Is anyone interested in Apollo missions...

[Evan Burton]

It seems that they feel that if they keep repeating the same errors, they can alter reality.

I have often wondered why they call themselves "truthers" when that seems to be the last thing they are interested in.

[Len Colby]

The video is just the usual "truther" crap and is filled with all sorts of unsupported and false claims. Just in the first few minutes it made several that I haven’t heard before and for which no documentation was provided including:.

- Canada commanded U.S. airspace on 9/11

- John Deutch lost 14,000 pages of classified CIA files

- The “Red Team” attackers during Amalgam Virgo were improperly given control of US airspace and worked with UN weapons inspectors and were sponsored by Saddam Hussein. As per all I’ve read about the exercise it was limited to an area around Tyndall AFB and only involved USG employees and defense contractors.

- Bruce McConnell gave encryption key codes to the US “secure communications systems” to “foreign powers”.

- AlQaeda was allowed (presumably by the USG) to covertly monitor cell phone communications using “Iridium” technology.

- Boeing illegally installed chipsets allowing planes to be remotely controlled in passengers jets sold to Germany but were caught by Lufthansa in 2002.

- A Canadian crime family controlled thousands of workers involved in the events of 9/11

Towards the end it was claimed that:

a) an engine was found 7 miles from the Shanksville crash site – all reliable reports I’ve seen said a turbofan (i.e. an engine part) was found about 1000 feet from the rest of the plane. The debris that was scattered miles away was paper and seat covers.

the secondary debris was found northwest of the point of impact all reports I’ve seen even the map shown indicated it was found to the southeast i.e. it was found beyond the flight path not along it.

They claimed to have “forensic economists” working for them. On his website the filmmaker claims to be a “forensic economist” but his own bio shows no qualification in that area (he is a mechanical engineer who mostly worked in the petroleum industry) other than having developed some computer programs with out any indication of who uses them. http://www.hawkscafe.com/bio.html . He seems to be pushing the notion that it was (I kid you not) that it was some sort of Francophone conspiracy involving French Canadian, French and Swiss parties. See http://www.captainsherlock.com/911PowerPoint.ppt linked from his homepage http://www.hawkscafe.com/ .

The guy seems to be a raving crackpot, the next most likely option is that he is posing as one to discredit the truth movement.

I put the word truth in quotes when refering to the "truth" movement beacuse as Evan indicated their books, articles, pamphlets, websites, videos etc etc have far more distotion in them than truth. They seem far more interested in forcing the evidence to fit their view that actually discovering the truth. An example of this was Fetzer leaving claims that he'd made up on his site months after he'd been shown they were wrong and Dr. Jones butchering a quote to make it say what he wanted http://www.911myths.com/html/jones_quotes_manning_.html

[Len Colby]

Just a quick clarification before someone from the forum’s “brain trust” accuses me of distorting the facts:

all reports I’ve seen even the map shown indicated it [debris from the plane] was found to the southeast i.e. it was found beyond the flight path not along it.

I just remembered there were 1 or 2 (IIRC) witness accounts that small parts like screws falling of the otherwise intact plane as it was being flown erratically and at speeds way above those it was designed to at low altitude (where air pressure and thus air resistance is much greater). This is far more consistent with the “official story” than the “theory” that the plane was blown up midair. My original statement was still technically correct because AFAIK no such parts were ever recovered along the flight path.

[Evan Burton]

I'm not sure what particular issue they are referring to, but one I hear is that "debris was found 6 miles from the Shanksville crash site". That's just plain wrong.

Firstly, the "debris" consisted of some paperwork according to the policeman who found it.. "nothing at all significant".

Secondly, it was 6 miles ROAD distance from the crash site. Straight line distance it was about 1.2 to 2 miles.

[Len Colby]

I'm not sure what particular issue they are referring to, but one I hear is that "debris was found 6 miles from the Shanksville crash site". That's just plain wrong.

Firstly, the "debris" consisted of some paperwork according to the policeman who found it.. "nothing at all significant".

Secondly, it was 6 miles ROAD distance from the crash site. Straight line distance it was about 1.2 to 2 miles.

I’ve read that elsewhere but it is incorrect. Paper from the plane was found in New Baltimore about 8 miles (in a straight line) from the crash site a day and a half – two days latter. Shortly after the crash some debris (mostly plastic and paper but also small metal parts according to some accounts and PERHAPS pieces of bone*) also fell on and around Indian Lake 1 – 3 miles** from the point of impact. Experts have said this type of dispersal is normal.

