More
than 14 years and five months after an attack which took more than
2800 lives in ways so horrible that the U.S. Government and the nation’s
television networks seamlessly colluded—in real time—to prevent the
American people from seeing what really was happening, last month some
were finally hailing a “break” in the case.
In a deposition in a lawsuit filed by families of 9/11 victims against the Saudi Government, Zacarias Moussaoui, the man authorities dubbed the 20th
hijacker, fingered a dozen prominent Saudis—including several Princes
of the Royal House of Saud— as patrons of Al Qaeda whose support enabled
the 9/11 attack.

Bob Graham, former chair of the Joint
Congressional Intelligence Committee inquiry into 9/11, used the
opportunity to again call for the release of 28 blank pages dealing with
Saudi Arabian complicity.
Kabuki-lite in Washington D.C.

Said Graham, “The
28 pages primarily relate to who financed 9/11, and they point a very
strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier.”
Author Anthony Summers seconded Graham’s call for the release of the material on the Saudis.
Both men cited the suspicious flight
two weeks before 9/11 of the wealthy family of Abdulaziz al-Hijji, his
wife, Anoud, and her father, Esam Ghazzawi, an advisor to a Saudi
prince, from their mansion in Sarasota, which records show was visited
by Mohamed Atta.
When the Saudi family’s panicked flight from Sarasota became public, FBI officials acknowledged the
investigation, but said it had turned up no connection to 9/11 — statements contradicted by the handful of records made public in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit.
investigation, but said it had turned up no connection to 9/11 — statements contradicted by the handful of records made public in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit.

The exercise is an elaborate charade. Its Kabuki Theater—whose
theme is conflict between humanity and feudal lords—for Washington
insiders. Its not supposed to be told, as it is here, from the point of
view of the Overlords themselves.
Pointing the finger of blame at the Saudis is an easy sale. But it isn’t even news. A decade ago Craig Unger’s “House of Bush, House of Saud detailed Saudi complicity in 9/11. So did elfin JFK assassination apologist, CIA asset, and plagiarist Gerald Posner’s “Why America Slept.”
Fighting for disclosure of information about Saudi involvement in 9/11 is a noble pursuit, and I’ve also uncovered details of the cover-up of Saudi involvement. But for Graham and Summers it comes in lieu of exposing the other side of the coin: the errors of omission of the FBI, and criminal activities of agencies of America’s national security state.
This wasn’t Zac’s first rodeo
His trial a decade ago produced twin bombshells—Mohamed Atta’s cell phone records, and an undisclosed aviation incident in Clearwater—each of which would have been at least as explosive, had anyone shown any interest—as the classified pages about the Saudis of the Joint Intelligence Committee report.

Bob Graham and Anthony Summers muster their outrage only to point the finger of blame outwards. These two highly intelligent men can’t be under the illusion that the Saudis were playing solitaire with themselves in pre-9/11 Florida. They know there was a CIA or military intelligence operation bringing Saudi and other Arab student pilots to the U.S. in 2000 and 2001.
They just won’t say it out loud.
The Fourth Estate: The New York Mets of American institutions

The first bombshell revelation from Moussaoui’s trial involved a previously-undisclosed aviation incident that took place in February of 2001.
Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi were caught practicing takeoffs and landings at a tiny Clearwater airpark
that had already closed for the night, breaking the airport’s curfew
and drawing the attention of a night watchman who wrote down the plane’s
‘N’ number.
The plane’s FAA registration revealed
it belonged to Huffman Aviation in Venice. Yet according to the FBI’s
official chronology, as well as sworn testimony before Congress, Atta
and Marwan left Huffman in Venice for good almost two months earlier, on
December 26, 2000.

“Why the two men chose the small Clearwater airpark 75 miles north of Venice remains a mystery,” reported the St. Petersburg Times. “The
incident was another example of how closer scrutiny of Atta and the
other 9/11 hijackers might have averted the 2001 disasters.”
‘Time-line discrepancies’ are the ‘wardrobe malfunctions’ of the FBI

In sworn Congressional testimony, Dekkers stated “On December 24th, 2000, Atta and Al-Shehhi rented a Warrior from Huffman Aviation
for a flight… one to two days later Atta and Al-Shehhi returned to
Huffman Aviation to make final payments on their outstanding bills.”
“Because they were not taking any more
flying lessons, they were asked to leave the facility due to their bad
attitudes and not being liked by staff and clients alike. Huffman never
heard about or from them again until September 11th, 2001.”

