|
by Daniel Hopsicker
ONLINE JOURNAL™
October 24, 2001
Questions mount about the precise
nature of the conspiracy which took down the World Trade Center on Sept.
11, even as the time for asking them grows urgently short.
Justice, vengeance, and our duty to
our dead demand adherence to a simple progression.
Identify the bad guys who killed our
people. Find the bad guys who killed our people. Kill them.
London, England. to Venice, Florida.
Macro to micro. Tony Blair sketches out the Cliff Notes version of the
case against Bin Laden. He says, “Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization
with ties to a global network.”
“A global network.”
What global network? A global
network of what? Said global network assisted terrorist cadre. Said global
network otherwise remains shadowy and undefined.
London, England to Venice, Florida.
Macro to micro. A massive flight training operation funnels hundreds of
foreign national pilots here. Noise complaints heat up. City Council
meetings. Rudi Dekkers’ operation makes Big Noise. “During a period of two
hours some 90 flights went over . . . 15 planes flying overhead six times
each.”
“Fifteen planes overhead.”
A terrorist squadron. Bin Laden Air.
Three weeks later on the tarmac at
the Venice Airport they are standing clear of Rudi Dekkers. Former
associates plead ignorance. They are “no longer with the company.”
More is learned about Rudi Dekkers.
Rudi’s $500,000 yacht rocks at anchor in Naples, Florida. Rudi has Big
Friends. Rudi has Big Problems. Rudi’s stock is Marked Down. Rudi’s story
does not “cohere.” Rudi’s friends are in High Places. Down on the tarmac
Rudi is Mucho Unloved.
If the FBI is buying Rudi’s act, it
isn’t because of his sterling reputation. “I tolerated Rudi’s advances
because I needed to keep my job,” said former Dekkers’ employee Nicole
Antini.
Two weeks before the World Trade
Center attack she filed suit to force him to enforce
settlement of a sexual harassment charge. Dekkers agreed to settle for
$15,000. Now he was balking at paying.
“As long as I have worked at Huffman
Aviation,” Nicole said, “I have been subjected to sexual harassment by
Rudi Dekkers.” Dekkers’ Venice Florida flight school was terrorist
American beachhead. Huffman Aviation was terrorist Omaha Beach.
The FBI pointedly said -- early --
they knew about terrorists rotating through Rudi Dekkers’ flight school.
They leave hanging the question of why they did nothing to shut it down.
Dekkers’ waxes indignant. “I don’t
need anything from you, just a check to start flying.” Dekkers tells
reporters how he happened to provide pilot training to the terrorist
cadre:
“We’re just a business.”
Consider the (business) logic.
Two Dutch nationals, Arne Kruithof
and Rudi Dekkers, buy two flight training schools at the
‘way-off-the-beaten-track’ Venice, Florida, airport in 1998.
Dekkers begins extensive “marketing”
in Belgium and Germany. Atta lived in Germany. Mohamed Atta and at least
four of his terrorist cadre leave Germany. They move directly to Venice,
Florida.
They do not pass “go.” If they
collect $200, it comes in useful, because now they are in pilot training
with Dekkers and Kruithof. Pilot training is expensive.
Atta and Al-Shehhi pay $38,000
between them. Dekkers is training 500 foreign national pilots at two
separate facilities. Yet, out at the Venice Municipal Airport, Rudi is
falling behind on his rent.
Right now there are people in
federal custody whose connections with the terrorists are far less
suspicious. Both men are foreign nationals and thus presumed to be flight
risks. Yet neither Dekkers nor Kruithof is being held.
Big Clout. Big Friends. Big Trouble.
Big Charade.
“We’re just a business.”
What global network? A global
network of what?
The birth of the ‘Lone (Nut) Cadre
theory.
Dekkers’ and Kruithof’s importance
grew when the Washington Post proposed the “Lone (Nut) Cadre” theory,
which is how, they report, the operative assumption in the FBI’s
investigation.
“The 19 hijackers who carried out
the worst act of terror ever to occur on U.S. soil worked with little
outside help as a single, integrated group,” said the Post in a Sunday
report on the state of the investigation.
“Little outside help.”
“As more of the conspiracy becomes
understood, government sources now say that the investigation so far
suggests the 19 had “no major help” in the United States,” wrote Post
reporter Amy Goldstein.
“No major help.”
