What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?

March 7, 2007

A CounterPunch Special Investigation

High-Fivers and Art Student Spies

What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?

By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, an FBI bulletin known as a

BOLO -- "be on lookout" -- was issued with regard to three suspicious

men who that morning were seen leaving the New Jersey waterfront

minutes after the first plane hit World Trade Center 1. Law

enforcement officers across the New York-New Jersey area were warned

in the radio dispatch to watch for a "vehicle possibly related to New

York terrorist attack":

White, 2000 Chevrolet van with 'Urban Moving Systems'

sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ,

at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade

Center Three individuals with van were seen celebrating

after initial impact and subsequent explosion. FBI Newark

Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold

for prints and detain individuals.

At 3:56 p.m., twenty-five minutes after the issuance of the FBI BOLO,

officers with the East Rutherford Police Department stopped the

commercial moving van through a trace on the plates. According to the

police report, Officer Scott DeCarlo and Sgt. Dennis Rivelli

approached the stopped van, demanding that the driver exit the

vehicle. The driver, 23-year-old Sivan Kurzberg, refused and "was

asked several more times [but] appeared to be fumbling with a black

leather fanny pouch type of bag". With guns drawn, the police then

"physically removed" Kurzberg, while four other men -- two more men

had apparently joined the group since the morning -- were also removed

from the van, handcuffed, placed on the grass median and read their

Miranda rights.

They had not been told the reasons for their arrest. Yet, according to

DeCarlo's report, "this officer was told without question by the

driver [sivan Kurzberg],'We are Israeli. We are not your problem.Your

problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.'" Another

of the five Israelis, again without prompting, told Officer DeCarlo --

falsely -- that "we were on the West Side Highway in New York City

during the incident". From inside the vehicle the officers, who were

quickly joined by agents from the FBI, retrieved multiple passports

and $4,700 in cash stuffed in a sock. According to New Jersey's Bergen

Record, which on September 12 reported the arrest of the five

Israelis, an investigator high up in the Bergen County law enforcement

hierarchy stated that officers had also discovered in the vehicle

"maps of the city with certain places highlighted. It looked like

they're hooked in with this", the source told the Record, referring to

the 9/11 attacks. "It looked like they knew what was going to happen

when they were at Liberty State Park."

The five men were indeed Israeli citizens. They claimed to be in the

country working as movers for Urban Moving Systems Inc., which

maintained a warehouse and office in Weehawken, New Jersey. They were

held for 71 days in a federal detention center in Brooklyn, New York,

during which time they were repeatedly interrogated by FBI and CIA

counterterrorism teams, who referred to the men as the "high-fivers"

for their celebratory behavior on the New Jersey waterfront. Some were

placed in solitary confinement for at least forty days; some were

given as many as seven liedetector tests. One of the Israelis, Paul

Kurzberg, brother of Sivan, refused to take a lie-detector test for

ten weeks. Then he failed it.

Meanwhile, two days after the men were picked up, the owner of Urban

Moving Systems, Dominik Suter, a 31- year-old Israeli national,

abandoned his business and fled the United States for Israel. Suter's

departure was abrupt, leaving behind coffee cups, sandwiches, cell

phones and computers strewn on office tables and thousands of dollars

of goods in storage. Suter was later placed on the same FBI suspect

list as 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and other hijackers and

suspected al-Qaeda sympathizers, suggesting that U.S. authorities felt

Suter may have known something about the attacks. The suspicion, as

the investigation unfolded, was that the men working for Urban Moving

Systems were spies. Who exactly was handling them, and who or what

they were targeting, was as yet uncertain.

It was New York's venerable Jewish weekly The Forward that broke this

story in the spring of 2002, after months of footwork. The Forward

reported that the FBI had finally concluded that at least two of the

men were agents working for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence

agency, and that Urban Moving Systems, the ostensible employer of the

five Israelis, was a front operation. Two former CIA officers

confirmed this to me, noting that movers' vans are a common

intelligence cover. The Forward also noted that the Israeli government

itself admitted that the men were spies. A "former high-ranking

American intelligence official", who said he was "regularly briefed on

the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials", told

reporter Marc Perelman that after American authorities confronted

Jerusalem at the end of 2001, the Israeli government "acknowledged the

operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington".

Today, Perelman stands by his reporting. I asked him if his sources in

the Mossad denied the story. "Nobody stopped talking to me", he said.

In June 2002, ABC News' 20/20 followed up with its own investigation

into the matter, coming to the same conclusion as The Forward. Vincent

Cannistraro, former chief of operations for counterterrorism with the

CIA, told 20/20 that some of the names of the five men appeared as

hits in searches of an FBI national intelligence database. Cannistraro

told me that the question that most troubled FBI agents in the weeks

and months after 9/11 was whether the Israelis had arrived at the site

of their "celebration" with foreknowledge of the attack to come. From

the beginning, "the FBI investigation operated on the premise that the

Israelis had foreknowledge", according to Cannistraro. A second former

CIA counterterrorism officer who closely followed the case, but who

spoke on condition of anonymity, told me that investigators were

pursuing two theories. "One story was that [the Israelis] appeared at

Liberty State Park very quickly after the first plane hit. The other

was that they were at the park location already". Either way,

investigators wanted to know exactly what the men were expecting when

they got there.