Why didn’t Graham and Summers call for Dekkers to be indicted for perjury before Congress?
Why haven’t they demanded Congressional investigation of the mountain of embarrassing evidence proving FBI malfeasance in the 9/11 investigation?
“All our friends are not our friends.”

Summers was writing, for release on the
10th anniversary of the 9/11 attack, what for the foreseeable future
(to the present date, certainly) would be the last ‘big’ book about
the attack. As he prepared to leave Venice, on his way to interview
recently-retired Senator Bob Graham in Miami, Summers promised to alert
the Senator (on the off-chance he didn’t already know) about two
discoveries made in my investigation.
It didn’t seem a lot to ask. I’d been
squiring him around Venice for a month, hoping against hope his book
would bring some truth of what happened to a larger audience than had my
own meager efforts.
An Idiot’s Guide to 9/11
During July of 2000, the same month
Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al Shehhi arrived to attend flight school at
Huffman Aviation, DEA agents discovered 43 pounds of heroin aboard a Lear jet belonging to the flight school’s owner, Wally Hilliard.
Authorities had called it “the biggest seizure of heroin ever in central Florida.” Given the state’s sordid past, this was no mean feat.
The international heroin trafficking was being carried out in tandem with the operation training hundreds of Saudis and other Arabs to fly, in large part at two flight schools owned by Hilliard, and run by Dekkers.

Hilliard’s Learjetflew 39 weekly flights to Venezuela
and back before getting busted, for the same Latin client, who insisted
on paying for each weekly flight in cash, which is a major no-no in
South Florida aviation.
Another “legend” bites the dust

I’d been intrigued by news about the
Joint Intelligence Committee’s attempts to learn more about two
hijackers who’d lived in the home of a man who was an FBI informant for,
of all things, counter-terrorism.

Sen. Graham called the hijackers’ host, Abdussattar Shaikh, the “best chance to uncover the Sept. 11 plot before it happened.”
So after attending my friend’s funeral in Newport Beach I drove to San Diego and ‘poked around’ for two very fruitful days.
Abdussattar Shaikh had been identified
in wire reports as “a retired professor of English at San Diego State,”
and “Vice President for International Projects at American Commonwealth
University.”
In truth, he was nothing of the kind.
Maybe call the Make a Wish Foundation

1. Abdussattar Shaikh never taught at San Diego State;
2. He has never been a Professor of English… anywhere;
3. He has a phony PhD purchased from a bogus diploma mill run by people with U.S. military and intelligence connections;
4. The
“University” which he was said to be “Vice President for International
Projects” does not, in fact, exist. There is no “American Commonwealth
University.”
5. “Abdussattar Shaikh” was not even his real name. A profile on the Indian-born Shaikh in India revealed his real name was “Abdussattar Chhipa.”

If they wanted to interview the
Professor, the Intelligence Committee probably would have had better
luck calling the “Make A Wish” Foundation.
A slippery slope

Turns out, he never mentioned Shaikh to Bob Graham, either.
Several years ago former Senator Graham came through Venice on a book tour, a fictional retelling he’d written of events similar to the 9/11 attack.
During the question and answer session
which followed a reading from the book, I asked if he’d been told about
the heroin trafficking through Venice; or if he knew about the phony
biography, or ‘legend’ in spook-speak, of Abdussattar Shaikh.
His answer was “No.” He hadn’t, he
said, looking puzzled and disconcerted. In a private conversation later,
he said Anthony Summers had never mentioned either matter.
Of course everybody knows that
politicians lie, almost as much as spooks do. Graham was a long-time
politician. Still, it seemed an unforced admission. I believed him.
The full story of 9/11? Or anything but?
When Summers and his writing partner
Robyn Swann’s book was released several years ago, I felt their book
would be our last best hope. Summers and Swann are veteran investigative reporters, with eight award-winning biographies between them.
I remained silent. I hid my bitter
disappointment, swallowed hard, tasted ashes, and kept my mouth shut. I
wasn’t about to do anything that might hurt the book’s chances of
rousing the nation to reexamine the FBI cover-up that passed for an investigation.
After it was clear that opportunity had
passed, I let go of my anger. It was made easier by the fact that I
found him personable, even charming. But when he puts himself forward as
a champion of truth justice and the American Way—on
a subject he was too lazy to address in his 500-page door-stop of a
book—his arrogance became a bridge too far for my natural reticence to
countenance.
That he’s been living off the fumes of his former reputation has recently become widely-known, in a controversy in which I have no opinion, save to say many of the criticisms retroactively appear valid about his 9/11 book.