“The FBI investigation into the plot
is preliminary, and the conspiracy’s precise nature probably will not be
understood for years.”
If the conspiracy’s precise nature
won’t be understood for years, how can they rule out domestic involvement?
A federal agency with a preference for lone (nut) gunmen floats a Lone
(Nut) Cadre trial balloon.
Think 19 Lee Harvey Oswalds.
Think squads of “lone gunmen.”
Atta’s cadre was a Lone Cadre. Doing
Lone Cadre-like things. Acting always alone . . . at least while in this
country. No one else involved. No Higher Ups.
Tony Blair’s global network
explanation now obsolete. Replaced by Lone (Nut) Cadre theory.
Think FBI. Think Whitewater.
Watergate. Kennedy.
Think ‘cover up.’
“I did not have sexual relations
with that woman.”
“We’re just a business.”
The Sarasota FBI office, responsible
for the Venice airport investigation, has so far not offered its version
of what Rudi Dekkers was up to.
Were Middle Eastern terrorists
wandering the Florida Panhandle and Gulf Coast as comfortably as if they’d
been listening to Tom Petty records all their lives?
Or is something else the case? Might
Rudi Dekkers and Arne Kruithof work for the CIA? Might the CIA have been
training bin Laden operatives as part of an intelligence operation
designed to try to penetrate his organization? Might that explain FBI lack
of interest in the two Venice Dutch Boys?
When commercial flights resumed at
Venice Municipal Airport after the Sept 11 disaster the first plane to
take off was an Air Sunshine flight, part of a fleet based in Fort
Lauderdale. The only passenger was the pilot. There was little other
activity at the airport. Members of the media outnumbered pilots or
passengers in the lobby of Huffman Aviation, watching national broadcasts
about the attacks.
Air Sunshine is owned by one
Mirmohammed Adili, whose large family is involved in numerous aviation and
import-export ventures. It is one of just two air carriers the American
military lets fly into the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo, Cuba.
Mirmohammed Adili’s Air Sunshine is in Fort Lauderdale.
Just six months before they hijacked
commercial planes and slammed them into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon,
bin Laden operatives tried to buy a multi-million dollar Boeing 727. They
found a willing broker in . . . Fort Lauderdale. It is just coincidence.
The Lone Cadre received “no major outside help.”
Atta didn’t Keep A Diary. Instead,
Atta Left A Will.
When it’s released experts read Atta
as Saudi Wahhabi. A fundamentalist puritanical strain. No women at the
funeral. No flowers. No wailing. No gnashing of terrorist teeth.
But Atta is an Arab elite commando.
Atta is an Arab elite. Atta’s father is an Egyptian diplomat/lawyer. Elite
make poor fundamentalists. Too much money to be made to spend time
speaking in tongues. Rockefellers don’t handle snakes at Monday night
revivals.
What induced Islamic terrorists to
move to a retirement enclave with more golf carts than cars? It couldn’t
have been the nightlife. But these terrorists -- strange for devout
Muslims, it seems -- dig lively nightlife.
Devout Muslims abstain from alcohol.
These Muslims order premium brands. These Muslims enjoy a night on the
town as much as any infidel.
Federal agents flash pictures at a
South Florida bar of the two terrorist pilots who just a day earlier had
demolished the World Trade Center. One of them drank Stolichnaya vodka for
three straight hours, one bartender remembers.
“Muslim extremist” Marwan al-Shehhi
was drinking rum.
Was Mohammed Atta a “devout Islamic
fundamentalist,” Saudi puritanical or Stoli guy?
Mohammed Atta is Islamic Stolichnaya
Forty-eight hours after the slaying
of John Fitzgerald Kennedy a CIA pilot named David Ferrie was under
suspicion of participation in the assassination conspiracy. Thirty years
later Joe Pesci plays Ferrie in Oliver Stone’s “JFK” the movie.
Forty-eight hours after the Sept. 11
attack, a flight school owner named Rudi Dekkers, known to have trained
virtually the entire terrorist pilot cadre, and a possible CIA asset,
seemed impervious to suspicion. What suspicions? He was being booked onto
Larry King Live.
Daniel Hopsicker is the author of
“Barry & ‘the boys;’ The CIA, the Mob & America’s Secret History” <http://www.barryandtheboys.com/>
Copyright © 1998–2001 Online Journal™. All rights reserved.
Return to Table of Contents |