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UQ Wire: Atta & The Disappearing Helicopters

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Unanswered Questions : Thinking for ourselves.

Terror Suspect Tied To Moroccan Military Attache


“There are certain points... where you have your drug related activities combined with money laundering and information laundering, converging with your terrorist activities.” - Sibel Edmonds, former FBI translator

Aug 10 2004-- Venice, FL
by Daniel Hopsicker
A MadCowMorningNews World Exclusive!
From: http://www.madcowprod.com


IMAGE: Welcome To Terrorland - A NEW BOOK BY DANIEL HOPSICKER
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PLUS: - The MadCowMorningNews has begun airing, on Conspiracy Tonight, Bogus FBI report to 9/11 Commission on Atta's Final Days (9 min)

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FIFTEEN MONTHS before the 9/11 attack a 26-year old Moroccan man whose name and multiple aliases appear on numerous terrorist watch lists started a company in Florida a man who is today the Chief Military Attaché for the Moroccan Embassy in Washington, DC.

On June 30, 2000, as Atta and Al-Shehhi began flight training at Huffman Aviation, terror list suspect Mohammed Arara joined Colonel Ahmed Arara, the Military Attaché of the Embassy of the Kingdom of Morocco, and a third man, “Joseph El Sheik,” to incorporate Titim Holdings, Inc. with the Florida Department of Corporations, at an address just a stone’s throw from an apartment in Coral Springs used by Atta and Marwan.

“Titim” is a verb in Gaelic, we discovered. It means “to fall down.”

The Moroccan military attaché and his two Arab companions had just launched “Falling Down Inc.”

The “Mohammed Arara” on the Finnish Banking Authorities Terrorist Watch list—so called because after being distributed worldwide by the FBI it was inadvertently made public by Finland in Oct of 2001—has the same vital statistics as the man of the same name who went into business with the Moroccan Kingdom’s Defense Attaché in Washington.

To cite just one example: both the ‘Mohammed Arara’ on the watch list and the ‘Mohammed Arara’ in business with Col Arara listed the same home address: 117 Westwood Ct., in Lake Worth, FL. This same address is also used by the Moroccan Embassy’s Col. Arara.

Six weeks after the attack, on October 25, 2001, the Palm Beach Daily Business Review reported Titim's Holdings Inc. paid $2.9 million for a 22,735-square-foot office building in nearby Coral Springs, FL.

Col. Arara has not returned calls to the Moroccan Embassy in Washington D.C. for comment.

"Just don't use my name in Haiti"

In addition to being business partners, Colonel Ahmed Arara and Mohammed Arara (whose family relationship if any remains unknown at this time) share the same home address, according to documents filed with the state of Florida, where both men used the same address in Atlantis, FL, just outside the Palm Beach County Park Airport.

During the final month of preparation before the attack, terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta flew out of this airport on numerous unexplained flights with still-unidentified companions. Mohammed Arara may have been one of these companions.


Moroccan Embassy, Wash. D.C.

"Colonel, this is Guido. Guido, meet the Colonel"

But Mohammed Arara has other unexplained ties that are equally startling.

Three of the addresses on the Terrorist Watch List for suspected terrorist pilot Mohammed Arara also lead back to a mysterious German national, who we have until now identified as Pascal Schreier, 32, and his wife, Sandra Hamouda, a French-Tunisian woman who took over a flight school at Charlotte County Airport when it went bankrupt in February 2001, stranding dozens of foreign flight students, most of them, curiously, Moroccan or Tunisian.

Terror suspect Arara’s listed addresses include 514 El Vernona Ave in Sarasota FL; 1670 Via Bianca in Punta Gorda FL; and 117 Mooney Ave., also in Punta Gorda FL.

All three properties belong to Hamouda and Schreier. Called "Guido Pascal Schreier" in court documents, he was responsible for spearheading the European recruiting efforts of the Dutch-owned flight schools in Venice, FL..

The newly-disclosed ties of the couple, neither of whom returned phone calls for comment, also throws a spotlight on their little-known home port of call, Punta Gorda.

