THE MOHAMED ATTA MYTH
Of the four alleged 9/11 suicide-pilots, three had been in attendance at two flight schools at the tiny airport in Venice, Florida: Huffman Aviation and Florida Flight Training. Both were owned by Dutch men who purchased the schools within months of each other, in 1999. Soon after they took over, the schools began training unprecedented numbers of Arab flight students.105 Yet Huffman Aviation and Florida Flight Training, along with the dubious characters who ran them, have so far avoided any serious investigation or media attention. One man who has tried to make up for this is investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker, who spent two years following the attacks in Venice, examining the training of the alleged hijackers. He reports his findings in his book Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta & the 9-11 Cover-up in Florida. As well as describing evidence of large-scale illegal activity going on in and around the Venice Airport, this book casts serious doubt upon the official account of who the hijackers really were.
We have all heard how these 19 alleged hijackers were Islamic extremists. Yet evidence uncovered by Hopsicker, particularly regarding alleged ringleader Mohamed Atta, depicts unlikely personalities and lifestyles for a bunch of religious fanatics. For example, almost totally ignored by the mainstream press is that Atta had an American girlfriend for over two months whilst in Venice, with whom he would go out clubbing almost every night. At the time, this attractive young woman – Amanda Keller – had spiky pink hair and was working as a ‘lingerie model’ for an escort service called Fantasies & Lace. Atta is known to have been a heavy drinker who snorted cocaine. Local newspapers reported how in February 2001, along with Keller, he went on a three-day binge of drinking and drug taking in Key West. 106
Just days before 9/11, Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi (another of the alleged suicide-pilots) spent the evening drinking heavily at a bar in Fort Lauderdale. The bar’s manager later told reporters that the men “got wasted,”107 drinking “Stolichnaya and orange juice, and Captain Morgan’s spiced rum and Coke.” Bartender Patricia Idrissi concurred, saying: “Atta drank Stoli vodka for three straight hours…. They were wasted.” Amanda Keller describes a typical night out at a club with Atta: “Marwan [al-Shehhi] was in the reggae room drinking with a bunch of women at the bar, there were a lot of women around him, and he was just flaunting money.” As Hopsicker points out: “It’s one thing to hear Atta described as living it up with wine, women and song. But Marwan flaunting money at the bar pretty much puts the lie to the ‘Islamic fundamentalist’ tag.”10
Hopsicker suggests that, rather than being a fundamentalist Muslim, Mohamed Atta better fits the profile of a member of Arab society’s privileged elite and also a spy. Amongst many oddities contradicting the ‘fundamentalist’ label is the fact that his e-mail list included the names of several employees of U.S. defense contractors.109 More alarming, he and as many as six of the other alleged 9/11 hijackers appear to have trained at U.S. military bases. Hopsicker writes:
On the Saturday following the Tuesday attack, the Los Angeles Times broke the story in a long article on their front page.
“A defense official said two of the hijackers were former Saudi fighter pilots,” reported the paper, “who had studied in exchange programs at the Defense Language School at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas and the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama.”
The story went wide the next day, Sunday, September 15th. Newsweek, the Washington Post and the Miami Herald all reported as many as seven of the terrorist hijackers in the September 11th attacks received training at secure U.S. military installations.
“Two of 19 suspects named by the FBI, Saeed Alghamdi and Ahmed Alghamdi, have the same names as men listed at a housing facility for foreign military trainees at Pensacola. Two others, Hamza Alghamdi and Ahmed Alnami, have names similar to individuals listed in public records as using the same address inside the base,” the Washington Post reported.
“In addition, a man named Saeed Alghamdi graduated from the Defense Language Institute at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, while men with the same names as two other hijackers, Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari, appear as graduates of the U.S. International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, and the Aerospace Medical School at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, respectively,” the Post said. 110
Newsweek detailed how U.S. military facilities routinely trained pilots for other countries: “A former Navy pilot told NEWSWEEK that during his years on the base, ‘we always, always, always trained other countries’ pilots…. Whoever the country du jour is, that’s whose pilots we train.’ Candidates begin with ‘an officer’s equivalent of boot camp,’ he said. ‘Then they would put them through flight training.’” 111
Hopsicker explains how this crucial story came to be dismissed:
Someone was going to have to answer… for a lot.
“But Atta is a fairly common surname in the Middle East,” the Post quoted Laila Alquatami of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee as saying, and the suspected hijacker’s first name is “probably the No. 1 name that is given to babies, in honor of the prophet Mohamed.”
The Boston Globe reported the Pentagon’s denial: “Some of the FBI suspects had names similar to those used by foreign alumni of U.S. military courses,” said the Air Force in a statement. “Discrepancies in their biographical data…indicate we are probably not talking about the same people.”
