There are many connections between the events of 9/11 and Oklahoma City. Some of these connections revolve around the alleged 9/11 hijackers, the “20th hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui, and a couple of airports around Oklahoma City. Looking closer at the airport connections reveals startling coincidences with regard to the people who ran World Trade Center (WTC) security company Stratesec, as well as CIA Director George Tenet’s mentor, David Boren, who is currently the co-chairman of President Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board.
Independent investigators have shown that there are striking links between the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City (OKC) and the events of 9/11.[1, 2] Recently, many 9/11 investigators have become more interested in learning the truth about the OKC bombing after being exposed to the excellent film A Noble Lie.[3]
The OKC investigations have revealed eyewitnesses accounts of the sighting in Oklahoma of Mohamed Atta and five other 9/11 hijacker suspects.[4] Last year, an article in the Oklahoma Gazette confirmed that records show Atta, Marwan Al-Shehhi, Nawaf Al-Hazmi and Zacarias Moussaoui all “either visited or lived in Oklahoma from July 2000 to August 2001.”[5]
Between February and August of 2001, Zacarias Moussaoui lived in Norman, Oklahoma and attended Airman Flight School at Max Westheimer Airport, which is owned and operated by the University of Oklahoma. Moussaoui even lived in a university dormitory. According to Moussaoui’s indictment, Atta and Al-Shehhi had visited the same flight school in July, 2000, but did not take classes there.
Westheimer Aiport is just three miles northwest of Norman and was originally a U.S. Navy flight training field. A squadron of the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), a federally supported, non-profit corporation that serves as the official civilian auxiliary of the U. S. Air Force, still gathers at Westheimer every week.[6] Coincidentally, several of the alleged 9/11 hijackers rented apartments in Delray Beach, Florida from a member of CAP. One of the apartments was said to be “a meeting ground for terrorists.” The CAP member landlord, Mike Irish, turned out to be the first intended victim of the October 2001 anthrax attacks. One of his employees actually died from the anthrax.[7]
In 2005, Airman Flight School shut down due to its inability to pay rent and the university newspaper revealed the name of the company that had leased the building. “The airport building is owned by the University of Oklahoma. A Cleveland County District Court order had granted possession of the building to the current landlord, Baker Hughes, Inc., of Houston, which leases the building from OU.” Baker Hughes is an oil services company that is among an elite few making a killing off of the Iraq War.[8]
Dale Davis, the vice president of Airman Flight School, said FBI agents showed up at the facility asking questions about Moussaoui and had been there before. “Davis said FBI agents had visited his school just two years earlier to inquire about Ihab Ali Nawawi, who took flight training there in 1993 and was later charged in connection with the 1998 US Embassy bombings in Africa, which were blamed on bin Laden’s group. Davis also confirmed that Atta and another suspected hijacker, Marwan al-Shehhi, visited Airman Flight School, staying overnight at the school’s dormitory in the nearby Sooner Inn, before deciding to train at another facility.”[9]
Weeks after 9/11, however, FBI Director Robert Mueller repeated his false assertion that federal authorities had no idea that terrorists were using U.S. flight schools to train for piloting commercial airliners. ”There were no warning signs that I’m aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country,” he said.[10] Apparently he had forgotten about the famous July 2001 Phoenix memo and several other related warnings focused on that exact risk.[11]
Established in 1989, Airman Flight School was owned by Jerry Carroll and Brenda Keene. Apparently Carroll and Keene bilked a number of their students out of their life savings as the flight school was going under. But the service was very good in some cases, considering that — “Flight instructor Juan Carlos [Merida] picked up Moussaoui at Will Rogers World Airport when he came to Oklahoma and took him back to the airport when he left.”[12]
Airman’s students sued Carroll and Keene when the business collapsed, along with KJB Flight Management, an entity of which Keene and David Batton were principals. KJB had tried to buy Airman and was managing the school until it closed.[13] David Batton was, at one time, the Cleveland County Assistant District Attorney. The Panamanian Juan Carlos Merida, who had picked up and dropped off Moussaoui from the airport, was later represented by Batton in legal proceedings related to suspicion of terrorism.[14]
Wiley Post and Hangar 8
According to FBI summary documents, Mohamed Atta was also spotted at nearby Wiley Post Airport in Bethany, Oklahoma within six months of the 9/11 attacks. An employee at private aviation company Million Air witnessed Atta flying at Wiley Post Airport along with two other alleged 9/11 hijackers, Marwan Al-Shehhi and Waleed Al-Shehri.[15] Other FBI summary documents indicate that Saeeed Al-Ghamdi was also seen flying in to Wiley Post Airport on an unspecified date and that Hani Hanjour had made inquiries to a company in The Netherlands that ran a flight school out of Wiley Post Airport.[16]
The suburb of Bethany is just seven miles west of Oklahoma City and a little over 20 miles from Norman. Wiley Post, located in Bethany, is one of three airports owned and operated by the Oklahoma City Department of Airports. Westheimer Airport in Norman, run by the university, provides a fourth option for public airport access.