Before such issues had been fully explored, however, the investigation

was shut down. Following what ABC News reported were "high-level

negotiations between Israeli and U.S. government officials", a

settlement was reached in the case of the five Urban Moving Systems

suspects. Intense political pressure apparently had been brought to

bear. The reputable Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported that by the last

week of October 2001, some six weeks after the men had been detained,

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and two unidentified

"prominent New York congressmen" were lobbying heavily for their

release. According to a source at ABC News close to the 20/20 report,

high-profile criminal lawyer Alan Dershowitz also stepped in as a

negotiator on behalf of the men to smooth out differences with the

U.S. government. (Dershowitz declined to comment for this article.)

And so, at the end of November 2001, for reasons that only noted they

had been working in the country illegally as movers, in violation of

their visas, the men were flown home to Israel.

Today, the crucial questions raised by this matter remain unanswered.

There is sufficient reason -- from news reports, statements by former

intelligence officials, an array of circumstantial evidence, and the

reported acknowledgment by the Israeli government -- to believe that

in the months before 9/11, Israel was running an active spy network

inside the United States, with Muslim extremists as the target. Given

Israel's concerns about Islamic terrorism as well as its long history

of spying on U.S. soil, this does not come entirely as a shock. What's

incendiary is the idea -- supported, though not proven, by several

pieces of evidence -- that the Israelis did learn something about 9/11

in advance but failed to share all of what they knew with American

officials. The questions are disturbing enough to warrant a

Congressional investigation.

Yet none of this information found its way into Congress's joint

committee report on the attacks, and it was not even tangentially

referenced in the nearly 600 pages of the 9/11 Commission's final

report. Nor would a single major media outlet track the revelations of

The Forward and ABC News to investigate further. "There weren't even

stories saying it was bullshit", says The Forward's Perelman.

"Honestly, I was surprised". Instead, the story disappeared into the

welter of anti-Israel 9/11 conspiracy theories.

It's no small boon to the U.S. government that the story of

9/11-related Israeli espionage has been thus relegated: the story

doesn't fit in the clean lines of the official narrative of the

attacks. It brings up concerns not only about Israel's obligation not

to spy inside the borders of the United States, its major benefactor,

but about its possible failure to have provided the U.S. adequate

warning of an impending devastating attack on American soil.

Furthermore, the available evidence undermines the carefully

cultivated image of sanctity that defines the U.S.- Israel

relationship. These are all factors that help explain the story's

disappearance, and they are compelling reasons to revisit it now.

Torpedoing the FBI Probe

All five future hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which rammed

the Pentagon, maintained addresses or were active within a six-mile

radius of towns associated with the Israelis employed at Urban Moving

Systems. Hudson and Bergen counties, the areas where the Israelis were

allegedly conducting surveillance, were a central staging ground for

the hijackers of Flight 77 and their fellow al-Qaeda operatives.

Mohammed Atta maintained a mail-drop address and visited friends in

northern New Jersey; his contacts there included Hani Hanjour, the

suicide pilot for Flight 77, and Majed Moqed, one of the strongmen who

backed Hanjour in the seizing of the plane. Could the Israelis, with

or without knowledge of the terrorists' plans, have been tracking the

men who were soon to hijack Flight 77?

In public statements, both the Israeli government and the FBI have

denied that the Urban Moving Systems men were involved in an

intelligence operation in the United States. "No evidence recovered

suggested any of these Israelis had prior knowledge of the 9/11

attack, and these Israelis are not suspected of working for Mossad",

FBI spokesman Jim Margolin told me. (The Israeli embassy did not

respond to questions for this article.) According to the source at ABC

News, FBI investigators chafed at the denials from their higher-ups.

"There is a lot of frustration inside the bureau about this case", the

source told me. "They feel the higher echelons torpedoed the

investigation into the Israeli New Jersey cell. Leads were not fully

investigated". Among those lost leads was the figure of Dominik Suter,

whom the U.S. authorities apparently never attempted to contact.

Intelligence expert and author James Bamford told me there was similar

frustration within the CIA: "People I've talked to at the CIA were

outraged at what was going on. They thought it was outrageous that

there hadn't been a real investigation, that the facts were hanging

out there without any conclusion."

However, what was "absolutely certain", according to Vincent

Cannistraro, was that the five Israelis formed part of a surveillance

network in the New York- New Jersey area. The network's purpose was to

track radical Islamic extremists and/or supporters of militant

Palestinian groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The former CIA

counterterrorism officer who spoke anonymously told me that FBI

investigators determined that the suspect Israelis were serving as

Arabic-speaking linguists "running technical operations" in northern

New Jersey's extensive Muslim communities. The former CIA officer said

the operations included taps on telephones, placement of microphones

in rooms and mobile surveillance. The source at ABC News agreed: "Our

conclusion was that they were Arab linguists involved in monitoring

operations, i.e., electronic surveillance. People at FBI concur with

this". The ABC News source added, "What we heard was that the Israelis

may have picked up chatter that something was going to happen on the

morning of 9/11".