"Singing de 'Whiffenpoof Song' all de day long"

"The 9/11 terror plot intersected with the activities of a drug trafficking network of international scope, in ways that form a "crystal clear" picture of what was going on.” --Sibel Edmonds.

So... what's up with Punta Gorda? Located half-way between Naples and Venice, and home to Charlotte County Airport, where the smell of hay from nearby ranches mixes into an atmosphere of intrigue, the town’s pedigree explains a lot…

“The town of Punta Gorda, once a fishing village that drew the likes of a Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Ford in search of tarpon, has survived many a boom and bust period since its beginnings in the 1880s…” reported the Washington Post on September 10, 1977.

“The development was the brainchild of two retired Central Intelligence Agency men who met while on duty in the Far East, Wilbur (Bud) Cole and Al Johns, now president and chairman of the board, respectively.”

Nothing much seems to have changed.


Atta & Marwan' s Deep Creek residence. Charlotte County Airport is bottom right.

From the June 4, 2004 Charlotte Sun-Herald: "Punta Gorda City Councilman Tom Poole, who served with U.S. Army Special Forces during the Vietnam War and spent more than 20 years as a CIA clandestine services officer, said he finds no fault in Goss' record of public service or policies."

23 helicopters have been stolen from there in the last several years, which seems an unprecedented wave of aviation crime. Even more amazing is that all of the helicopters were stolen from just one owner…

The Sheriff’s Department of Charlotte County.

Wags at the Airport insisted to us, however, that the missing helicopters weren’t really missing… They’d just been released on their own recognizance.

Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi must have felt right at home at the Charlotte County Airport when they moved down the road from Huffman Aviation in Venice in January of 2001, spending most of the next two months in a luxury pad in nearby Deep Creek which seems to somehow have escaped the FBI's attention.

The first thing the two young Arab pilots saw, every time they drove into the Charlotte County Airport after exiting Interstate 75 onto a rural county road running alongside it, no doubt reminded them that they were treading on the periphery of the Spook Hall of Fame...

They saw an Ark. A Flying Ark.

"Being Connected Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry"

Tied down at the front corner of the Charlotte County Airport (it has since been moved--we'd like to think as a result of its recent notoriety) was a vintage silver DC 3 resembling nothing so much as an airborne Noah’s Ark, replete with painted hippos, giraffes and elephants climbing up the fuselage toward the cockpit.

The parked plane was a conspicuous sight at the small rural airport for at least two years, after being seized by law enforcement officials from notorious pilot Frank Moss.

Moss, who still flies out of the Charlotte County Airport, gained infamy during the Iran Contra Hearings which revealed him to be a drug smuggling pilot and fly-by-night airline owner.

For a drug smuggler, Moss had some strange connections. With Col. Oliver North, for example. The Flying Ark at the Charlotte County Airport, it turns out, isn't the first airplane Mr. Moss has "donated" to the U.S. Government. That honor belongs to a DC-4 spotted off the west coast of Florida by U.S. Customs agents, whereupon the plane began dumping into the Gulf below, law enforcement authorities wryly noted, what “appeared to be a load of drugs.”

In the unpleasantness which ensued, it was learned Oliver North had known Frank Moss' Contra supply planes were being used to bring back drugs into the U.S. An address book found aboard contained the Virginia phone number of North's "courier," Robert Owen, and that in a memo to Owen North had written: "Moss’s “DC-6 which is being used for runs [to supply the Contras] out of New Orleans is probably used for drug runs into the US.”

We understand he was shocked.

"Good old Ollie. Always on top of things. "

Alas, as we learned in "Barry & "the boys,'" being connected means never having to say you're sorry. And Frank Moss--much like Rudi Dekkers--appears to have led a charmed life, somehow always evading major unpleasantness with federal authorities.

Au contraire...

Even though he was under investigation for narcotics offenses by a total of ten different law enforcement agencies, the State Department thought so highly of Moss that they signed him on to fly "humanitarian aid" missions to the Contras.

Maybe there's just something in the air at the Charlotte County Airport. Frank Moss isn't even the only one based there who became famous in the scandal over contra cocaine. Another pirate and buccaneer calling Charlotte County Airport home was Dietrich Reinhardt, linked with Barry Seal's Mena, Arkansas cocaine operation in the Iran Contra Hearings. Like Pascal Schreier, Reinhardt is German.