Hangar 8 of Wiley Post Airport was, until 2005, the home of Aviation General, the aircraft company owned by Kuwaiti-American Corporation (KuwAm) and run by Wirt Dexter Walker III. KuwAm and its WTC security company Stratesec had strong connections to the Kuwaiti royal family, which benefited from 9/11 through the ouster of Saddam Hussein. The companies were also strongly linked to the Bush family network and to people who came from deep-state U.S. intelligence backgrounds.[17] Like his fellow KuwAm director Robert Dudley van Roijen, Walker is the son of a CIA officer. He is also a suspect in 9/11 insider trading.[18]
Aviation General was the parent of two wholly-owned subsidiaries: Commander Aircraft Company, which manufactured Commander-brand aircraft, and Strategic Jet Services, which provided aircraft brokerage and refurbishment services. Aviation General, Commander Aircraft, and Strategic Jet Services were all located in Hangar 8 of Wiley Post Airport.
Wiley Post Airport has approximately 24 hangars and Hangar 8 is set off away from the rest.[19] Although Aviation General and its subsidiaries all went bankrupt or were sold off in the few years after 9/11, Hangar 8 still houses three businesses. These include Jim Clark & Associates, Valair Aviation, and Oklahoma Aviation.
Jim Clark & Associates is an aircraft sales and brokerage firm, similar to Strategic Jet Services, and is located in Hangar 8. The company shared a phone number (405-787-6222) with another aircraft company called Sundancer Enterprises, out of Norman, OK.
Valair Aviation is an aircraft service company also located in Hangar 8. This is a service center that works on Commander-brand aircraft, the kind that Wirt Walker’s Commander Aircraft Company had manufactured there. Valair started as a division of Aero Commander, which was a subsidiary of Rockwell International and Gulfstream. By the year 2000, Valair (called the Service Center) had also become specialized in servicing Raytheon aircraft.
At first glance, the most interesting of these new Hangar 8 companies is the flight school called Oklahoma Aviation. This is due to an incredible coincidence regarding the young man who now runs the company, Shohaib Nazir Kassam.
Oklahoma Aviation first appeared on the internet in March, 2001 although the website was only one page with the company name for the first year. The company was officially founded in February 2004 by Tom Kilpatrick, the son of famous Oklahoman John Kilpatrick Jr., who had been president of the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce.
Tom Kilpatrick didn’t know anything about aviation, so he hired Shoiam Kassam to be the Chief Flight Instructor and Rob Rothman as Assistant Chief Flight Instructor. Rothman was a recent graduate of the University of Oklahoma and member of the Civil Air Patrol. Rothman is now an officer in the U.S. Air Force stationed in Pensacola, Florida. The Air Force base is located at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola which, coincidentally, was the address used by several alleged 9/11 hijackers on their driver’s licenses.[20]
In March 2007, Oklahoma Aviation was purchased by another famous son of Oklahoma, Clayton Healey. Clay had just come off the ranch as a cowboy in 2003 and started AIC Title Service, which focused on aircraft company closures. Clay’s father was Skip Healey, a well known Republican National Committee member and oil company executive. The Healey’s were grandnephews of Lew Wentz, who had opened Oklahoma up to the oil industry.
