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Venice airport used for covert opsBy Daniel Hopsicker
Online Journal Contributing Writer�
"First we couldn't count votes. Now we're training
terrorists."�Florida law-enforcement official involved in 9/11 probe.
Venice, Fla., October 9, 2002, World Exclusive
The airfield where Mohamed Atta and his terrorist cadre learned to fly
has a long history of�being used as a training base for paramilitary
operations by federal authorities, the MadCowMorningNews has learned
exclusively.
The Venice airport, now notorious for two Dutch-owned flight schools
which trained three of the four terrorist pilots in the Sept. 11 attack,
has been utilized in covert U.S. operations since the earliest days of
the Cold War, according to a top local law enforcement official.
"Venice was even targeted by the Soviet Union in the event of nuclear
war, because of the military nature of certain activities taking place
at the airport," the official said.
During the Vietnam War pilots were trained in Venice for the
paramilitary operations of CIA-proprietary Air America, stated the
official. So too were bush pilots, a decade-and-a-half later, during the
conflicts in Central and South America during the Iran-Contra era.
The federal activity continues to this day.
"It's not unusual to see a military Blackhawk helicopter touch down at
the Venice airport in the middle of the night," stated the official, who
requested anonymity, "and then take off again 30 seconds later, after
dropping off its cargo or passengers."
"Or you look up and all of a sudden there's 5,000 soldiers from the
101st Airborne landing and taking off. Strange things have been going on
out there for a long time."
What they're hiding down in Venice, Florida, is that Mohamed Atta came
to be there at the behest of the people responsible for these
operations.
Spooks, Saudis, Raytheon . . . and Venice
Since most of the hijackers used Florida as their home base while they
were in this country, and since 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, a
big part of the story of the terrorist conspiracy that attacked America
is, perforce, a story� about "Saudis in Florida."
And the company's name that kept coming up again and again in connection
with stories of Saudis in Florida is that of major U.S. defense
contractor Raytheon.
As recently as July, for example, Raytheon and the U.S. Air Force tested
a new air-to air-missile at the Venice airport, designed to help create
a ground-based air defense system for Homeland Defense, as well as at
Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City, Florida.
We had already heard a curious story about Raytheon and Tyndall AFB,
after a former resident of the Florida Panhandle alerted us to a curious
visit that took place there in April of 1999, when Raytheon sponsored a
delegation of seven Saudi defense officials, led by Saudi Prince Turki
bin Bandar, to Tyndall AFB.
"The Prince told me they were at Tyndall to get a helicopter repaired
that President Roosevelt had given his father, who had been the Saudi
king during World War II," stated hotel proprietor Peggy Wood.
"When the delegation first arrived, they asked to speak to whoever was
in charge, and they wouldn't believe me when I told them that I was,"
Wood recalls. "'Women don't run businesses,' they told me."
A Saudi delegation led by a Saudi Prince had indeed spent several weeks
at Tyndall AFB, we confirmed with the owner of the Driftwood Inn in
nearby Mexico Beach, where they stayed.� And one of the members of the
delegation staying at her beachside inn, Peggy Wood told us, was a Major
Mohammed Al-Ghamdi.
Shortly after the 9/11 attack a man with that same name was taken into
custody in Miami by the FBI.
The Al-Ghamdi's of Saudi Arabia
Is the Mohammed al-Ghamdi suspected of taking part in the 9/11 plot the
same man who visited Tyndall AFB with Saudi Royalty Turki bin Bandar?
"Good luck finding out," said one local source. "They don't want facts
like the Saudi-al Qaeda connection made known, or that companies like
Raytheon have been playing both sides of the fence."
"I�took a friend of mine from Finland over to Tyndall AFB one time,"
the source continued. "We both flew the F15 simulator. How many Saudis
do you reckon got flying time on that simulator over the years? Anyone
who is a guest at Tyndall even foreigners can go in and fly the jet
simulators. Our national security has been a joke for the last few
years."
The "Al-Ghamdi" name is prominent in the terrorist conspiracy. Three of
the 19 hijackers were named Al-Ghamdi. Moreover two of those three
Al-Ghamdi's� listed the Pensacola Naval Air Station, known as the
"Cradle of U.S. Navy Aviation," as their home address on their driver's
licenses, reported NEWSWEEK.