The former CIA counterterrorism officer told me: "There was no

question but that [the order to close down the investigation] came

from the White House. It was immediately assumed at CIA headquarters

that this basically was going to be a cover-up so that the Israelis

would not be implicated in any way in 9/11. Bear in mind that this was

a political issue, not a law enforcement or intelligence issue. If

somebody says we don't want the Israelis implicated in this -- we know

that they've been spying the hell out of us, we know that they

possibly had information in advance of the attacks, but this would be

a political nightmare to deal with."

The Israeli "Art Student" Spies

There is a second piece of evidence that suggests Israeli operatives

were spying on al-Qaeda in the United States. It is writ in the

peculiar tale of the Israeli "art students", detailed by this reporter

for Salon.com in 2002, following the leaking of an internal memo

circulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration's Office of Security

Programs. The June 2001 memo, issued three months before the 9/11

attacks, reported that more than 120 young Israeli citizens, posing as

art students and peddling cheap paintings, had been repeatedly -- and

seemingly inexplicably -- attempting to penetrate DEA offices and

other law enforcement and Defense Department offices across the

country. The DEA report stated that the Israelis may have been engaged

in "an organized intelligence gathering activity", but to what end,

U.S. investigators, in June 2001, could not determine. The memo

briefly floated the possibility that the Israelis were engaged in

trafficking the drug ecstasy. According to the memo, "the most

activity [was] reported in the state of Florida" during the first half

of 2001, where the town of Hollywood appeared to be "a central point

for these individuals with several having addresses in this area".

In retrospect, the fact that a large number of "art students" operated

out of Hollywood is intriguing, to say the least. During 2001, the

city, just north of Miami, was a hotbed of al-Qaeda activity and

served as one of the chief staging grounds for the hijacking of the

World Trade Center planes and the Pennsylvania plane; it was home to

fifteen of the nineteen future hijackers, nine in Hollywood and six in

the surrounding area. Among the 120 suspected Israeli spies posing as

art students, more than thirty lived in the Hollywood area, ten in

Hollywood proper. As noted in the DEA report, many of these young men

and women had training as intelligence and electronic intercept

officers in the Israeli military -- training and experience far beyond

the compulsory service mandated by Israeli law. Their "traveling in

the U.S. selling art seem[ed] not to fit their background", according

to the DEA report.

One "art student" was a former Israeli military intelligence officer

named Hanan Serfaty, who rented two Hollywood apartments close to the

mail drop and apartment of Mohammed Atta and four other hijackers.

Serfaty was moving large amounts of cash: he carried bank slips

showing more than $100,000 deposited from December 2000 through the

first quarter of 2001; other bank slips showed withdrawals for about

$80,000 during the same period. Serfaty's apartments, serving as crash

pads for at least two other "art students", were located at 4220

Sheridan Street and 701 South 21st Avenue. Lead hijacker Mohammed

Atta's mail drop was at 3389 Sheridan Street--approximately 2,700 feet

from Serfaty's Sheridan Street apartment. Both Atta and Marwan

al-Shehhi, the suicide pilot on United Airlines Flight 175, which

smashed into World Trade Center 2, lived in a rented apartment at 1818

Jackson Street, some 1,800 feet from Serfaty's South 21st Avenue

apartment.

In fact, an improbable series of coincidences emerges from a close

reading of the 2001 DEA memo, the 9/11 Commission's staff statements

and final report, FBI and Justice Department watch lists, hijacker

timelines compiled by major media and statements by local, state and

federal law enforcement personnel. In at least six urban centers,

suspected Israeli spies and 9/11 hijackers and/or al-Qaeda-connected

suspects lived and operated near one another, in some cases less than

half a mile apart, for various periods during 2000-01 in the run-up to

the attacks. In addition to northern New Jersey and Hollywood,

Florida, these centers included Arlington and Fredericksburg,

Virginia; Atlanta; Oklahoma City; Los Angeles; and San Diego.

Israeli "art students" also lived close to terror suspects in and

around Dallas, Texas. A 25-year-old "art student" named Michael

Calmanovic, arrested and questioned by Texas-based DEA officers in

April 2001, maintained a mail drop at 3575 North Beltline Road, less

than a thousand feet from the 4045 North Beltline Road apartment of

Ahmed Khalefa, an FBI terror suspect. Dallas and its environs,

especially the town of Richardson, Texas, throbbed with "art student"

activity. Richardson is notable as the home of the Holy Land

Foundation, an Islamic charity designated as a terrorist funder by the

European Union and U.S. government in December 2001. Sources in 2002

told The Forward, in a report unrelated to the question of the "art

students", that "Israeli intelligence played a key role in helping the

Bush administration to crack down on Islamic charities suspected of

funneling money to terrorist groups, most notably the Richardson,

Texas-based Holy Land Foundation, last December [2001]".

It's plausible that the intelligence prompting the shutdown of the

Holy Land Foundation came from "art student" spies in the Richardson area.