For example, there’s nothing in his book about the thwarted attempt
made on the life of President George W. Bush at the Colony Beach Resort
where he was staying the evening before the 9/11 attack. This, despite
details published in NEWSWEEK, the Sarasota Herald Tribune, the Longboat
Observer, and on the ABC affiliate in Sarasota’s local newscast, all accumulated here.
Or read this list of ten more things about Mohamed Atta , and you’ll learn ten things more about Mohamed Atta than you’ll find in “The Full Story of 9/11.
So how could I have been so wrong?
How’s that again? “Pretty strong. But full of weaknesses.”

Two quotes from Summers as he promoted the book, which even he would say are representative, tell the story:
“I
have tried to write a book for the sane citizen that is open both to the
lone assassin theory and something more complex. The evidence that
Oswald fired is pretty strong but also full of weaknesses.”
“Given
the way the case was treated and the evidence so badly handled it isn’t
possible to say that it was the work of a lone assassin and it isn’t
possible to say that it was definitely a conspiracy.”
To spruce up the re-released book, he
changed the title to “Not in Your Lifetime,”touting it now as “The
Definitive Book on the JFK Assassination.” In it, he now reveals—no doubt to pull in those put off by his pronounced tendency to equivocation—the name of one of the assassins in Dealey Plaza.
Summers ferrets out JFK shooter
Based on a 2007 interview with an 81-year-old Cuban
exile living in Miami , Summers candidate for JFK triggerman is
Herminio Diaz Garcia, a Cuban whose resume included being a assassin who
murdered for Batista, supposedly boasting in prison of having killed
Kennedy, and having died in 1966.
The Cuban in Miami who told Summers the
big news, Reinaldo Martinez Gomez, learned of it from Tony Cuesta,
leader of an anti-Castro raid in 1966 that had ended in Diaz’s death,
while the two men were in prison in Cuba.
Cuesta told Martinez that before he
died Diaz uttered words he would never forget. Said Martinez: “Herminio
confessed to Tony Cuesta that he had taken part in the death of the US
president.”
Oddly enough, Herminio Diaz, who
Martinez calls “his best friend,” never heard from Diaz himself that he
had been a JFK shooter. Perhaps for this reason, Summers cites a third
party, Remegio Arce, who the Cuban in Miami, Martinez, said had
confirmed that Diaz said he’d done the hit.

Anthony Summers was flogging a 40-year
old book with a tall tale about a dead guy who told another dead guy he
killed JFK, who then repeats it to a guy who is himself now dead. Ouch.
If a bombshell goes off in the forest…
This is all great good fun, until one
realizes that Summers is now applying his “rigorous standards of proof”
to the claim in his book, “The Eleventh Day,” that Mohamed Atta never
knew Amanda Keller.
Objective evidence proves this is a
lie. For example, take one of the bombshell revelations produced by the
trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the release of Mohamed Atta’s cell phone records.
They showed he had used a Verizon cell phone with a Sarasota cell phone number (941-685-0468) , purchased from and serviced by Wissam Taysir Hammoud, the local authorized Verizon cell phone dealer in Sarasota.

The released cell phone records list all of Atta’s phone calls between
July of 2000, when the FBI says he arrived in Venice, and January 20th
of 2001, more than three weeks after the FBI said he left Venice for
good.
However a second court document
released at the same time—the return of subpoena document from Verizon
to the court— flatly contradicts the FBI claim. It shows that Atta’s
Nokomis cell phone was in service for four months longer than the phone bills being release, and presented as complete, by the FBI.
His phone records end when we say they do
Four months of Atta’s phone records were missing when the FBI released the “complete records.”
Reports in this space—alone among media outlets worldwide—attempted to draw attention to what was clearly another FBI cover-up.
“Atta’s Verizon cell phone, a PrePay
account, was active from 7/15/2000 until 5/12/2001 and was listed at the
516 Laurel Rd Nokomis address,” summarized Bill Warner, a Sarasota private investigator.
“Yet if he’d already moved to Ft
Lauderdale or Miami he wouldn’t continue to use a cell phone with a
Sarasota/Venice area code, because all his calls would have incurred
huge roaming charges, which were exorbitantly expensive back in 2000 and
2001,” Warner stated.

