1) This information in this piece is corroborated by no other source. I find it extremely difficult to believe that every new outlet in the world other than something called madcownews.com would "miss" such a story.
2) I am highly suspicious of reports of Atta's presence in the United States prior to June 2000. There are a number of these, and not one of them has panned out.
But the evidence now surfacing in Charlotte County strongly indicates that Atta and Al-Shehhi were in Punta Gorda as early as April of 2000, and began their training not in Venice but at a soon-to-be-bankrupt flight school thirty miles down the road in Punta Gorda called Professional Aviation, where the school's pupils became a focal point for the FBI's investigation.
I don't buy this at all. Not one other source has mentioned seeing the extremely memorable Atta being in Punta Gorda in April 2000. There are "Elvis sightings" of Atta all over America between June 2000 and September 2001, but nothing resembling the time and place of this report.
3) I have a big, big problem with the idea that Atta would violate operational security by sending inflammatory e-mails all over the country, even to defense contractors. I can't picture this. I do think that the reported e-mail friendship he had with a Muslim woman in Finland (who after 9/11 put an obituary for Atta in a Helsinki paper) could be possible. But not this.
Remember--except for Nawaq Alhazmi and Khalid Almidhar's time in San Diego in 1999, not one of the 9/11 hijackers ever set foot in a mosque while they were in the USA. The idea was to appear as un-Islamic as possible. ("We're on a mission," they told a motel manager. "A mission of Islam?" he asked. "Oh, no," they replied).
I never believed even a word of this article. Not one thing in it rings true.
With that said, there is at least a tiny bit of corroboration for this story. The article itself also appeared at http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/Hopsicker043002/hopsicker043002.html (on April 24, 2002).
Also, the e-mail address paradisehasaprice@hotmail.com does apparently exist; see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybermuslims/message/1052, a Yahoo Groups posting from Nov. 12, 2001.