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_12967.html

http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/13/penn.attack/

http://www.intellnet.org/news/2001/09/14/6642-1.html

* In the 1st and 3rd linked articles two different witnesses who were together at the time said ‘…there was something that looked like a rib bone amid [the other debris]’ and “We thought we saw pieces of bone…”, the local coroner was quoted by Popular Mechanics as saying ‘…no body parts were found in Indian Lake. Human remains were confined to a 70-acre area directly surrounding the crash site.’ (single quotation marks indicates paraphrasing by journalists). http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology...2.html?do=print

**Indian Lake is the name of both a lake and a town on its shore, some debris was found in the former.

EDIT - Map added

Edited February 2, 2008 by Len Colby

[Charles Drago]

Towards the end it was claimed that:

a) an engine was found 7 miles from the Shanksville crash site – all reliable reports I’ve seen said a turbofan (i.e. an engine part) was found about 1000 feet from the rest of the plane. The debris that was scattered miles away was paper and seat covers.

I put the word truth in quotes when refering to the "truth" movement beacuse ... [t]hey seem far more interested in forcing the evidence to fit their view that actually discovering the truth.

[EMPHASIS ADDED BY C.D.]

Whatever they're paying this "guy," it's too much.

The game is given away with the repeated uses by "Colby" of "all" and "reliable" within the context of implicit encyclopedic knowledge and honest, unimpaired judgment.

Impressive?

Nope.

The accurate translation of "all" and "reliable": "only those" that "conform" to "Colby's" assigned view of things.

But perhaps there's hope. Whatever "Colby" is, "his" subconscious may have confessed when "he" succinctly described "his" own game: "['truthers'] seem far more interested in forcing the evidence to fit their view that [sic] actually discovering the truth."

WARNING: In my personal opinion: "Len Colby" is an agent provocateur, a breeder of disinformation. It is likely that "he" is in fact a composite character, a fiction created to attack the truth and those who speak it. But even if "Colby" exists as advertised, "he" yet serves the agendas of the assassins of John F. Kennedy. Informed, cynical readings of "his" posts will lead to deeper understandings of our enemies, their methods, and their goals.

Edited February 2, 2008 by Charles Drago

[Evan Burton]

It was the Indian Lake one I was referring to; also I made a typo... that should have read 1.5 - 2 miles.

[Guest David Guyatt]

[Len Colby]

Towards the end it was claimed that:

a) an engine was found 7 miles from the Shanksville crash site – all reliable reports I’ve seen said a turbofan (i.e. an engine part) was found about 1000 feet from the rest of the plane. The debris that was scattered miles away was paper and seat covers.

I put the word truth in quotes when refering to the "truth" movement beacuse ... [t]hey seem far more interested in forcing the evidence to fit their view that actually discovering the truth.

[EMPHASIS ADDED BY C.D.]

Whatever they're paying this "guy," it's too much.

The game is given away with the repeated uses by "Colby" of "all" and "reliable" within the context of implicit encyclopedic knowledge and honest, unimpaired judgment.

Impressive?

Nope.

The accurate translation of "all" and "reliable": "only those" that "conform" to "Colby's" assigned view of things.

But perhaps there's hope. Whatever "Colby" is, "his" subconscious may have confessed when "he" succinctly described "his" own game: "['truthers'] seem far more interested in forcing the evidence to fit their view that [sic] actually discovering the truth."

WARNING: In my personal opinion: "Len Colby" is an agent provocateur, a breeder of disinformation. It is likely that "he" is in fact a composite character, a fiction created to attack the truth and those who speak it. But even if "Colby" exists as advertised, "he" yet serves the agendas of the assassins of John F. Kennedy. Informed, cynical readings of "his" posts will lead to deeper understandings of our enemies, their methods, and their goals.

LOL How pathetic! You and Lemkin are the most predicatable posters here.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...iew=getlastpost

If you can find any inaccuracies or distortions etc in the linked post don't be shy, but dig up facts isn't your style is it? Why put in the effort when ad hom attacks and other insults are so much easier.

