The two-year long investigation into Mohamed Atta & his contacts and associates in Florida. FBI agents harassed and intimidated witnesses to the 9/11 terrorist conspiracy’s activities in Florida, issuing warnings to avoid talking with reporters, say current and former residents in Venice, Florida. At least one eyewitness,

... who knew Mohamed Atta because he lived next door for a time, received regular visits for over six months after the attack from FBI agents eager to ensure she continued to remain silent. Several said they felt unfairly singled out because what they saw and heard is at considerable variance with the official story of the terrorist cadre’s time in Florida.

An American girl named Amanda Keller, for example, briefly lived with Mohamed Atta in Venice, according to both local news reports and numerous eyewitnesses.

She possessed presumably ‘scorching-hot’ details of life with a terrorist ringleader. But we never saw her being interviewed by Diane Sawyer.

The FBI had other ideas.

A total blackout on information With reporters literally camped at her doorstep, Keller told us she had been so intimidated into silence by the FBI that she spoke barely a dozen words. “The newspaper quote you read was accurate,” she said. “‘I can’t really say anything. I’m afraid I’ll get in trouble.’"

“A N.Y. Times reporter named Chris—young, tall, kind of heavy, dark hair and a dark goatee—came to my house,” she explained. “And he was mad because I wouldn’t talk to him. This dude would NOT leave me alone. I stood outside arguing with him forever, and he was trying to trip me up and get me to say something.”

"And so I called the FBI agent that had been calling me—right while this reporter guy was standing there—and told him this reporter won’t leave me alone. The agent said let me talk to him, so I handed him the phone. And I don’t know what was said, but after that he left me alone.”

Why had she remained silent? "Because of the intimidation by the FBI,” she replied. “They told me not to talk to anybody, to keep my mouth shut."

"Peeling hundreds from his fanny pack"

The FBI didn’t confine their menacing visits just to people who had lived with the terrorist ringleader. Some got in trouble just for having lived next-door, like Stephanie Frederickson, a pleasant 50-year old housewife who made the grave mistake of living in an apartment beside the apartment that Mohamed Atta moved into with Amanda Keller.

“At first, right after the attack, they (the FBI) told me I must have been mistaken in my identification," Frederickson stated. “Then they would insinuate that I was lying. Finally they stopped trying to get me to change my story. After that they just stopped by once a week to make sure I hadn’t been talking to anyone.

Frederickson shrugged. "Who was I going to tell? Everybody around here already knew.”

The Sandpiper Apartments manager, Charlie Grapentine, is a grizzled Korean vet in his early 60’s. The FBI did not welcome his recollections any more warmly than they had those of Stephanie Frederickson.

"Atta always carried a fanny pack around his waist,” Grapentine told us. "I remember Amanda once telling him that she needed some new clothes, and he reached in and peeled off a few hundreds from a thick roll of cash he had stuffed inside the fanny pack.”

Grapentine turns grim on the subject of the FBI's treatment. "They called me a liar, and told me to keep my mouth shut," stated the ex-marine through clenched teeth. “Nobody likes to hear that: that they didn't see something they know they saw.”

Keller, Frederickson, and Grapentine, are just three examples of the apparently officially-sanctioned silencing of eyewitnesses in Florida to the terrorist's activities.

They are by no means alone in having felt official pressure to keep silent.

Longboat Key fire captain Carroll Mooneyhan was waiting in the lobby of the hotel President Bush was staying at the night before the attack, for Bush to come out for his morning run when he saw something he shouldn’t have. Something pretty big, actually…

After talking with local reporters he clammed up. When we finally reached him by phone, Mooneyhan, who witnessed the launch of an attempt to assassinate the President, told us: “I was visited by the CIA and the Secret Service after 9/11. I have a career to think about. I have to be careful what I say.”

And that was the last we heard from him.

In a land where the newspapers no longer report what happens every day, appearance can replace reality...at least until its too late to do anything about it.

September 11th was surrealistic enough. Now we know that the flight school where Atta learned to fly in Florida is not a “flight school.”

Its owner is not a “flight school owner.”

Today Florida has replaced California as the epicenter of national weirdness, a place where nothing is as it seems.

Venice, Florida is the biggest September 11th crime scene that wasn’t reduced to rubble. And a big piece of the 9/11 puzzle will fall into place when we know the answer to this question:

“What was going on in Venice, Florida?”

The true owner of the flight school which served as home away from home for the two pilots who took down the World Trade Center, Wally Hilliard, has a Rolodex which includes everyone from Whitewater scandal figure Truman Arnold to Evangelical Christian mover-and-shaker Jerry Falwell to Latin American dictator Fidel Castro. Hilliard owns the only air carrier claiming regular service to Havana. He has made numerous trips to Cuba, courting Castro for business concessions, through the simple expedient, we hear, of passing out handfuls of Presidential Rolexes.

Hilliard had his Lear jet confiscated at Orlando Executive Airport in July of 2000--the same month Atta arrived--with 43 lbs. of heroin onboard.

Mr. Hilliard's associations are presumed to have nothing to do with Mohamed Atta's choice to take flying lessons at his flight school.

"WELCOME TO TERRORLAND " The book written by Daniel Hopsicker Venice, Florida, where three of the four terrorist pilots learned to fly, is the biggest September 11 crime scene that wasn’t reduced to rubble. Yet it has until now received no serious scrutiny for what it might reveal about the nature of the 9/11 attack. Investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker went searching for evidence that Mohamed Atta and his Hamburg cadre received outside help while they were in the U.S., as authorities initially stated, from a shadowy ‘global network,’ or even from foreign governments.

What he found was a massive cover-up-in-progress in Florida designed to conceal the true story of what was going while Mohamed Atta and his Hamburg cadre conspirators made Venice, Florida their 'home away from home' base for a year and a half.

The book is packed with revelations, many of them stunning:

FBI Director Robert Mueller says the FBI doesn't know where Mohamed Atta was between January and April of 2001.

Strange. We do.

On morning of the 9/11 attack there was an attempt on the life of President George W. Bush at the hotel where he was staying in Sarasota, Florida by four Arab men...

Mohamed Atta had an American girlfriend, with whom he lived for two months in Venice, FL., who was intimidated into silence by the FBI...

Terrorists, strippers and mysterious German associates mingling together in wild booze and drug fueled party weekends in Key West...

The mysterious ‘money man’ behind the purchase of Huffman Aviation in Venice had his Lear jet seized at gunpoint by DEA agents, with 43 lbs. of heroin onboard... the same month Mohamed Atta arrived at his school.

Far from merely being negligent or asleep at the switch, the available evidence indicates the CIA was not just aware that hundreds of Arab ‘flight students’ began pouring into Southwest Florida in 1999, but was running the operation

Order the book from: "Welcome to Terrorland" Coming in February Click on this link.