By 2008, Oklahoma Aviation had the best airplanes around.[21] And somehow young Shoaib Kassam came to be listed as the owner of the company.[22] The Chief Flight Instructor today is Marcus Buchanan, who in 1998 was a student at the Airline Training Academy (ATA) in Orlando, Florida. This is the same ATA that went bankrupt while robbing its students and was then found to have financial connections to Wally Hilliard, who owned Huffman Aviation, where Atta and friends went after deciding not to train in Oklahoma.[23] Buchanan went from ATA to be a flight instructor at the University of Oklahoma’s Department of Aviation before moving to his current job in Hangar 8.
The part of this story that seems more incredible is that Kassam was, in March 2006, a government witness against Zacarias Moussaoui. He was actually Moussaoui’s flight instructor. To emphasize, the guy who is now occupying Wirt Walker’s offices in Hangar 8 at Wiley Post Airport not only knew Zacarias Moussaoui, he was the primary flight instructor of the “20th hijacker” at Airman Flight School.
Kassam moved to Norman in 1998, at the age of 18, coming from Mombassa, Kenya. He was originally from Pakistan. Two years after he arrived in Norman, he completed his training to become a flight instructor. He was only 21 years of age when he spent 57 hours (unsuccessfully) trying to train Zacarias Moussaoui to fly.
During his testimony and cross-examination in the Moussaoui trial, Kassam was asked many times about Moussaoui’s religion. Both the prosecutor and the defense attorney were very interested in whether Moussaoui was a devout Muslim. After repeated questioning, Kassam said that yes, he thought that Moussaoui considered himself a Muslim.
“Q. And you mentioned that he was trying to get you back into the faith?
A. No. He just talked about, you know, church, I mean, sorry, mosques and going to pray and fasting, and just things like that.”[24]
There seemed to be some confusion on this issue in the courtroom. But Kassam was useful to the prosecution in that he confirmed that Moussaoui also called himself Zuluman Tangotango. This allowed prosecutors to introduce a mountain of emails from the address “pilotz123@hotmail,” purportedly belonging to Zuluman Tangtango. The email evidence played a significant role in Moussaoui’s conviction.
Kassam also remembered seeing Atta and Al-Shehhi at Airman. A student at the time of Atta and Alshehhi’s visit, Kassam recalled bumping into them when they were being given a tour of the Airman facility.
The history of Aviation General was, like that of Stratesec and the other companies that Wirt Walker ran, a record of well-financed business failure. As of 1998, Aviation General was losing millions of dollars every year. With very humble positive returns, the year 2000 results were the best in the company’s history, according to Walker.
In September 2000, John DeHavilland of British Aerocraft joined as CEO of Strategic Jet Services. Three months later, Walker’s president at Aviation General, Dean N. Thomas, died suddenly at a young age.[25] And by August 2001, Aviation General was reporting million-dollar losses again.
In late 2002, Strategic Jet Services “discontinued its operations and began the process of dissolving the company.”[26] Commander Aircraft Company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy at the same time, and that was changed to Chapter 7 in January 2005. Commander Aircraft left Oklahoma in September 2005 to move to an “undisclosed location.” In an odd shell game reminiscent of the Stratesec dealings, what was left of Aviation General was sold to Tiger Aircraft, a small company with Taiwanese investors that went bankrupt in 2006.
Oklahoma Aviation was a flight school that was just getting off the ground in 2005, as it took over Hangar 8 from Aviation General and soon had the best planes. This was the opposite of the apparent financial fortunes of the Aviation General companies that all went belly up that year. And it was also unlike Airman Flight School which, although it was in the same area and same business as Oklahoma Aviation, shut down in 2005 because it could not pay the rent.
