FILMMAKER HOPSICKER DISCUSSES ODD ACTIVITIES OF 911 'RINGLEADER' SUPPRESSED BY AMERICAN MEDIA

by rense.com

Radio Transcript Published In The American Free Press

 

By Tom Valentine with Daniel Hopsicker and Michael C. Piper

American Free Press

January 6 & 13, 2003

 

Investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker, producer of the new video, "Mohamed Atta and the Venice Flying Circus," was a guest on the Dec. 15 broadcast of Radio Free America, the weekly call-in talk forum sponsored by American Free Press with host Tom Valentine.

 

Joining Valentine as co-host for the evening was AFP Correspondent Michael Collins Piper. The two discussed Hopsicker's shocking discoveries - outlined in his video - that prove, beyond any question, that the U.S. government has been officially covering up explosive facts about the activities and associations of reputed 9-11 hijacking ringleader Mohamed Atta.

 

Excerpts:

 

Valentine:

 

For all intents and purposes, as your research into Barry Seal has shown - along with the work of many others who have dared to look into the subject matter - the world's largest cargo airline has been run by the CIA. Intelligence officials have a definite link to this little Venice airport, don't they? Some people would argue that it was "just a coincidence" that Atta and the 9-11 boys would come there to learn to fly.

 

Hopsicker:

 

It's beyond coincidence at this point. In fact, you'll even find that the owner of the flight school in Venice, Wallace J. Hilliard, was in business with a key figure in the Whitewater scandal, Truman Arnold, a Bill Clinton crony from Arkansas who had been the finance chairman of the Democratic Party.

Arnold's attorney in Whitewater was longtime Washington figure Richard Ben-Veniste, who was just named to sit on the 9-11 investigation panel.

 

So, Ben-Veniste has ties to people he is supposed to be investigating. So when you are talking, in this case, about the owner of the "terror flight school" you are talking about a person that anyone might naturally consider a possible suspect.

 

Hilliard, a 70-year-old multimillionaire health insurance executive and a self-styled Mormon bishop, inexplicably went into business three years ago with a Dutch native living in America, Rudy Dekkers, and began buying flight schools which shortly thereafter were flooded with Arab student pilots.

 

Initially, I thought that Dekkers owned the flight school. But Hilliard was always the true owner of the flight school where Atta and one of the other 9-11 hijackers trained.

 

There was another hijacker who trained next door at the Florida Flight Training Center which - coincidentally, you might say - is also owned by a Dutch native.

 

It appears that Zaccarias Moussaoui who is scheduled to go on trial for conspiracy in the 9-11 attacks was also here.

 

Valentine:

 

The federal authorities came in and grabbed up all of the records of the flight school.

 

Hopsicker:

 

That's right. They flew them out on a plane that also had Jeb Bush aboard.

 

Valentine:

 

The federal authorities told the local law enforcement authorities to keep their noses out of the investigation, didn't they?

 

Hopsicker:

 

That's correct. I sat down with two Southern lawmen, a current sheriff and his immediate predecessor. These two guys looked me dead in the eye and said that, based on what they have seen with a lot of CIA-connected covert operations in the area, the CIA was somehow involved in, if not responsible for, the World Trade Center attacks.

You might expect some wild-eyed leftist radical to say that. But these are two Southern sheriffs. They have spent years watching CIA activities that they could not interfere with.

 

(snip)

 

Piper:

 

I'd like to make a comment about your video, "Mohamed Atta and the Venice Flying Circus." I have to say it was riveting. There are a lot of people who are looking into 9-11, focusing on various theories and propositions that run contrary to the official government version of the events.

However, what Daniel Hopsicker has done in this video has taken a very specific set of circumstances and events linked specifically to the people who are alleged by the government to have committed the 9-11 atrocity and has uncovered all of these remarkable facts - not theories. If you look at this aspect of the whole 9-11 story, the portion that Daniel has assembled, and you see all the holes in the "official" story in the context of what Daniel has presented, then you know that there is a much bigger cover-up and a much bigger scandal beyond what Daniel has covered.

 

Valentine:

 

Who are these Dutch fellows? How did they get involved?

 

Hopsicker:

 

That's the question. Who are these guys? Why were they training hundreds of Arabs here in America to fly? There aren't that many flight jobs in the Arab world, yet they were training hundreds of men for only a handful of jobs. So something else was really going on. And what they did simply did not make business sense. They paid twice what the flight school in Venice was worth, clearly throwing around somebody else's money.

 

If you were the CIA and you were running some secret operation in this country and you wanted to create plausible deniability, then why not bring in two Dutch men to come to the United States and run the flight school for you?

 

It's a big story. I will tell you that I have just completed a three-hour taped interview with Atta's American girlfriend.

 

Valentine:

 

I didn't even know that Atta had an American girlfriend.

 

Hopsicker:

 

Well, there you go again. You have to ask yourself why you didn't know that. Don't you think you would have seen a ton of stories - at least in the supermarket tabloids - about this woman under titles such as "I Dated a Terrorist." The truth is that this woman is in hiding. I had to track her down and convince her to talk to me.

 

Valentine:

 

One would normally think that you can sell that to The National Enquirer.

 

Hopsicker:

 

I don't think they are interested.