Which is exactly when Amanda Keller said she knew Atta in Venice. The FBI’s release of Atta’s phone documents,
a cheesy modified limited jamg-out, give the lie to the strenuous
attempts by the terrorists’ hometown Sarasota Herald-Tribune
to invalidate the testimony of Amanda Keller.
Adding historical insult to historical injury

He knew he was hiding something. He must have thought no one would notice.
Amanda Keller derived no benefit from
claiming to know Atta. Having briefly been a terrorist’s girlfriend was
not something she was proud of. Nor was she looking for publicity.
Before fleeing the state in the aftermath of the attack, and hiding out
until I found her more than a year later, she spoke only a dozen words
to reporters. She said, “I can’t really discuss anything. I’m afraid
I’ll get in trouble.”
Summers, who was always looking for
someone in authority at the FBI or the CIA to give him the shot, had an
important dinner meeting with a counter-terrorism official while in
Venice. They discussed Amanda Keller, he told me later. The official
said he admired her, as well he might, speaking about someone who’d
undergone days of relentless grilling by the FBI without cracking.
Summers said the unnamed official told him, “She never changed her story once.”
Eyewitnesses speak of “FBI intimidation”

A stay-at-home Mom, whose husband was a Maytag repairman, Frederickson hardly qualifies as a “conspiracy theorist.”
When I met her, there was one burning topic she wanted to discuss, something both she and Sandpiper Apartment manager Charlie Grapentine, an ex-marine, felt strongly about. It wasn’t Mohamed Atta, but how she’d been harassed and intimidated by the FBI.

For at least six months after the 9/11
attack, Frederickson says, she received weekly visits from an agent in
the FBI’s Sarasota office. “The question they asked was always the same.
You aren’t saying anything to anybody, are you?”
“Who was I going to tell?” She shrugged. “Most everyone around here already knew.”
Summers also neglects to tell his readers that three local newspapers in the Venice area all reported Amanda Keller and Mohamed Atta’s brief “hook-up” fully a year before I did.
None of this matters to Summers. All of
it is intellectually dishonest. His “remit” from Random House, one
source told me, had forced him to call into question any testimony
which exposed criminal activity during the U.S. operation which brought
the terrorists to the U.S.
That’s why he so blithely dismissed
Keller in a footnote, as if—if he could only make the type small
enough—it might diminish the testimony of the most important eyewitness
to Mohamed Atta’s character and motives.

The Herald-Tribune reported, Summers states, “Keller’s mother and sister had described his as tall and lanky.”
“What she said was, he had a ‘flank-y’ ass.”

But in my interview with Amanda Keller and her sister Tammy, recounted in “Welcome to TERRORLAND”,
Tammy, who said she met Atta on a dozen occasions, described him, not
as “lanky, but “flank-y.” After seeing him wearing a green speedo at the
pool, she said he had a “flank-y ass” (page 35.) It wasn’t a compliment.

“After a lengthy analysis of a tangled scenario, the authors concluded this had been a case of mistaken identity.”
“Phone
checks, said a counterterrorism agent cited in the second 2006 report,
indicate that the real Atta and Keller never called each other.”
This is some neat trick. The released
phone checks he is citing don’t include the four months (January through
May 2001) of Atta’s cell phone records which the FBI neglected to
release, the same months that Amanda Keller was living with him at the Sandpiper Apartments across from the Venice Airport.
His biased opinion, or “authors
conclusion,” will be rendered inoperative by the verdict of history.
Till then, we will hear tinny music in the background. As Gary Webb
wrote, “The Mighty Wurlitzer plays on.”

Summers wasn’t the first person seeking to discredit Keller’s inconvenient testimony,
which to her everlasting credit directly contradicts the FBI’s
carefully-drawn portrait of the leader of the 9/11 hijackers. But he
might be the last.
As Shakespeare wrote, “Murder will out.”
Anthony Summers is a worthy successor
to CIA asset and JFK assassination apologist Gerald Posner, whose
widely-reviled “Case Closed” similarly ignored evidence which didn’t
support his “remit,” that Oswald acted alone.
Anthony Summers is the Gerald Posner of 9/11.
Send out for more blank pages
We come now to The Big Taboo.
The discovery that DEA agents found 43
pounds of heroin aboard Huffman Aviation flight school owner Wally
Hilliard’s Lear jet is important enough to rate another 28 blank pages
in Senator Graham’s Joint Intelligence Committee’s report.
Instead, it was relegated to a footnote
on page 529 of Summers’ book, where, through omitting crucial facts, he
equivocated enough to make it appear inconsequential.
The Lear jet in question had only been “co-owned” by
Hilliard, Summers’ footnote asserted, ending with the statement that
“Hilliard maintained he was the ‘innocent owner’ of the plane.”
Since neither of the other two straw
owners of the dummy front company Hilliard incorporated to register the
plane possessed either the citizenship necessary to own an
American-registered plane, or the wherewithal to pick up the check for
both dinner and dessert, its safe to say Wally Hilliard owned—not
“co-owned”—the plane.
Mentioning the drug trafficking violates The Big Taboo