David Boren
On the morning of 9/11, CIA Director George Tenet was having breakfast in Washington with his long-time mentor, former Oklahoma Senator David Boren. While a Senator, Boren was the longest serving chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). According to Tenet, Boren plucked him from obscurity in 1987 to serve first as his aide and then, later as the staff director for the SSCI.
Boren was a member of the Yale secret society Skull & Bones, like George W. Bush was five years later. After serving four years as Governor of Oklahoma and 15 years in the U.S. Senate, he became the President of the University of Oklahoma, a position he has held since 1994. Boren lives in Norman where his university housed Airman Flight School, and where the alleged 9/11 hijackers sought training and Moussaoui lived and trained.
Boren went from his breakfast meeting with Tenet to join James Woolsey in helping to produce the media story. Although the CIA and FBI didn’t seem to have any idea what to look for prior to 9/11, Boren certainly seemed to know what the 9/11 attacks were all about as soon as they happened.
While being interviewed on September 11, Boren said:
“I think you have to have bin Laden on the suspect list. You probably have some nation states that ought to be on the suspect list as well [Iraq, for example]. You know, looking at this, it’s very clear– and I think this hopefully will give us leads to trace back and find and affix responsibility– the training that had to have been there by those who took over the aircraft, the ability to pilot the aircraft. It appears that perhaps they were piloting the aircraft, the knowledge to turn off the transponders that would make it very difficult to trace these aircraft from the ground and through our air control system.
These were people that were highly trained; they knew what they were doing. It was all very carefully coordinated. So we’re dealing with people with a lot of sophistication here. Some of that training and some of that preparation is bound to have left clues that hopefully we’ll be able to thread through pretty quickly.”[27]
There certainly were a lot of clues, and many of them seemed to implicate David Boren and his university. Boren had no intention of mentioning those clues, however. He didn’t mention that the airport run by the university where he was president had been training Zacarias Moussaoui to fly. He also failed to point out that Mohamed Atta and other alleged 9/11 hijackers had called, emailed and visited his airport in the two years before 9/11. Additionally, it might have been of interest to the listeners that the FBI had showed up several times over the years to talk to the people at Airman Flight School, located at Boren’s airport, about the training of terrorism suspects.
Another relevant point of interest was that, just the month before, Boren had personally brought the former CIA Station Chief in Berlin to the university to teach in the Political Science department. David Edger, who had been involved in orchestrating another September 11th tragedy, the Coup in Chile, joined the faculty at the University of Oklahoma at Boren’s invitation. Edger’s most recent responsibility at the CIA was the monitoring of the Hamburg al-Qaeda cell, which included Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehi, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Ziad Jarrah.[28]
What are the odds that David Boren could have been so clueless about the training of al Qaeda operatives under his own nose? What are the odds that Zacarias Moussaoui’s primary trainer at Boren’s airport is now occupying the offices of Wirt D. Walker’s former businesses in Hangar 8 at Wiley Post Airport? Maybe we should find out.