[Douglas Caddy]

The State of the Jihad, As Bin Laden Might See It

By Michael Scheuer

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Washington Post

On Feb. 5, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell warned the Senate Intelligence Committee that al-Qaeda is regrouping, not retreating -- and boosting its capacities to launch another attack inside the United States. So how does the war on terrorism look these days through our enemies' eyes? Here's an informed -- albeit fictional -- guess.

In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate --

Brothers, I write to give my view of how far we have, with God's help, traveled since declaring war on the United States in 1996. Al-Qaeda has today become all that we hoped for when we formed it in 1988: a vanguard organization whose main mission is not fighting, but rather inciting and inspiring young Muslims to arm themselves and defend Islam from the American crusaders, their Zionist offspring and their agent regimes in the Muslim world, especially the House of Saud. We must thank God for the steady flow of young Muslims to our ranks, men who now make the forces of al-Qaeda and its allies larger, more intelligent and more pious than ever.

By God's grace, al-Qaeda's incitement has met with wondrous success; Western polls show that hundreds of millions of Muslims now believe that U.S. foreign policy aims to undermine or destroy Islam. Ironically, Washington itself has become a major inciter of Muslim hatred for the United States, simply by maintaining policies -- slaughtering the innocent in Iraq, propping up the House of Saud and Hosni Mubarak's tyranny in Egypt, blindly backing the pretender state of the Jews -- that drive Muslims into our ranks. Not all these Muslims are ready to take up arms, but even the limited number who are now fighting have proved more than enough to stymie U.S. plans in Afghanistan and Iraq and to support the jihad in Algeria, Lebanon, Thailand, Somalia, Gaza and Europe.

And so, even with limited numbers, al-Qaeda appears to Muslims as a huge, rising and conquering army. Just as important, Americans have been taught by their leaders to see al-Qaeda behind every rock and tree, ready to pounce. American leaders, in effect, now terrorize ordinary Americans, making Washington appear to be the enemy of its own people's civil liberties.

This all gives us confidence in our plan to defeat America -- by bleeding it into bankruptcy and tempting it to spread out its forces.

Brothers, the amount of money that Washington spends on wars to murder Muslims and on pointless "homeland security" measures is staggering, with no end in sight. The war in Iraq alone is costing $12 billion per month. Bush is also burning money to deploy troops to Africa, under a new Pentagon command created to steal the continent's oil. And after America's Iraq "surge," U.S. generals cannot scrape up the few thousand troops they would need to fight our Taliban brothers in Afghanistan because Washington's NATO allies refuse to send reinforcements.

Thanks be to God, brothers, America is hemorrhaging money and ruining its military by trying to fight al-Qaeda's mujaheddin wherever they appear -- or, more accurately, wherever U.S. officials imagine they appear.

Our military and media operations have advanced the ultimate goal of our grand strategy -- restoring Islamic rule to the Muslim world. We have a winning formula:

-- Driving the United States from the Middle East;

-- Destroying Israel and the region's Arab tyrannies; and

-- Settling scores with the heretical Shiites.

* * *

Frankly, brothers, things had to get much worse for Muslims before they could get better. We had to goad America into sending a larger, more vulnerable presence into the Muslim world before we could bleed its forces and treasury. The mujaheddin's 9/11 raid did just that; the inexplicable U.S. decision to invade Iraq vastly expanded the American presence. (Only God could grant such a miracle!) Al-Qaeda and the groups we have inspired are now exploiting both the triumph of 9/11 and the hornet's nest in Iraq that the Americans so foolishly kicked over.

But to win this war, our strategy's three parts must be pursued in order: First, drive America from Arab lands, then finish off Israel, Mubarak and the House of Saud, then deal with the Shiite apostates. But we risk defeat if we simultaneously fight the Americans, the Zionists, the corrupted Arab regimes and the Shiites.

When the Americans occupied Afghanistan after 9/11, we were confident that we could defeat them there, which would start their retreat from the region. When the Americans madly invaded Iraq, we grew more confident, perhaps cocky. Brothers, we lacked humility for these gifts from God, and now we are on the edge of a setback -- one that could disrupt our grand strategy.