How easy was it to tell the Pentagon was lying? Think about it. It is neither plausible nor logical that the reports were false because of seven separate cases of mistaken identity. One or two, maybe. But seven? No way. 112
None of the newspapers retracted the story, yet it disappeared. One person who sought answers was Senator Bill Nelson, who faxed Attorney General John Ashcroft, demanding to know if the story was really true. However:
The Senator has still not received a reply, we heard from his spokesman, when we called his office eleven months later.
“In the wake of those reports, we asked about the Pensacola Naval Air Station but we never got a definitive answer from the Justice Department,” stated the Senator’s press spokesman.
“So we asked the FBI for an answer ‘if and when’ they could provide us one. Their response to date has been that they are trying to sort through something complicated and difficult.” 113
Deciding to investigate for himself, Hopsicker phoned the Pentagon and spoke with the public information officer who helped write and disseminate their original denial of the story:
“Biographically, they’re not the same people,” she explained patiently, using the same language contained in the Air Force’s press release. “Some of the ages are twenty years off.”
… Was she saying that the age of the ‘Mohamed Atta’ who had attended the Air Force’s International Officer’s School at Maxwell Air Force Base was different than that of ‘terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta?’
Not exactly, she admitted. She could not confirm that – in this specific instance – they had different ages. What she could do was once again deny that the International Officer’s School attendee named Mohamed Atta had been the Mohamed Atta who piloted a passenger plane into the World Trade Center.
However, she could offer no specifics for her assertion, and repeatedly declined requests for biographical details about the Mohamed Atta who had trained at Maxwell Air Force Base. 114
After Hopsicker’s persistent questioning, she finally said in exasperation: “I do not have the authority to tell you who attended which schools.” Hopsicker reflects: “It was hard to read this as anything other than a back-handed confirmation. When she said that she didn’t have the authority, the clear implication was that someone else does… Somewhere in the Defense Dept. a list exists with the names of Sept. 11 terrorists who received training at U.S. military facilities. She just didn’t have the authority to release it.” 115 Furthermore, Hopsicker spoke to a woman who works at the Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama:
“I have a girlfriend who recognized Mohamed Atta. She met him at a party at the Officer’s Club,” she told us.
“The reason she swears it was him here is because she didn’t just meet him and say hello. After she met him she went around and introduced him to the people that were with her. So she knows it was him.”
Saudis were a highly visible presence at Maxwell Air Force Base, she said. “There were a lot of them living in an upscale complex in Montgomery. They had to get all of them out of here.
“They were all gone the day after the attack.” 116
Despite it being a key 9/11 crime scene, there has been a surprising absence of investigations into the goings on in Venice, Florida. In fact, to the contrary, “the FBI’s full attention seemed to have been engaged – not in investigating what had happened – but in suppressing evidence and even intimidating the witnesses who had seen and heard things that fly in the face of the ‘official story.’”117 For example, Mohamed Atta’s former girlfriend Amanda Keller says that even after she left Venice, the FBI called on her every other day for several months, telling her not to talk to anybody. Similarly, a woman called Stephanie Frederickson who lived next-door to Atta and Keller in Venice reported how she and other residents at the same apartment building were harassed and intimidated by FBI agents, to prevent them from talking to reporters. According to Frederickson:
The question [the FBI] asked was always the same. You aren’t saying anything to anybody, are you?
At first, right after the attack, they told me I must have been mistaken in my identification. Or they would insinuate that I was lying. Finally they stopped trying to get me to change my story, and just stopped by once a week to make sure I hadn’t been talking to anyone. 118
What is more, the FBI arrived in Venice just hours after the 9/11 attacks. A former manager from Huffman Aviation said: “They were outside my house four hours after the attack.” He added: “My phones have been bugged, they still are…. How did the FBI get here so soon? Ask yourself: How’d they got here so soon?”119 Within 24 hours of the attacks, records from Huffman Aviation, where Atta and al-Shehhi attended, were escorted aboard a C-130 cargo plane to Washington by Florida governor and brother of the president Jeb Bush. Similarly, according to a sergeant with the Venice police, the FBI took all their files and flew them to Washington with Jeb Bush aboard. (Presumably this was on the same flight as the Huffman records.) Hopsicker notes: “The important point was that taking files was a lot different than copying them. The FBI wasn’t taking any chances.”120 He concludes: “There is a demonstrable, provable, and massive federally-supervised cover-up in place in Florida.” 121
As this and my previous evidence shows, there are countless unanswered questions about 9/11 that at some point are going to have to be properly examined. Even an investigation into just a few of these questions, such as those around the war games on 9/11, could be enough to start a major scandal. However, as numerous writers and independent researchers have found, there are so many suspicious circumstances that the truth could be very different to what we have been led to believe. The human rights lawyer Richard Falk has written: “There are so many gaping holes in the official accounts of 9/11 that no plausible coherent narrative remains, and until now we have been staggering forward as if the truth about these traumatic events no longer mattered.”122 But if the mainstream press start investigating properly, it could lead to a completely unprecedented ‘9/11 scandal.’
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