[1] Jim Crogan, The Terrorist Motel, LA Weekly, July 24, 2002, http://www.laweekly.com/2002-08-01/news/the-terrorist-motel/
[2] Holland Van den Nieuwenhof, Key to the Truth in Oklahoma: 4.19.95 and 9.11.01, 911Blogger.com, April 14, 2008, http://911blogger.com/node/15075
[3] To get a copy, see the film’s website: A Noble Lie: Oklahoma City 1995, http://www.anoblelie.com/
[4] See, for example: Andrew W. Griffin, The OKC-9/11 link the media and authorities willfully ignored, Red Dirt Report, September 9, 2011, http://www.reddirtreport.com/Story.aspx/19579
[5] Clifton Adcock, The Sooner State’s ties to the twin towers are tight, despite the distance, The Oklahoma Gazette, July 9, 2011, http://npaper-wehaa.com/oklahoma-gazette#2011/09/07/?article=1375779
[6] Wikipedia page for University of Oklahoma Westheimer Airport, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oklahoma_Westheimer_Airport
[7] History Commons Complete 9/11 Timeline, Profile: Gloria Irish, http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=gloria_irish_1
[8] The Wall Street Journal, Baker Hughes Wins $640 Mln Iraq Oil Drilling Contract –Sources, December 20, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20111220-711513.html
[9] Kevin Cullen and Ralph Ranalli, Flight School Says FBI Trailed Suspect Prior To Hijackings, The Boston Globe, September 18, 2001, accessed at http://911research.com/cache/disinfo/deceptions/bostonglobe091801.html
[10] Ibid
[11] History Commons Complete 9/11 Timeline, The Phoenix Memo and Related Investigations, http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?projects_and_programs=phoenixMemo&timeline=complete_911_timeline
[12] KXII.com, Oklahoma Flight School Owner Will File for Bankruptcy, October 10, 2005, http://www.kxii.com/news/headlines/1772416.html
[13] Ibid
[14] Ralph Blumenthal, Unsuspecting flier ends up a suspect: Had contact with 9/11 figure, put on U.S. list, New York Times News Service, March 29, 2005, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2005-03-29/news/0503290199_1_airman-flight-school-fbi-director-federal-aviation-administration-license
[15] See FBI summary documents: FBI Case Summary for 9/11 from the 9/11 commission files, http://www.scribd.com/doc/13120344/FBI-Case-Summary-for-911-from-the-911-Commission-Files, FBI Case Summary for Marwan Al-Shehhi found at: http://www.scribd.com/doc/13120551/-FBI-Summary-about-Alleged-Flight-175-Hijacker-Marwan-Alshehhi
[16] See FBI summary documents for Saeed Al-Ghamdi and Hani Hanjour found in 911 archives at Scribd.com: http://www.scribd.com/911DocumentArchive
[17] Kevin R. Ryan, KuwAm and Stratesec: Directors and investors that link 9/11 to a private intelligence network, DigWithin.net, February 24, 2012, http://digwithin.net/2012/02/24/kuwam-and-stratesec-directors/
[18] Kevin R. Ryan, Evidence for Informed Trading on the Attacks of September 11, November 18, 2010, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/11/18/evidence-for-informed-trading-on-the-attacks-of-september-11/
[19] Wiley Post Airport website, Airport Guide, http://www.wileypostairport.com/Page/AirportGuide
[20] Newsweek, Alleged Hijackers May Have Trained At U.S. Bases, September 14, 2001, http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2001/09/14/alleged-hijackers-may-have-trained-at-u-s-bases.html
[21] Ja’Rena Lunsford, Company Takes Flight in Aviation Business, The Oklahoman, April 22, 2008, http://www.redorbit.com/news/business/1353230/company_takes_flight_in_aviation_business/
[22] Oklahoma Aviation website, http://www.oklahomaaviation.com/aboutus.html
[23] Daniel Hopsicker, 9/11: The American Connection, Mad Cow Morning News, Issue 43, http://www.madcowprod.com/issue43.html
[24] Court transcript, UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF VIRGINIA ALEXANDRIA DIVISION, proceeding from March 9, 2006, accessed at http://cryptome.org/usa-v-zm-030906-01.htm
[25] NewsOK, Obituary for Dean N. Thomas, December 7, 2000, http://newsok.com/dean-n.-thomas/article/2722429
[26] Aviation General Inc, Form 8-K, March 26, 2004, http://www.wnd.com/markets/action/getedgarwindow?accesscode=106083004000089
[27] Transcript of PBS NewsHour show, Intelligence Investigation, September 11, 2001, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/july-dec01/intelligence2.html
[28] History Commons Complete 9/11 Timeline, Profile: Airman Flight School, http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=airman_flight_school_