Probably just a coincidence.

In another even-more-amazing coincidence, Reinhardt's business partner at Charlotte County Airport, Jamie Hill, is the very man suspected by law enforcement in the criminal mischief that was making their helicopters disappear.

Pascal Schreier's wife, Sandra Hamouda, owns the hanger next door.

"Keeping the shades pulled down since the dawn of the millennium"

"You have a network of people who obtain certain information and they take it out and sell it to … whomever would be the highest bidder. Then you have people who would be bringing into the country narcotics from the East, and their connections. It is only then that you really see the big picture. The post-9/11 intelligence 'failures' included the willful quashing by the government, of investigations tracing these criminal networks".-- Sibel Edmonds, former FBI translator

Operating out of Charlotte County Airport, Dietrich Reinhardt’s Caribe Air, was called a CIA proprietary airline in a Senate Intelligence Committee report which investigated the company for delivering Hawk and TOW missiles to Iran in the arms-for-hostages deal between the U.S. and Iran.

It was a blemish. But things would get even worse.

In the early 90’s When Federal prosecutors seized the company’s aircraft in the early 90's, they had been parked at the infamous Mena Ark. Airport, and Reinhardt was accused of allowing his planes to be used to ship drugs worth billions of dollars into this country.

In sum, Dietrich Reinhardt is not the sort of person you'd exactly like to see rubbing elbows with the terrorist element out at Charlotte County Airport.

How odd then to discover that Rudi Dekker's Huffman Aviation had been doing business with Caribe Air.

The disturbing fact slipped out during a controversy in Lynchburg, VA. over an aviation contract that had been awarded to a phantom company, which maintained a phantom presence inside--where else?-- Huffman Aviation in Venice. About the phantom presence that had previously been even-more invisible while housed under Rudi Dekker's flying circus maintop, a source in Lynchburg noted, “They stay strictly to themselves, and keep their shades pulled down.”

The Lynchburg City Council hearings revealed that Huffman Aviation had a "maintenance contract" with Caribe Air. It makes a certain sense.

You wouldn't want just anyone vacuuming the planes.

"High Plains Drifters with prayer rugs"

“The real activities taking place behind the scenes are criminal… Everything from drugs to money laundering to arms sales. And yes, there are certain convergences (between) these activities and international terrorism."- Sibel Edmonds

In a Sept 21, 2001 story County Sheriff William Clement told the Charlotte Sun-Herald that Atta had lived in the area and attended a flight school at Charlotte County Airport, under an alias.

The alias Atta used, we have learned, was “Mohamed Arajaki,” the same one he used with Amanda Keller while living in the Sandpiper Apartments in Venice. FBI agents told Amanda Keller that they already knew this to be one of Atta's aliases, when they showed up to retrieve a check he'd written to bail her out of jail.

Yet on the terror watch list of the FBI is Mohamed Arajaki as if this were some another individual entirely. Nothing could be further from the truth. But maybe that’s the way the FBI likes it.

Sheriff Clement told reporters Atta had been in flight training at the Charlotte County Airport, at David Byers’ Professional Aviation. Byers denied it. “He may have had friends here,” Byers said. “Perhaps he was visiting, but he was not at our school as a student.”

His words "may have", may have just been meant for public consumption. Byers and the FBI knew better. Two days after the attack his school received a visit. Apparently it wasn't pretty.

"David Byers' pupils have been a focal point for the FBI in Charlotte County,” read a news account in the Charlotte Sun. “At least eight of them have been interviewed several times each.”

"Agents seized records from a financially troubled flight school at the Charlotte County Airport, Professional Aviation, that recruited students from Tunisia and went out of business in the spring of 2001, the paper reported, "after tipsters said they saw Atta there late last year or early this year."

Sandra Hamouda, Pascal Schreier's wife, is half-Tunisian. She has an extended family in Florida, we learned, and is listed as an officer of a number of family-led firms in Punta Gorda with non-specific sounding names like Universal Technologies and Airex Enterprises. A relative, Ibrahim Hamouda, founded something called Globex Enterprises.

