public election officials it would be a
big clue that something really was wrong in the state of Denmark.
Three words: Spooks, Saudis,
Florida
If you were to tell a friend that
the same network doing business with the terrorists in Florida before
the 9.11 attack three years ago was helping to count American votes
three years later, they’d look at you like you were crazy.
So we strongly suggest you keep it
to yourself.
Still, anyone interested in who
attacked us on Sept 11 must feel curious just a little to learn of
Hilliard’s association with Khashoggi ... Is this the connection which
led to the federal complaint accusing him (and Rudi Dekkers) of numerous
"unauthorized and unsupervised flights" during 1999?
“They were flying for the Saudis,”
said an aviation executive familiar with the operation. "They were
ferrying Saudi princes all over the U.S."
“You can go to jail for the kind
of things they’re charged with," said the aviation executive. "But all
they're getting is a slap on the wrist. What they were doing is
blatantly illegal. Without a Federal Aviation Administration air carrier
operating certificate, the Government has no idea where those planes
went, or even who was on board. Whoever they were flying for didn’t want
anyone to know.”
Of course, any move by the FAA to
curb the suspicious aviation activities of Hilliard and Dekkers must
answer the obvious question.
“Why start now?”
So just why is it that that
everything about Khashoggi seems to reek, even if unintentionally, of
intrigue?
Even a recent (Nov 20, 2004)
trashy British tabloid story headlined “ERIC CLAPTON: Our stormy affair
and the day I saw our son plunge to his death,” where Clapton’s
girlfriend and the mother of the dead baby was identified, when she met
Clapton, as “a 26-year-old model and TV presenter -- and former
girlfriend of Adnan Khashoggi.”
According to a recent story in the
Dec 10, 2004 London Evening Standard, he still owns a home in glitzy
Aspen, where Khashoggi joined Jack Nicholson, Goldie Hawn, Michael
Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones, Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas,
Hunter S Thompson, and the Donald, who has a personal history worth
noting there.
“On New Year's Eve 1989, Ivana
Trump confronted Marla Maples at Bonnie's restaurant. In front of
Donald, she demanded, 'Are you the witch who's been screwing my
husband?' That night Trump took Marla, not Ivana, to a house party of a
billionaire friend. The Trumps divorced shortly afterwards.”
Adnan moves in some interesting
circles …
When a huge ranch in Kenya which
used to be owned by Khashoggi changed hands recently, purchased by a
British NGO whose patron is Queen Elizabeth II of England, an article
about the sale noted “When Khashoggi owned the property, he would fly in
his private jet directly to the airstrip, and the customs officials
would drive there from Nairobi to clear him and his entourage.”
Cloak & Dagger in Green Bay
A world away in Packer Country,
the story of Hilliard’s involvement with Khashoggi remains to be
written.
But when Hilliard's home-town
Green-Bay Press Gazette did a front page review of "Welcome to
TerrorLand" they had noticed the same thing we did:
"Terrorists, drug runners,
cover-ups, CIA, KGB and shady characters are the cloak-and-dagger kinds
of elements that make for a riveting spy novel or action thriller. It's
hardly the place you'd expect to find retired Green Bay businessman
Wally J. Hilliard."
Was Adnan Khashoggi a principal in
a company which has been counting the votes of American servicemen
overseas? Answer: highly likely.
Both Election.com, and Triad, the
election company cited for causing most of the problems in Ohio, should
receive close scrutiny for evidence of Khashoggi involvement.
While there has been no suggestion
of it anywhere in the media, the name “Triad” was used extensively by
Khashoggi at exactly the same time (the early 80’s) and in exactly the
same place (Palm Beach, Florida) as the “Triad Governmental Systems”
involved in Ohio’s current election “difficulties.”
Khashoggi owned a number of
companies named “Triad.”
Khashoggi owned “Triad
International Marketing.”
“Northrop, the Los Angeles-based
aircraft and electronics manufacturer, owes Triad International
Marketing, S.A., a Liechtenstein corporation controlled by Khashoggi,
$31 million in commissions on sales to the Saudi air force,” reported
the L.A. Times on August 29, 1987.
Khashoggi owned “Triad America.”
