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Kruithof and Dekkers are referred to as 'The Magic Dutch Boys.' The near simultaneous appearance as owners of neighboring businesses in Venice is a deep source of suspicion for Hopsicker:
It was Kruithof's school that trained yet another September 11 pilot, Ziad Jarrah, at the same time that Atta and Al-Shehhi were students at Huffman. Jarrah piloted the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. Through it all is a Death In Venice (Florida) theme with no apologies to Thomas Mann or anyone else. Local residents are splashed throughout, from a waitress at The Pelican Alley through local power brokers Boone, Boone and Hines et. al., whose offices are prominently shown with a caption borrowed from the Venice Gondolier, "Evil in our backyard." That one appeared in the October 31, 2001, story, Jackson Stephens 'Active' in Venice Florida, a piece that puts some ancient and not-so ancient political history together with almost pure speculation about recent and current events. The dots are there, and admittedly these are some darned peculiar dots, but Hopsicker is unable to connect them. Much of Hopsicker's writings are difficult at best to wade through. Hopsicker jumps like a grasshopper from idea to idea trying to tie together a vast number of bizarre, scary and often unreported nuggets of information. The reader is often left in the dust, choked by details and unable to grasp the big picture. And what is that big picture that Hopsicker is trying to paint? It's taken me a full day to understand it, a maddening day at that of sifting through about 100 pages that spit out of my printer. Hopsicker's big picture is that the training of Atta and others here in Venice was a covert operation by the CIA that went horribly wrong. That the CIA was directly responsible for setting up the schools for the sole purpose of observing and possibly infiltrating Al Queda and other terrorist groups, and that in the process of doing so had greatly helped the terrorists in their murderous acts. Maybe it all makes better sense on his video, Mohamed Atta and the Venice Flying Circus (there's an online clip of it available). In print, however, Hopsicker's yarn is a mess, and he doesn't help his case by asking innumerable impossibly unanswerable questions. He drags Chandra Levy into the mix:
Now that was written in December, long before Levy's body was found in the brush in a D.C. park. As far back as July of 2001, police in D.C. had acknowledged that five other area women in their 20's were missing, also in suspicious circumstances. Trying to tie Levy's case into the events of September 11 with a 'may have' statement involving sex slaves is akin to grasping for straws from another dimension. At that point in time, one could just as easily have speculated that Levy had been abducted by interplanetary aliens. Even Charlie Voss deserves closer scrutiny, according to Hopsicker. He and his wife, you may remember, took Atta and Al-Shehhi for a time into their own home, then kicked them out.
Uhhh. This is a town whose demography is tilted heavily towards retirees. There's a lot of military retirees in the mix. In fact, ever since World War II ended, this has been a town that has been particularly attractive to military retirees, especially retired military pilots, a fact that Dorothy Korweck over at the Historical Archives would be more than glad to explain. So, Voss, an area resident, is an ex-C130 pilot who picks up a job at the airport. With that kind of a background, where else would he go to look for a job? Moreover, Voss has lived in Venice as far back as 1991, long before anyone here had ever heard of Rudi Dekkers. In spite of the Grassy Knoll feel of Hopsicker's ongoing obsessive attacks on our fair little town, a few of his upturned stones bear examination. In Was CIA Running Terrorist Flight School, for instance, Hopsicker writes that Huffman flight instructor Mark Mikarts' real name is Mark Wierdak, a sometime pilot for the missionary group Agape Flights. Agape Flights runs missionaries and missionary supplies out of Sarasota, Florida into South and Central America, and has been doing so for years.
OK, now that's odd, and more than a little suspicious sounding. To be fair, Hopsicker does turn up a lot of odd stuff. For instance, Dekkers purportedly wanted to have student pilots assigned as co-pilots on commercial airline flights as 'ride-alongs,' a serious breach of FAA regulations. Hopsicker quotes Dekkers' business partner in Florida Air, Richard Boehlke:
Hopsicker finally made an apparent substantive link, albeit somewhat stretched, between Atta, Dekkers and the CIA in February of this year. In his story Venice Flight School Linked to CIA, Hopsicker notes that a previously unknown business named Britannia Aviation had been operating out of the Venice Airport in one of Dekkers' hangars. It begins to get a bit convoluted, but Britannia came under the gun after winning a controversial governmental bid for services in Lynchburg, VA. Out of that came the revelation that Britannia was doing work for Caribe Air, which has had numerous reported ties with the CIA. Hopsicker further alleges in the same story that Britannia was under some sort of protection from the DEA, this according to his unnamed sources at the Venice Airport, and that all other law enforcement had been told to back away. If true: very, very, very bizarre. Very. If true. If true. Remember the goofy INS papers that landed in Venice six months to the day after September 11th? Serious INS screw-up. Everyone was dumping on the INS for that one, and rightfully so. In Flight School Owner Changes Story Again, Hopsicker puts an interesting spin on that fiasco, leaving unstated his apparent belief that maybe it wasn't a mistake after all. When you think about it, that whole incident went so beyond profound idiocy as to make any subsequent explanation for it unbelievable. The most startling allegations, though, come out in Hopsicker's April 8th story, I Thought They Were Mafia, and in the April 18th story FBI Cover-up of Atta's Last Days. It is here that Hopsicker asserts, with videotaped statements from witnesses and with rental car records, that Atta and pals were back in Venice three times in the weeks leading up to September 11th attack. The last time, according to Hopsicker, was just one week prior to the attack.
Actually, Hopsicker asks why a lot. There's also a lot of could haves and might haves all through his work. Granted, it's a shadowy world that he is poking around in and answers don't come easy, but it all has the cumulative effect of feeling like this is nothing more than speculation piled upon speculation. The facts that he has uncovered (and some of them are quite juicy) tend to get lost in the mix. Hopsicker hits substantive paydirt quite a few times, but the unconnected dots seem to outweigh everything else. It's all a lot to swallow in one gulp, even though Hopsicker has been trailing his stories out since mid-September of 2001. Hopsicker never comes right out and states that Rudi Dekkers is a covert ops man for the CIA, but it is implied:
I don't know much about Kruithof, but the thought of Dekkers as a covert ops man in the CIA is really stretching the limits of credibility. A more credible question would go something along the lines of 'could Dekkers could have been duped and manipulated by the CIA?' But even then, we're still left with an open-ended question that ends up being the entire premise of a series of pieces containing open-ended questions. The other side of that coin is that it is possible that Hopsicker is absolutely right. Just because someone is paranoid doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't something around worth being paranoid about. Mohamed Atta did live here. So did Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah. They did receive flight training here. They did participate in the events of September 11, 2001. Those last four sentences alone should be enough to make the most sensible, well-grounded person more than a little paranoid. So is Hopsicker worth the read? Yeah, if you have the time and the patience. Keep a shaker of Morton's granulated nearby, though. John Patten is the head of Web Operations for Creative Pages, and has worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times. |
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Death in
Venice?