Others among the "art students" had specific backgrounds in electronic

surveillance or military intelligence, or were associated with Israeli

wiretapping and surveillance firms, which prompted further concerns

among U.S. investigators. DEA agents described Michael Calmanovic, for

example, as "a recently discharged electronic intercept operator for

the Israeli military". Lior Baram, questioned near Hollywood, Fla., in

January 2001, said he had served two years in Israeli intelligence

"working with classified information". Hanan Serfaty, who maintained

the Hollywood apartments near Atta and his cohorts, served in the

Israeli military between the ages of 18 and 21. Serfaty refused to

disclose his activities between the ages of 21 and 24, including his

activities since arriving in the U.S.A. in 2000. The French daily Le

Monde meanwhile reported that six "art students" were apparently using

cell phones that had been purchased by a former Israeli vice consul in

the U.S.A.

Suspected Israeli spy Tomer Ben Dor, questioned at Dallas-Fort Worth

Airport in May 2001, worked for the Israeli wiretapping and electronic

eavesdropping company NICE Systems Ltd. (NICE Systems' American

subsidiary, NICE Systems Inc., is located in Rutherford, New Jersey,

not far from the East Rutherford site where the five Israeli "movers"

were arrested on the afternoon of September 11.) Ben Dor carried in

his luggage a print-out of a computer file that referred to "DEA

Groups". How he acquired information about so-called "DEA Groups" --

via, for example, his own employment with an Israeli wiretapping

company -- was never determined, according to DEA documents.

"Art student" Michal Gal, arrested by DEA investigators in Irving,

Texas, in the spring of 2001, was released on a $10,000 cash bond

posted by Ophir Baer, an employee of the Israeli telecommunications

software company Amdocs Inc., which provides phone-billing technology

to clients that include some of the largest phone companies in the

United States as well as U.S. government agencies. Amdocs, whose

executive board has been heavily stocked with retired and current

members of the Israeli government and military, has been investigated

at least twice in the last decade by U.S. authorities on charges of

espionage-related leaks of data that the company assured was secure.

(The company strenuously denies any wrong-doing.)

According to the former CIA counterterrorism officer with knowledge of

investigations into 9/11-related Israeli espionage, when law

enforcement officials examined the "art students" phenomenon, they

came to the tentative conclusion that "the Israelis likely had a huge

spy operation in the U.S. and that they had succeeded in identifying a

number of the hijackers". The German daily Die Zeit reached the same

conclusion in 2002, reporting that "Mossad agents in the U.S. were in

all probability surveilling at least four of the 19 hijackers". The

Fox News Channel also reported that U.S. investigators suspected that

Israelis were spying on Muslim militants in the United States. "There

is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks,

but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered

intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it", Fox

correspondent Carl Cameron reported in a December 2001 series that was

the first major expos

- wrote:

<pages of drivel snipped>

Zzzzzzzz...

Someone, please wake me up when "-" has something worthwhile to say.

Thanks!

--

Notan

Notan <notan@ddressthatcanbespammed> wrote:

> Someone, please wake me up when "-" has something worthwhile to say.

Well, Notan, what did you just say that was worthwhile to read ?

Do you have any qualifications, by the way, or are you just spouting ?

- regards

- jb

------------------------------------------------------

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http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=11797

------------------------------------------------------

To get to the other side?

"-" <jazzerciser@hotmail.com> wrote in message

news:45f4c02b.2246968610@news.isomedia.com...

>

> March 7, 2007

> A CounterPunch Special Investigation

>

>

> High-Fivers and Art Student Spies

> What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?

>

> By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

>

>

> On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, an FBI bulletin known as a

> BOLO -- "be on lookout" -- was issued with regard to three suspicious

> men who that morning were seen leaving the New Jersey waterfront

> minutes after the first plane hit World Trade Center 1. Law

> enforcement officers across the New York-New Jersey area were warned

> in the radio dispatch to watch for a "vehicle possibly related to New

> York terrorist attack":

>

> White, 2000 Chevrolet van with 'Urban Moving Systems'

> sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ,

> at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade

> Center Three individuals with van were seen celebrating

> after initial impact and subsequent explosion. FBI Newark

> Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold

> for prints and detain individuals.

>

> At 3:56 p.m., twenty-five minutes after the issuance of the FBI BOLO,

> officers with the East Rutherford Police Department stopped the

> commercial moving van through a trace on the plates. According to the

> police report, Officer Scott DeCarlo and Sgt. Dennis Rivelli

> approached the stopped van, demanding that the driver exit the

> vehicle. The driver, 23-year-old Sivan Kurzberg, refused and "was

> asked several more times [but] appeared to be fumbling with a black

> leather fanny pouch type of bag". With guns drawn, the police then

> "physically removed" Kurzberg, while four other men -- two more men

> had apparently joined the group since the morning -- were also removed

> from the van, handcuffed, placed on the grass median and read their

> Miranda rights.