 

Valentine:

 

No, they probably are not interested. I think the Enquirer is a front for these operations, too. In fact, my colleague here, Michael Collins Piper, did a pioneering story for the old Spotlight pointing out that all of the tabloids are owned by one company - most people don't realize that - which is controlled by a Wall Street banker named Roger Altman, who, as a deputy treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, was - again - a key figure in the Whitewater scandal.

 

Piper:

 

That's correct. The fact is that the tabloids have a long-standing relationship with the CIA that goes back to the early years of both the tabloids and the CIA itself.

 

Valentine:

 

So the tabloids probably won't be interested in any stories that might implicate the CIA in any covert activities involving the circles around Atta.

 

Hopsicker:

 

Atta's girlfriend was a pink-haired stripper. She lived with him for two months before she kicked Atta out when she found a new boyfriend.

 

From what she described, we've been able to positively identify five people who were close associates of Atta. I don't mean fellow student pilots. I'm talking about people he went to meetings with. They are all still alive and I will tell you this: they are not Arabs. They are all Germans.

 

Here's Atta, who spent eight years in a two-year urban planning collegiate program in Hamburg, Germany. What was Atta doing in German for all those years? Didn't anyone in Germany notice that this foreign national had spent eight years in a two-year program? Of course they did. Atta was an intelligence agent.

 

And from what his girlfriend told me. Atta was psychopathic enough to have done what he is said to have done. And he did hate the United States. I have no proof that he was the guy who flew into the World Trade Center, but everything I have shows that he could have.

 

Valentine:

 

Does anyone really have any proof as to who the hijackers are who were aboard those planes?

 

Hopsicker:

 

Not to my knowledge. I haven't followed that end of it.

 

Piper:

 

All we really know is that persons - using the passports and identities of foreign nationals, mostly Saudis - were aboard those ill-fated planes and that they spoke Arabic. But Israel's Mossad has a long documented record of infiltrating Arab terrorist organizations with Arabic-speaking Jews who pose as Arabs.

And it should be noted that even many Arabs had some real doubts about whether Ramzi Yousef, who organized the first World Trade Center bombing, was really even an Arab.

That fact is not very well known nor is it mentioned by people such as Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch who is trying to connect Yousef and Saddam Hussein to the Oklahoma City bombing.

 

Valentine:

 

What is this German connection?

 

Hopsicker:

 

I don't have the slightest clue. But then, again, speaking of the Oklahoma City bombing, just ask yourself the question: Who was Andreas Strassmeir, the German national, who was intimately tied to the circumstances surrounding the Oklahoma City bombing?

 

Valentine:

 

Strassmeir was the close friend of self-styled "Southern rights activist" Kick Lyons who played a part in the destruction of Liberty Lobby, the populist institution that published The Spotlight.

 

Piper:

 

When you mentioned this German connection, I immediately thought of Lyon's friend Strassmeir who - although German and ostensibly a "neo-Nazi" - turns out to be quite fluent in Hebrew, the state language of Israel.

 

As much as it will surprise many people, the fact is that Israeli and German intelligence are very, very tightly interconnected, going back to the days of German General Reinhard Gehlen (who became a U.S. asset after World War II and who worked quite closely with the Israelis, a point that many people like to forget).

 

And if you bother to look into the Lavon Affair of the 1950s, when the Israelis plotted terrorist attacks against U.S. installations in Egypt to be falsely blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood, there were Germans involved in that little venture.

 

Hopsicker:

 

Well, I will say this: I know some other things that I'm not telling right now. There are ties to the former KGB in all of this. The KGB has been around Hilliard's operation in Venice. I don't know why they were there, but I know that Hilliard knew they were there. And not just the KGB, there were individuals who flew for the Israeli military who were there at the Venice airport.

 

Valentine:

How much do the local law enforcement authorities in Venice know about all of this?

 

Hopsicker:

 

They aren't stupid. But there's a limit to what they can do. I interviewed the local chief of police in Venice and he was totally apologetic about what he was forced to allow to happen in his town. The police were not allowed to touch Dekkers's operation at the Venice airport.

 

The Drug Enforcement Administration, for example, told the police to stay away. The airport had a "green light," whatever that means.

 

The chief told me that the Venice airport was the kind of place where it was not unusual to see an American military helicopter touch down at three in the morning and then take off again.

 

Valentine:

 

This sounds like the Mena, Ark., airport all over again.

 

Piper:

 

All of the facts that Daniel has presented in his video have been suppressed by every newspaper in the world, except, of course, for American Free Press. All of this information points to one thing: that Atta was not just "working for Osama bin Laden," if he was even working for bin Laden at all. Atta was moving in circles that were under the discipline of the U.S. government's own intelligence community.

 

Hopsicker:

 

I'll speculate for a moment: having spent a year in Venice on this investigation, it looks to me as if one of two things was going on here - and frankly, I have no idea which is correct. Either the CIA was running a covert operation and training hundreds of Arab pilots in an effort to place human assets in bin Laden's organization or somebody was trading oil and heroin for guns and training on the southwest coast of Florida from 1999 to 2001.

 

I believe that the resignation of both Henry Kissinger and George Mitchell, the co-chairman of the 9-11 probe, points to something critical. I think that once the Iraqi war is over, there will be renewed attention to what happened on 9-11: who did it and why? I think Kissinger and Mitchell quit because they are looking at something that is 10 times bigger than Watergate.

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