We remember being in a trendy Los Angeles eatery one night a long time ago, chatting with a well-dressed and colorful fellow habitué named Pepe, who in a fit of bonhomie gave us his business card. Everyone said Pepe was with the CIA.

But his business card gave the name of Pepe's company as "Los Angeles Private Enterprise."

Both Pascal Schreier and his wife Sandra Hamouda are executives in another Florida flight school, Pelican Flight Training Center. In another amazing coincidence, when the New York Times did a story about struggling flight schools in Florida on the two-year anniversary of the 9/11 attack, the two schools profiled both received some badly-needed free publicity.

Out of the 220 flight schools in Florida, the Times had picked Arne Kruithof’s Florida Flight Training. And Pelican Flight Training Center.

This is probably just a coincidence.

"It was called 'Operation Money Flowing Out The Ass'"

“After almost three years the American people still do not know that thousands of lives can be jeopardized under the unspoken policy of ‘ protecting certain foreign business relations.” —Sibel Edmonds


Guido Pascal Schreier

Atta and his doomed cadre played out their journey to oblivion against a backdrop which contains clear and convincing evidence of an unseen presence.

Visible out of the corner of the eye are the scurryings back-and-forth that seem to be the routine operations of a global network.

Is this the same ‘semi-official’ network which FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds has forcefully alleged is --even now!-- being protected from exposure by the FBI and State Department?

"These guys had money flowing out their ass," Atta’s sometime American girlfriend Amanda Keller stated. "They never seemed to run out of money. They had massive supplies of cocaine. Whenever they’d run out, they’d go over to the flight school. I followed them one day with Sabrina to see where they were going, and saw them go into Florida Flight Training."

It has become painfully obvious that questions about Mohamed Atta's terrorist conspiracy operated, as we've seen, in close proximity to some celebrated ‘players’ from previous American scandals.

But the official story denies that the terrorists received any outside help while in the U.S.

No mention of Atta hanging out with a seedy group of Americans with multiple “priors.” Nobody Atta knew here had colorful criminal histories, certainly no one engaged in what social scientists primly call “state sponsored crime.”

Life at Charlotte County Airport while Atta's crew moved in and out exhibited beaucoup strange activity. But if the air overhead was crowded with missing helicopters, it was all just a coincidence.

Mohamed Atta & co. were the Lone Cadre. They were the Lost Planet Airmen. Strangers in a Strange Land. Things like the puzzle of Charlotte County’s 23 missing helicopters have absolutely no relevance at all to an understanding of the 9/11 attack.

So here's the deal: One of us cannot be wrong.

You Make the Call.

One final irony from the Charlotte County Airport story, just a little something we noticed out of the corner of our eye while we struggled to put wild conspiracy theories and baseless rumors to rest.

When Pascal Schreirer’s wife Sandra created Aeronautical Services, Inc. back in the 90's, her partner in the venture was a man named Rickey Hilton.

Back when Atta was hanging with “the boys” out at the Charlotte County Airport, Sandra Hamouda's partner Rickey had also been running a little venture called "Defense Trading."

Thanks to the Wayback Machine we found a page of their now-defunct website. You can take a look at it here (http://www.madcowprod.com/defense_trading_company.htm).

Not to suggest Charlotte County’s 23 missing helicopters had anything to do with it. But it looks like the kind of place where, if you needed a helicopter cheap and with no questions asked, they 'might could' be able to help.

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- Daniel Hopsicker is the author of Barry & 'the boys: The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History. About the author. - Email the author.

IMAGE: Welcome To Terrorland - A NEW BOOK BY DANIEL HOPSICKER
ORDER YOUR SIGNED COPY TODAY.
http://www.madcowprod.com/books.html

***************

STANDARD DISCLAIMER FROM UQ.ORG: UnansweredQuestions.org does not necessarily endorse the views expressed in the above article. We present this in the interests of research -for the relevant information we believe it contains. We hope that the reader finds in it inspiration to work with us further, in helping to build bridges between our various investigative communities, towards a greater, common understanding of the unanswered questions which now lie before us.

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