>

> They had not been told the reasons for their arrest. Yet, according to

> DeCarlo's report, "this officer was told without question by the

> driver [sivan Kurzberg],'We are Israeli. We are not your problem.Your

> problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.'" Another

> of the five Israelis, again without prompting, told Officer DeCarlo --

> falsely -- that "we were on the West Side Highway in New York City

> during the incident". From inside the vehicle the officers, who were

> quickly joined by agents from the FBI, retrieved multiple passports

> and $4,700 in cash stuffed in a sock. According to New Jersey's Bergen

> Record, which on September 12 reported the arrest of the five

> Israelis, an investigator high up in the Bergen County law enforcement

> hierarchy stated that officers had also discovered in the vehicle

> "maps of the city with certain places highlighted. It looked like

> they're hooked in with this", the source told the Record, referring to

> the 9/11 attacks. "It looked like they knew what was going to happen

> when they were at Liberty State Park."

>

> The five men were indeed Israeli citizens. They claimed to be in the

> country working as movers for Urban Moving Systems Inc., which

> maintained a warehouse and office in Weehawken, New Jersey. They were

> held for 71 days in a federal detention center in Brooklyn, New York,

> during which time they were repeatedly interrogated by FBI and CIA

> counterterrorism teams, who referred to the men as the "high-fivers"

> for their celebratory behavior on the New Jersey waterfront. Some were

> placed in solitary confinement for at least forty days; some were

> given as many as seven liedetector tests. One of the Israelis, Paul

> Kurzberg, brother of Sivan, refused to take a lie-detector test for

> ten weeks. Then he failed it.

>

> Meanwhile, two days after the men were picked up, the owner of Urban

> Moving Systems, Dominik Suter, a 31- year-old Israeli national,

> abandoned his business and fled the United States for Israel. Suter's

> departure was abrupt, leaving behind coffee cups, sandwiches, cell

> phones and computers strewn on office tables and thousands of dollars

> of goods in storage. Suter was later placed on the same FBI suspect

> list as 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and other hijackers and

> suspected al-Qaeda sympathizers, suggesting that U.S. authorities felt

> Suter may have known something about the attacks. The suspicion, as

> the investigation unfolded, was that the men working for Urban Moving

> Systems were spies. Who exactly was handling them, and who or what

> they were targeting, was as yet uncertain.

>

> It was New York's venerable Jewish weekly The Forward that broke this

> story in the spring of 2002, after months of footwork. The Forward

> reported that the FBI had finally concluded that at least two of the

> men were agents working for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence

> agency, and that Urban Moving Systems, the ostensible employer of the

> five Israelis, was a front operation. Two former CIA officers

> confirmed this to me, noting that movers' vans are a common

> intelligence cover. The Forward also noted that the Israeli government

> itself admitted that the men were spies. A "former high-ranking

> American intelligence official", who said he was "regularly briefed on

> the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials", told

> reporter Marc Perelman that after American authorities confronted

> Jerusalem at the end of 2001, the Israeli government "acknowledged the

> operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington".

> Today, Perelman stands by his reporting. I asked him if his sources in

> the Mossad denied the story. "Nobody stopped talking to me", he said.

>

> In June 2002, ABC News' 20/20 followed up with its own investigation

> into the matter, coming to the same conclusion as The Forward. Vincent

> Cannistraro, former chief of operations for counterterrorism with the

> CIA, told 20/20 that some of the names of the five men appeared as

> hits in searches of an FBI national intelligence database. Cannistraro

> told me that the question that most troubled FBI agents in the weeks

> and months after 9/11 was whether the Israelis had arrived at the site

> of their "celebration" with foreknowledge of the attack to come. From

> the beginning, "the FBI investigation operated on the premise that the

> Israelis had foreknowledge", according to Cannistraro. A second former

> CIA counterterrorism officer who closely followed the case, but who

> spoke on condition of anonymity, told me that investigators were

> pursuing two theories. "One story was that [the Israelis] appeared at

> Liberty State Park very quickly after the first plane hit. The other

> was that they were at the park location already". Either way,

> investigators wanted to know exactly what the men were expecting when

> they got there.

>

> Before such issues had been fully explored, however, the investigation

> was shut down. Following what ABC News reported were "high-level

> negotiations between Israeli and U.S. government officials", a

> settlement was reached in the case of the five Urban Moving Systems

> suspects. Intense political pressure apparently had been brought to

> bear. The reputable Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported that by the last

> week of October 2001, some six weeks after the men had been detained,

> Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and two unidentified

> "prominent New York congressmen" were lobbying heavily for their

> release. According to a source at ABC News close to the 20/20 report,

> high-profile criminal lawyer Alan Dershowitz also stepped in as a

> negotiator on behalf of the men to smooth out differences with the

> U.S. government. (Dershowitz declined to comment for this article.)

> And so, at the end of November 2001, for reasons that only noted they

> had been working in the country illegally as movers, in violation of

> their visas, the men were flown home to Israel.

>

> Today, the crucial questions raised by this matter remain unanswered.

> There is sufficient reason -- from news reports, statements by former

> intelligence officials, an array of circumstantial evidence, and the

> reported acknowledgment by the Israeli government -- to believe that

> in the months before 9/11, Israel was running an active spy network

> inside the United States, with Muslim extremists as the target. Given

> Israel's concerns about Islamic terrorism as well as its long history

> of spying on U.S. soil, this does not come entirely as a shock. What's

> incendiary is the idea -- supported, though not proven, by several

> pieces of evidence -- that the Israelis did learn something about 9/11

> in advance but failed to share all of what they knew with American

> officials. The questions are disturbing enough to warrant a

> Congressional investigation.