Like everything else having to do with
general aviation in Florida, a subject crucial to understanding what
was going on in the run up to the 9/11 attack, this fact escaped
Summers notice. He never mentions it.
Evidence to the contrary, there was no
drug trafficking through the Venice Airport while Atta was there.
Summers sums up with a complete non-sequitur: “Hilliard maintained he
was the ‘innocent owner’ of the plane.”
As if that were, finally, that. Had
Hilliard maintained he was Santa Claus, or the second coming of Christ,
that would not, by itself, have made it true. But it allows Summers the
opening he needs to come down, as firmly as possible, on the side of
equivocation, the familiar one-two punch of the poseur, or the
quisling:
“Experts disagree.” “We may never know the real truth.”
A Gerald Posner for our time

Several times, I sent the judge’s order
to Summers, but it became another inconvenient (and thus omitted)
detail in his rush to exonerate Hilliard against a very-provable charge
of drug trafficking which he deigned to mention only in a footnote.
Everybody gets the fact that mention of
drug trafficking in the same sentence with any organ of the national
security state is breaking a big taboo.
But, did no one tell Summers that that’s what they do in Florida?
If Anthony Summers did
find anything objectionable about the FBI’s malfeasance in its
investigation into 9/11, or the criminal activities of the American
“contract agents” who were using training Arab student pilots to fly as
“cover” for running drugs, he was careful not to mention it.
An American Tradition: The Modified Limited Hang-Out

Yet those calling the loudest for the
release of the classified information about Saudi involvement are
puzzlingly silent about cover-ups closer to home.

Senator
Graham may have done all he could to overcome the blanket of “national
security” placed over the most important areas of the 9/11 attack. But,
by any objective reckoning, he failed. That the second
investigation—the 9/11 Commission—failed as well makes Graham’s failure
no less disappointing.
Author Anthony Summers is an even
bigger 9/11 fail. His 500-page book, “The Eleventh Day,” was so bereft
of new revelations about the 9/11 attack that he was forced to use a
discovery that wasn’t his—and wasn’t even in his book—to drum up sales
during his book tour.
Why are two people who haven’t exactly
covered themselves in glory uncovering the truth about the 9/11 attack
clamoring for the release of the 28 blank pages about the Saudis in
Graham’s Joint Intelligence Committee Report?
The answer remains unclear. However
despite their heavy breathing about the Saudis, it is obvious that the
charge they’re leading will result—at best—in a “modified limited
hang-out” that will leave the American people no closer to the truth.
The ghosts of 9/11
In 1999 there were few Arabs—at most a
smattering—attending Southwest Florida flight schools. Two years later
there were hundreds. It didn’t happen by accident.
Late in 1999, a retired insurance executive from Green Bay named Wally Hilliard walked unannounced into founder Stan Huffman’s office at Huffman
Aviation and set down a briefcase filled with cash, according to an
aviation executive at a neighboring facility who heard the story from
someone who was in the room, and offered to pay far in excess of what
Huffman’s floundering business—which wasn’t for sale—was worth.

Watergate Committee Chairman Sam Ervin would have made mincemeat of Wallace J. Hilliard.
“Flight schools don’t make money,” a former business partner of Hilliard’s told me. “Everyone in aviation knows that.”
After the 9/11 attack, Venice, Florida
was the biggest 9/11 crime scene which wasn’t reduced to rubble. Yet it
was utterly ignored by the mainstream media. Early on, in frustration, I
contacted one of the few members of America’s national security
establishment who would take my calls.
“How could hundreds of Saudis and other Arabs just waltz enmasse into Florida flight schools,” I asked, “without the CIA knowing about it?”
“Why I assume that they did know,” he replied gently. “It would have been impossible for them not to.”
Bob Graham and Anthony Summers know
that the operation underway in the two years before the 9/11 attack in
Venice and other locations in Southwest Florida—Charlotte County
Airport, Hilliard’s second flight school in Naples—was culpable and
bears responsibility for leaving the country defenseless to the
terrorist’s attack.
They just won’t say it out loud.

Maybe its the ghosts of 9/11.
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