If you recall, I linked to a story awhile back about Rudi Dekkers, the guy who ran, Huffman Aviation, the flight school in Sarasota, Florida where Mo Atta and another 9/11 hijacker learned to fly planes. He was busted in Texas for drug-smuggling.
You may also recall that during the time when the hijackers metriculated there one of Huffman's planes was busted in Orlando, Florida with 43 pounds of heroin.
Why, you may wonder, didn't the media touch the story about the 43 pounds of heroin? And why haven't they touched on Mr. Dekkers' current legal problems? You may wonder.
In the days and weeks after the 9/11 attack Rudi Dekkers was everywhere. He did more than 2000 interviews. It was Rudi Dekkers who told the world who the hijackers were, what they were doing, and what they were like. He did almost all of the heavy lifting providing the narrative about what the hijackers had been doing in the U.S.
Rudi Dekkers was on television more often than Larry King. Then, and for the next ten years, the mainstream media bought his patter hook line and sinker.
There were a few reporters who expressed skepticism. But they were local, with no national readership. One worked for an alternative weekly newspaper in Sarasota, and arrived on scene at Huffman Aviation on September 12, on the first day of the media frenzy.
In the Sept. 29, 2001 Sarasota Weekly Planet, reporter Rochelle Renford noted how often Dekkers’ story was changing.
“Wouldn’t it be reasonable to expect Rudi Dekkers to give the same information to every news outlet?” she asked. “Perhaps. But that was not the case. When Dekkers first appeared before the press on the day after the attack, this is what he said:
“He didn’t know the suspects. He wasn’t the one who took their money so he was unsure how they had paid for their training.
“He didn’t see their passports so he wasn’t sure where they were from. He denied having had many interactions with them at all.
“On Wednesday (the day after the attack) he told some reporters, including me, that his interaction with the two suspects came from a couple of brief conversations when he passed them in the halls,” Renford wrote. “He said his employees had dealt with their enrollment.”
“But by Sunday’s reports, Dekkers was serving up anecdotes about the two men, “ she continued. “He told one reporter: ‘He sat right there last year when he came to talk to me about taking lessons here.’”
"On the day after the attack a reporter from the New York Times asked Dekkers about reports that the two men (Atta and Al-Shehhi) were from Germany," Renford wrote. “Didn’t it strike you as odd that they were from Germany? They didn’t look German, did they?”
“Don’t tell me what people tell you,” Dekkers barked in response. “I have never heard that they’re from Germany. I have never heard that they speak German.”
“But Dekkers gave a different answer on Larry King Live. Now he did know where they were from… Dekkers now recalled that Atta told him he had come from Germany, he said. But when Dekkers, a Dutch native, began speaking to Atta in German, the Middle Eastern man just got up and walked out of his office. Dekkers said he found it odd."
“Whereas on Wednesday he’d blasted a reporter for asking about a German connection,” wrote Renford, “on Thursday he told me an anecdote about one of the suspects saying he was German.
“Dekkers wasn’t just remembering new details,” Renford concluded. “He was learning how to tell a story.”
The whole article is interesting. You might want to read it.