>

> Yet none of this information found its way into Congress's joint

> committee report on the attacks, and it was not even tangentially

> referenced in the nearly 600 pages of the 9/11 Commission's final

> report. Nor would a single major media outlet track the revelations of

> The Forward and ABC News to investigate further. "There weren't even

> stories saying it was bullshit", says The Forward's Perelman.

> "Honestly, I was surprised". Instead, the story disappeared into the

> welter of anti-Israel 9/11 conspiracy theories.

>

> It's no small boon to the U.S. government that the story of

> 9/11-related Israeli espionage has been thus relegated: the story

> doesn't fit in the clean lines of the official narrative of the

> attacks. It brings up concerns not only about Israel's obligation not

> to spy inside the borders of the United States, its major benefactor,

> but about its possible failure to have provided the U.S. adequate

> warning of an impending devastating attack on American soil.

> Furthermore, the available evidence undermines the carefully

> cultivated image of sanctity that defines the U.S.- Israel

> relationship. These are all factors that help explain the story's

> disappearance, and they are compelling reasons to revisit it now.

>

>

>

> Torpedoing the FBI Probe

>

> All five future hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which rammed

> the Pentagon, maintained addresses or were active within a six-mile

> radius of towns associated with the Israelis employed at Urban Moving

> Systems. Hudson and Bergen counties, the areas where the Israelis were

> allegedly conducting surveillance, were a central staging ground for

> the hijackers of Flight 77 and their fellow al-Qaeda operatives.

> Mohammed Atta maintained a mail-drop address and visited friends in

> northern New Jersey; his contacts there included Hani Hanjour, the

> suicide pilot for Flight 77, and Majed Moqed, one of the strongmen who

> backed Hanjour in the seizing of the plane. Could the Israelis, with

> or without knowledge of the terrorists' plans, have been tracking the

> men who were soon to hijack Flight 77?

>

> In public statements, both the Israeli government and the FBI have

> denied that the Urban Moving Systems men were involved in an

> intelligence operation in the United States. "No evidence recovered

> suggested any of these Israelis had prior knowledge of the 9/11

> attack, and these Israelis are not suspected of working for Mossad",

> FBI spokesman Jim Margolin told me. (The Israeli embassy did not

> respond to questions for this article.) According to the source at ABC

> News, FBI investigators chafed at the denials from their higher-ups.

> "There is a lot of frustration inside the bureau about this case", the

> source told me. "They feel the higher echelons torpedoed the

> investigation into the Israeli New Jersey cell. Leads were not fully

> investigated". Among those lost leads was the figure of Dominik Suter,

> whom the U.S. authorities apparently never attempted to contact.

> Intelligence expert and author James Bamford told me there was similar

> frustration within the CIA: "People I've talked to at the CIA were

> outraged at what was going on. They thought it was outrageous that

> there hadn't been a real investigation, that the facts were hanging

> out there without any conclusion."

>

> However, what was "absolutely certain", according to Vincent

> Cannistraro, was that the five Israelis formed part of a surveillance

> network in the New York- New Jersey area. The network's purpose was to

> track radical Islamic extremists and/or supporters of militant

> Palestinian groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The former CIA

> counterterrorism officer who spoke anonymously told me that FBI

> investigators determined that the suspect Israelis were serving as

> Arabic-speaking linguists "running technical operations" in northern

> New Jersey's extensive Muslim communities. The former CIA officer said

> the operations included taps on telephones, placement of microphones

> in rooms and mobile surveillance. The source at ABC News agreed: "Our

> conclusion was that they were Arab linguists involved in monitoring

> operations, i.e., electronic surveillance. People at FBI concur with

> this". The ABC News source added, "What we heard was that the Israelis

> may have picked up chatter that something was going to happen on the

> morning of 9/11".

>

> The former CIA counterterrorism officer told me: "There was no

> question but that [the order to close down the investigation] came

> from the White House. It was immediately assumed at CIA headquarters

> that this basically was going to be a cover-up so that the Israelis

> would not be implicated in any way in 9/11. Bear in mind that this was

> a political issue, not a law enforcement or intelligence issue. If

> somebody says we don't want the Israelis implicated in this -- we know

> that they've been spying the hell out of us, we know that they

> possibly had information in advance of the attacks, but this would be

> a political nightmare to deal with."