Military success came too fast in Iraq. The Iraqi mujaheddin are not ready to unite in an Islamist government to replace the U.S. agent, Nouri al-Maliki. Part of this failure is al-Qaeda's fault. We allowed the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, may God accept him as a martyr, to remain al-Qaeda's commander in Iraq for too long. He was consumed by hatred for Iraq's Shiites and struck them murderously, angering Shiite and Sunni alike. His excesses helped create what, for now, is an unbridgeable split between the two sects, and he raised the specter of civil war in Iraq. Such a conflict would hurt our ability to keep the world's Muslims focused on the Crusaders and Zionists and allow the apostate Arab regimes to pose as Islam's protectors by supplying guns, money and fighters to Iraq's Sunnis in their battle with the Shiites.

Al-Qaeda and its allies in Iraq are laboring to repair the damage left by our martyred Abu Musab, and have had some success. But Saudi preachers and spies are deepening the hatred for Shiites among Iraq's Sunni insurgents faster than we can heal the wounds. As in post-Soviet Afghanistan, the perfidious House of Saud is stealing the fruit of Islam's military victory by preventing the emergence of a united Sunni front through bribery, false religious guidance and efforts to stoke intra-Sunni fighting.

We must face this reality, brothers, and be ready to retake the initiative in 2008. While U.S. forces are in Iraq, the mujaheddin will focus on them, but after they retreat -- and a new U.S. president could leave quickly -- the chance of civil war increases. If such a conflict erupts, the mujaheddin might focus on Iraq, not America.

For this reason, I urge you to consider two military options for al-Qaeda to have in hand if needed:

An attack on a major oil-production plant in the Land of the Two Holy Mosques, which suffers under the rule of the House of Saud, to greatly disrupt the world's oil supply and compel U.S. forces to rush into the kingdom to protect the undamaged facilities and rebuild the others; or

A raid greater than 9/11 in the United States, an option that could do graver and graver damage as the U.S. economy deteriorates.

Brothers, we can execute either operation. Each would make Washington overreact, again unleashing the Americans' military ferocity. Such a response would have only a minor impact on the dispersed forces of al-Qaeda and our allies in jihad, but America's vengeance would kill many, many innocent Muslims -- and, perhaps, with the approval of the despised House of Saud, find the Americans again desecrating the holy soil of Arabia near Mecca and Medina. These results would focus the wrath of the world's Muslims on America, delay a Shiite-Sunni civil war in Iraq and keep our grand strategy viable.

Brothers, think about these ideas, and join me in praying for God's guidance.

msresponse@yahoo.com

Michael Scheuer was chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999. His latest book is "Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq."

[Christopher Hall]

The state of OBL's mind right now is room temperature.

And who, except for someone wanting to make some money on a book deal, would admit to being the chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999?

[Michael Hogan]

The state of OBL's mind right now is room temperature.

And who, except for someone wanting to make some money on a book deal, would admit to being the chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999?

In his just released book, The Commission, author Philip Shenon devotes an entire chapter to Mike Scheuer. A few excerpts:

Among some of the (911) commission staffers, Scheuer had a nickname: 'the Prophet.' More than anybody else in the CIA, and much earlier, Michael Scheuer had understood the danger that Osama bin Laden posed to the United States. For four of his twenty-two years at the CIA, until he was ousted from the bin Laden unit and banished to a small cubicle in the agency's library in 1999, he had done little but think of ways to capture or, preferably, kill bin Laden.

and regarding his testimony before the 911 Commission:

Mike Scheuer wanted to be under oath. So many people were lying, spinning--even former colleagues at the CIA, the institution he loved no matter how often and enthusiastically it had tried to humiliate him. He did not want there to be any questions about his truthfulness. So bring out a bible and swear me in, send me to jail if I'm lying, he challenged them.

and:

Scheuer was outraged that so many good opportunities to capture or kill bin Laden had been missed, and his frustration boiled over later in 1999. He committed what amounted to professional suicide: He went outside his usual chain of command and sent an e-mail directly to (CIA Director) Tenet and most of Tenet's deputies on the seventh floor at CIA headquarters that listed the ten things that needed to change at the CIA if it was ever to succeed in ending the threat from al-Qaeda.

A few days later, Scheuer was demoted to a "junior librarian." Shenon's book, The Commission is a fascinating and essential read on the inner workings of the 911 Commission.