In a never-retracted story Sept 15, 2001, which nonetheless died an
immediate death, NEWSWEEK reported, "The three foreign nationals
training in Pensacola appear to be Saeed Alghamdi and Ahmad Alnami, who
were among the four men who allegedly commandeered United Airlines
Flight 93. That flight crashed into rural Pennsylvania. The third man
who may have trained in Pensacola, Ahmed Alghamdi, allegedly helped
highjack United Airlines."
A former Navy pilot told NEWSWEEK that during his years on the 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."
Saeed Alghamdi had also, stated NEWSWEEK, attended the Defense Language
Institute at the Presidio of Monterrey in California. So the Al-Ghamdi
family is apparently very well connected, in the U.S. as well as in
Saudi Arabia.
And it turns out there is a fifth Al-Ghamdi� associated with the
September 11 attack on America. In the most-aired Osama video, where he
salaams a crippled sheikh, the crippled sheikh's name is Sheikh
Al-Ghamdi.
There's an Elephant in the Living Room. Ignore It.
Just who are all these Al-Ghamdis? The name belongs, we learned, to one
of the most important and influential tribes in Saudi Arabia.
According to the Washington Post's� Sept 11 anniversary recap, after
the Hamburg cadre left Germany to train in bin Laden's Afghanistan
terror camps in 1999 "the first place in Afghanistan that the new
arrivals were taken was a guesthouse in Kandahar, called the Al-Ghumad
House, after the Saudi Al-Ghamdi tribe."
At least four other men named Al-Ghamdi have shown up on records at
Huffman Aviation, the flight school in Florida where Alghamdi was said
by the FBI to have trained, the Post reported.
Rudi Dekker's Huffman Aviation trained more than 200 potential terrorist
pilots with the surname Alghamdi, stated the article.
Hundreds of former flight students who took lessons in Venice are now
under scrutiny by federal authorities, one investigator told us.
All of which brings up one crucial question which no one in authority
has been willing to even address, let alone answer: "Whose idea was it
to train thousands of young Arab men to learn to fly?"
Sarasota County is Jeb Country.
They didn't go just anywhere to learn to fly. They came, most of them,
to Florida.
The two Venice "Magic Dutch Boys" have been walking, as it turns out, a
familiar path . . . The Venice airport was built by the U.S. government
in the early 1940s as a flight training facility during World War II.
Since then the feds have had not just a significant but predominant role
at the airport, according to some local officials.
Venice, Florida, is an otherwise unexceptional retirement community
sandwiched on Florida's Gulf Coast between the well-heeled resort (and
Bush family retreat) of Boca Grande and Sarasota, home of local
girl-making-good Katherine Harris.
Lessons that emerged from the Cocaine Scandals in Mena Arkansas during
Bill Clinton's term included the no-brainer notion that if you wanted to
be able to act with impunity and, say,�get away with murder, having
the state's coroner in your hip pocket was clearly a good place to
start.
In Sarasota County, where Venice is located, Republicans occupy 41 of
the 42 elected offices.
According to local law enforcement who loaded the records from Huffman
Aviation and Florida Flight Training Center aboard a C130 at Sarasota
International Airport the day after September 11, when it flew out Jeb
Bush was aboard.
The accumulating evidence in Venice of official and so far
unacknowledged complicity in the presence in the U.S. of Mohamed Atta
and his terrorist cadre is a far more important issue than the proposed
focus for the the now halted independent 9/11 investigation: "blunders
and missed signals" by the CIA and FBI.
One person in Venice seems particularly unconcerned. Said Rudi Dekkers
recently, about his sudden notoriety:
"At the beginning, it was bad. We had some death threats. Now,
basically, all we hear is good news. People come up and say, 'Aren't you
the guy who owns Huffman Aviation?' And they shake hands with me."
Lily Tomlin said it best. "No matter how cynical I get, I just can't
keep up."
Daniel Hopsicker is the author of "Barry & ?the boys;? The CIA, the Mob
& America?s Secret History" and the producer of the video, "Mohamed Atta
and the Venice Flying Circus. He also is the publisher of the Mad Cow
Morning News.
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