“Creditors claim they are owed
more than $100 million by Triad America and its subsidiaries … in Salt
Lake City. Leonard Gumport, the court-appointed examiner, also is
recommending that Triad America seek repayment of the $189.2 million
loaned to companies controlled by the Khashoggis,” reported the Salt
Lake Tribune.
From the company’s literature:
“TRIAD Governmental Systems, Inc., is a nationally recognized
corporation that is committed to providing quality, computer based
systems for governmental voting units. Incorporated in 1982, TRIAD GSI
was founded to provided quality support and services for Rapp Systems'
Election products, with election experience that spans a quarter of a
century.”
In 1982, Khashoggi owned Triad
Farms in Kentucky.
In "The Blue Grass Conspiracy” by
Sally Denton, she revealed that the large drug smuggling operation
called “The Company,” headquarters were near Lexington, Kentucky, at
Triad Farms, owned by Khashoggi.
That’s just about the same time
(1983) that TRIAD Governmental Systems was founded …
“Lightning Strike, Computer Glitch
... Whatever.”
We also discovered that a
strikingly similar allegation of Triad employee tampering was lodged
against the company all the way back in 1988 …
According to Jackie Beville, a
former employee of the Supervisor of Elections in Hillsborough County,
Triad workers adjusted the software to clear up a ballot-counting
problem shortly before the election, and the machinery should then have
been recertified following the work.
When questioned, she was told that
Triad workers were just fixing problems caused by a lightning strike.
Beville disputes that the weather
had anything to do with the repair work.
But even it if did, "My question
is, why was it a secret? The party chairmen were not called in. The
canvassing board was not notified. The Division of Elections was not
notified.
"Why was I forbidden to mention
it? If the party chairmen and division had been notified, it may not
have been a big deal. But it should have been made public. Everyone has
a right to know."
Triad manufactures punch-card
voting systems, and also wrote the computer program that tallied the
punch-card votes cast in 41 Ohio counties last November. The company is
owned by a man named Tod Rapp, who has donated money to the Republican
Party as well as the election campaign of George W. Bush.
Given the broad distribution of
Triad voting systems in Ohio, the allegations that have been leveled
against this company strike to the heart of the assumed result of the
2004 election.
And not just Triad …
Election.com should be examined
for the invisible hand of the Saudi financier and CIA “fixer.”
News reports stated Election.com
was owned by an offshore Saudi front company in Bermuda consisting of
five unnamed Saudi billionaires, until scrutiny forced a sale to
Accenture, the remnants of the disgraced and disbanded Arthur Anderson,
the accounting firm which made Enron possible.
From a recent Federal lawsuit
involving Khashoggi: “Ultimate Holdings Ltd., a Bermuda investment
company owned by Adnan Khashoggi, the company's largest shareholder.”
Election.com was also involved in
the U.S.’s big democracy push into Eastern Europe … in Estonia, just a
stolen vote’s throw away from the Ukraine.
NOSTALGIC LONGING FOR LAND OF THE
BABUSHKAS
Implausibly, Americans have began
to have longing thoughts they never thought they’d have …
“If only we could be as free as
the Ukraine!”
For one thing, in the Ukraine
soldiers don’t have to rely, like our overseas military has had to, on
election companies like election.com, an offshore shell company owned by
a group of anonymous Saudi billionaires suspected of including arms
merchant and international fugitive Adnan Khashoggi.
We feel sure that there really
shouldn’t be any dummy front companies counting the vote.
The Ukrainians also voted using a
new medium which is suspiciously unavailable to American voters … a new
miracle invention which allows for accurate counts and recounts done in
plain sight for all to see …
They call it paper.
Those innovative Ukrainians!
Who knew? There’s a lot we can
learn from studying the glorious democratic traditions of the Ukraine …
If our own country ever decides to
turn democratic, maybe they’ll offer to help.
Next week: WALLY HILLIARD, ADNAN
KHASHOGGI, and a cabal OF secretive international financiers: Do they
constitute a rogue state which has taken over America?
The deposition of Michael Roy
Fugler grows in importance with word that Adnan Khashoggi is currently
in Florida.
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