In November, 2004 Vanity Fair published an article entitled: The Path to 9/11 Lost Warnings and Fatal Errors; By the time the hijackers made their way into the U.S., memos, photographs, and intercepts had sounded alarms inside the C.I.A., White House, F.B.I., and European intelligence services. The authors were Ned Zeman, David Wise, David Rose and Bryan Burrough. The article contains a lot of information on Michael Scheuer

Part of that article is reproduced here: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summa...286-7181486_ITM

Edited February 20, 2008 by Michael Hogan

[Christopher Hall]

The state of OBL's mind right now is room temperature.

And who, except for someone wanting to make some money on a book deal, would admit to being the chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999?

In his just released book, The Commission, author Philip Shenon devotes an entire chapter to Mike Scheuer. A few excerpts:

Among some of the (911) commission staffers, Scheuer had a nickname: 'the Prophet.' More than anybody else in the CIA, and much earlier, Michael Scheuer had understood the danger that Osama bin Laden posed to the United States. For four of his twenty-two years at the CIA, until he was ousted from the bin Laden unit and banished to a small cubicle in the agency's library in 1999, he had done little but think of ways to capture or, preferably, kill bin Laden.

and regarding his testimony before the 911 Commission:

Mike Scheuer wanted to be under oath. So many people were lying, spinning--even former colleagues at the CIA, the institution he loved no matter how often and enthusiastically it had tried to humiliate him. He did not want there to be any questions about his truthfulness. So bring out a bible and swear me in, send me to jail if I'm lying, he challenged them.

and:

Scheuer was outraged that so many good opportunities to capture or kill bin Laden had been missed, and his frustration boiled over later in 1999. He committed what amounted to professional suicide: He went outside his usual chain of command and sent an e-mail directly to (CIA Director) Tenet and most of Tenet's deputies on the seventh floor at CIA headquarters that listed the ten things that needed to change at the CIA if it was ever to succeed in ending the threat from al-Qaeda.

A few days later, Scheuer was demoted to a "junior librarian." Shenon's book, The Commission is a fascinating and essential read on the inner workings of the 911 Commission.

In November, 2004 Vanity Fair published an article entitled: The Path to 9/11 Lost Warnings and Fatal Errors; By the time the hijackers made their way into the U.S., memos, photographs, and intercepts had sounded alarms inside the C.I.A., White House, F.B.I., and European intelligence services. The authors were Ned Zeman, David Wise, David Rose and Bryan Burrough. The article contains a lot of information on Michael Scheuer

Part of that article is reproduced here: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summa...286-7181486_ITM

Thanks for the correction, Michael.

Who is Philip Shenon?

His book sounds interesting, and I will take a look at it on Amazon.

I guess that this explains why Sandy Berger risked his career and his freedom to steal and destroy documents from the National Archives relaing to the threat of OBL during the 2d Clinton Administration.

I still think that OBL is dead.

[Guest Stephen Turner]

BUMP. This old thread may contain useful information to those debating in the nine eleven timeline.

[Guest David Guyatt]

An important additional point Danny Hopsicker makes about Huffman Aviation at Venice airport, the flight school Atta attended, was the unusual arrival in the early hours of the following morning after 9/11, of Governor Jeb Bush aboard a C-130 transport aircraft. The purpose of Jeb Bush's fight was to apparently supervise seizing the records of Huffman Aviation that pertained to Atta and others.

Venice Airport also, rather interestingly, has a long history of being used for covert and paramilitary operation dating back to the end of WWI and during the cold war. It was used for pilot training by the CIA airline, Air America during the Vietnam war. Ditto for bush pilots destined for Central and South America during the Iran-Contra period. This sort of activity has continued to the present day.

One might be forgiven for wondering why a spook airport was chosen by an Islamic terrorist preparing to become one of the most infamous men in history, for his fight training --- in view of the hundreds, if not thousands, of small regional airfields he could have been trained at without raising the possibility of more than a casual glance.

http://www.madcowprod.com/mc312004.html

Issue Number 31

What they're hiding down in Venice, Florida

"First we couldn't count votes. Now we're training terrorists."

—Florida law-enforcement official involved in 9/11 probe.

by Daniel Hopsicker

October 9—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 thirty seconds later, after dropping off its cargo or passengers."

"Or you look up and all of a sudden there's 5000 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 Saudi's 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 simulator's. 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 last 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 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 11th 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-Ghamdi's? The name belongs, we learned, to one of the most important and influential tribes in Saudi Arabia.

According to the Washington Post's Sept 11th 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 two hundred 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 11th, 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 upcoming 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."