>

>

>

> The Israeli "Art Student" Spies

>

> There is a second piece of evidence that suggests Israeli operatives

> were spying on al-Qaeda in the United States. It is writ in the

> peculiar tale of the Israeli "art students", detailed by this reporter

> for Salon.com in 2002, following the leaking of an internal memo

> circulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration's Office of Security

> Programs. The June 2001 memo, issued three months before the 9/11

> attacks, reported that more than 120 young Israeli citizens, posing as

> art students and peddling cheap paintings, had been repeatedly -- and

> seemingly inexplicably -- attempting to penetrate DEA offices and

> other law enforcement and Defense Department offices across the

> country. The DEA report stated that the Israelis may have been engaged

> in "an organized intelligence gathering activity", but to what end,

> U.S. investigators, in June 2001, could not determine. The memo

> briefly floated the possibility that the Israelis were engaged in

> trafficking the drug ecstasy. According to the memo, "the most

> activity [was] reported in the state of Florida" during the first half

> of 2001, where the town of Hollywood appeared to be "a central point

> for these individuals with several having addresses in this area".

>

> In retrospect, the fact that a large number of "art students" operated

> out of Hollywood is intriguing, to say the least. During 2001, the

> city, just north of Miami, was a hotbed of al-Qaeda activity and

> served as one of the chief staging grounds for the hijacking of the

> World Trade Center planes and the Pennsylvania plane; it was home to

> fifteen of the nineteen future hijackers, nine in Hollywood and six in

> the surrounding area. Among the 120 suspected Israeli spies posing as

> art students, more than thirty lived in the Hollywood area, ten in

> Hollywood proper. As noted in the DEA report, many of these young men

> and women had training as intelligence and electronic intercept

> officers in the Israeli military -- training and experience far beyond

> the compulsory service mandated by Israeli law. Their "traveling in

> the U.S. selling art seem[ed] not to fit their background", according

> to the DEA report.

>

> One "art student" was a former Israeli military intelligence officer

> named Hanan Serfaty, who rented two Hollywood apartments close to the

> mail drop and apartment of Mohammed Atta and four other hijackers.

> Serfaty was moving large amounts of cash: he carried bank slips

> showing more than $100,000 deposited from December 2000 through the

> first quarter of 2001; other bank slips showed withdrawals for about

> $80,000 during the same period. Serfaty's apartments, serving as crash

> pads for at least two other "art students", were located at 4220

> Sheridan Street and 701 South 21st Avenue. Lead hijacker Mohammed

> Atta's mail drop was at 3389 Sheridan Street--approximately 2,700 feet

> from Serfaty's Sheridan Street apartment. Both Atta and Marwan

> al-Shehhi, the suicide pilot on United Airlines Flight 175, which

> smashed into World Trade Center 2, lived in a rented apartment at 1818

> Jackson Street, some 1,800 feet from Serfaty's South 21st Avenue

> apartment.

>

> In fact, an improbable series of coincidences emerges from a close

> reading of the 2001 DEA memo, the 9/11 Commission's staff statements

> and final report, FBI and Justice Department watch lists, hijacker

> timelines compiled by major media and statements by local, state and

> federal law enforcement personnel. In at least six urban centers,

> suspected Israeli spies and 9/11 hijackers and/or al-Qaeda-connected

> suspects lived and operated near one another, in some cases less than

> half a mile apart, for various periods during 2000-01 in the run-up to

> the attacks. In addition to northern New Jersey and Hollywood,

> Florida, these centers included Arlington and Fredericksburg,

> Virginia; Atlanta; Oklahoma City; Los Angeles; and San Diego.

>

> Israeli "art students" also lived close to terror suspects in and

> around Dallas, Texas. A 25-year-old "art student" named Michael

> Calmanovic, arrested and questioned by Texas-based DEA officers in

> April 2001, maintained a mail drop at 3575 North Beltline Road, less

> than a thousand feet from the 4045 North Beltline Road apartment of

> Ahmed Khalefa, an FBI terror suspect. Dallas and its environs,

> especially the town of Richardson, Texas, throbbed with "art student"

> activity. Richardson is notable as the home of the Holy Land

> Foundation, an Islamic charity designated as a terrorist funder by the

> European Union and U.S. government in December 2001. Sources in 2002

> told The Forward, in a report unrelated to the question of the "art

> students", that "Israeli intelligence played a key role in helping the

> Bush administration to crack down on Islamic charities suspected of

> funneling money to terrorist groups, most notably the Richardson,

> Texas-based Holy Land Foundation, last December [2001]".

>

> It's plausible that the intelligence prompting the shutdown of the

> Holy Land Foundation came from "art student" spies in the Richardson area.

>

> Others among the "art students" had specific backgrounds in electronic

> surveillance or military intelligence, or were associated with Israeli

> wiretapping and surveillance firms, which prompted further concerns

> among U.S. investigators. DEA agents described Michael Calmanovic, for

> example, as "a recently discharged electronic intercept operator for

> the Israeli military". Lior Baram, questioned near Hollywood, Fla., in

> January 2001, said he had served two years in Israeli intelligence

> "working with classified information". Hanan Serfaty, who maintained

> the Hollywood apartments near Atta and his cohorts, served in the

> Israeli military between the ages of 18 and 21. Serfaty refused to

> disclose his activities between the ages of 21 and 24, including his

> activities since arriving in the U.S.A. in 2000. The French daily Le

> Monde meanwhile reported that six "art students" were apparently using

> cell phones that had been purchased by a former Israeli vice consul in

> the U.S.A.

