"Welcome to Terrorland"

I finally finished reading Daniel Hopsicker's "Welcome to Terrorland".

Part of the reason it took me so long is I don't have enough time to read books-- between my job, the family, keeping up with the news and the blogs, and my blog here.

The other part of the reason is the book has some real rough patches that make it hard to get through.

However, the book IS DEFINITELY worth the read, because it has some truly excellent and invaluable material in it.

Some chapters are really good-- interesting and well-written, while other sections meander quite a bit. Also Hopsicker is overly reptitious with some material--- for instance, how many times does he have to point out that Mohamed Atta wasn't what you would expect for an Islamic fundamentalist? In terms of style, Hopsicker is also overly sarcastic at times, and the flow of the book is a little off.

The flaws in the book are especially annoying given the importance of the material. This book could be a killer for the 9/11 investigation if it were written a little more crisply. A good editor would do wonders for it.

Here are my ratings (1= lowest, 5= highest):

Overall content and importance = 5
Readability = 3


The bottom line is that Hopsicker has found evidence, as clear as you are ever going to get, that the 9/11 hijackers trained at flight schools in Florida which were connected to the CIA. Also, it is highly likely Mohamed Atta was a highly trained intelligence operative, who was likely involved in drug smuggling. In Germany, Atta was supported by a US-funded international scholars program. Atta may have trained as well at a US army base. Atta had compatriots who were German nationals, and this has been completely ignored by the media. Overall, Atta did not fit the picture of a Muslim fundamentalist jihadist. The owners of the flight school were clearly involved in drug smuggling. One of the owners, Wally Hilliard, is a CIA agent or operative. Hilliard has ties to both major Republican and Democratic Party figures, including Bill Clinton, which is probably why this angle to the 9/11 story has been suppressed.

Of course, all these findings radically challenge the conventional 9/11 narrative.

Apart from the writing style and lack of editing, there are two problems I had with the content:

1) Hopsicker says over and over that Atta and Al-Shehhi did not fit the profile of Islamic fundamentalists. And Hopsicker clearly has evidence that the hijackers had CIA ties. Atta and Al-Shehhi, according to the official 9/11 story, were the pilots of flights 11 and 175, respectively, that slammed into the WTC. Yet Hopsicker persists in the belief that Atta and Al-Shehi really were piloting the planes on 9/11. If there WEREN'T Islamic fundamentalists (and I believe they weren't), why would they engage in such a horrible act of suicide bombing? Hopsicker never tries to explain this contradiction.

2) Amanda Keller, who apparently was Atta's American girlfriend, is a little hard to believe as a completely reliable witness. A lot of what she says about Atta seems to be over-the-top, for instance that his penis was smaller than her pinky finger, or the fact that Atta got mad at her and cut up her baby kittens and left them all around the apartment. Her information about Atta is not COMPLETELY unbelievable, but you have to wonder about the validity of her whole story.

Fortunately, these two problems aren't crucial to the main findings of the book: that the Florida flight training school where the hijackers trained had government and CIA connections and were involved in drug smuggling.

In my mind, this book strongly supports the idea that the 9/11 hijackers were CIA assets, and thus that 9/11 was an inside job.

Intriguingly, at one point Hopsicker makes a reference to robot-controlled planes being used at the Florida airport where the hijackers "trained", but he never follows it up with any explanation.