>

> Suspected Israeli spy Tomer Ben Dor, questioned at Dallas-Fort Worth

> Airport in May 2001, worked for the Israeli wiretapping and electronic

> eavesdropping company NICE Systems Ltd. (NICE Systems' American

> subsidiary, NICE Systems Inc., is located in Rutherford, New Jersey,

> not far from the East Rutherford site where the five Israeli "movers"

> were arrested on the afternoon of September 11.) Ben Dor carried in

> his luggage a print-out of a computer file that referred to "DEA

> Groups". How he acquired information about so-called "DEA Groups" --

> via, for example, his own employment with an Israeli wiretapping

> company -- was never determined, according to DEA documents.

>

> "Art student" Michal Gal, arrested by DEA investigators in Irving,

> Texas, in the spring of 2001, was released on a $10,000 cash bond

> posted by Ophir Baer, an employee of the Israeli telecommunications

> software company Amdocs Inc., which provides phone-billing technology

> to clients that include some of the largest phone companies in the

> United States as well as U.S. government agencies. Amdocs, whose

> executive board has been heavily stocked with retired and current

> members of the Israeli government and military, has been investigated

> at least twice in the last decade by U.S. authorities on charges of

> espionage-related leaks of data that the company assured was secure.

> (The company strenuously denies any wrong-doing.)

>

> According to the former CIA counterterrorism officer with knowledge of

> investigations into 9/11-related Israeli espionage, when law

> enforcement officials examined the "art students" phenomenon, they

> came to the tentative conclusion that "the Israelis likely had a huge

> spy operation in the U.S. and that they had succeeded in identifying a

> number of the hijackers". The German daily Die Zeit reached the same

> conclusion in 2002, reporting that "Mossad agents in the U.S. were in

> all probability surveilling at least four of the 19 hijackers". The

> Fox News Channel also reported that U.S. investigators suspected that

> Israelis were spying on Muslim militants in the United States. "There

> is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks,

> but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered

> intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it", Fox

> correspondent Carl Cameron reported in a December 2001 series that was

> the first major expos, of allegations of 9/11-related Israeli

> espionage. "A highly placed investigator said there are 'tie-ins'. But

> when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying,

> 'evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell

> you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified

> information.'"

>

> One element of the allegations has never been clearly understood: if

> the "art students" were indeed spies targeting Muslim extremists that

> included al-Qaeda, why would they also be surveilling DEA agents in

> such a compromising manner? Why, in other words, would foreign spies

> bumble into federal offices by the scores and risk exposing their

> operation? An explanation is that a number of the art students were,

> in fact, young Israelis engaged in a mere art scam and unknowingly

> provided cover for real spies. Investigative journalist John Sugg, who

> as senior editor for the Creative Loafing newspaper chain reported on

> the "art students" in 2002, told me that investigators he spoke to

> within FBI felt the "art student" ring functioned as a wide-ranging

> cover that was counterintuitive in its obviousness. DEA investigators,

> for example, uncovered evidence connecting the Israeli "art students"

> to known ecstasy trafficking operations in New York and Florida. This

> was, according to Sugg, planted information. "The explanation was that

> when our FBI guys started getting interested in these folks [the art

> students] -- when they got too close to what the real purpose was --

> the Israelis threw in an ecstasy angle", Sugg told me. "The argument

> being that if our guys thought the Israelis were involved in a

> smuggling ring, then they wouldn't see the real purpose of the

> operation". Sugg, who is writing a book that explores the tale of the

> "art students", told me that several sources within the FBI, and at

> least one source formerly with Israeli intelligence, suggested that

> "the bumbling aspect of the art student thing was intentional."

>

> When I reported on the matter for Salon.com in 2002, a veteran U.S.

> intelligence operative with experience subcontracting both for the CIA

> and the NSA suggested a similar possibility. "It was a noisy

> operation", the veteran intelligence operative said. The operative

> referred me to the film Victor, Victoria. "It was about a woman

> playing a man playing a woman. Perhaps you should think about this

> from that aspect and ask yourself if you wanted to have something that

> was in your face, that didn't make sense, that couldn't possibly be

> them". The intelligence operative added, "Think of it this way: how

> could the experts think this could actually be something of any value?

> Wouldn't they dismiss what they were seeing?" U.S. and Israeli

> officials, dismissing charges of espionage as an "urban myth", have

> publicly claimed that the Israeli "art students" were guilty only of

> working on U.S. soil without proper credentials. The stern denials

> issued by the Justice Department were widely publicized in the

> Washington Post and elsewhere, and the endnote from officialdom and in

> establishment media by the spring of 2002 was that the "art students"

> had been rounded up and deported simply because of harmless visa

> violations. The FBI, for its part, refused to confirm or deny the "art

> students" espionage story. "Regarding FBI investigations into Israeli

> art students", spokesman Jim Margolin told me, "the FBI cannot comment

> on any of those investigations." As with the New Jersey Israelis, the

> investigation into the Israeli "art students" appears to have been

> halted by orders from on high. The veteran CIA/NSA intelligence

> operative told me in 2002 that there was "a great press to discredit

> the story, discredit the connections, prevent [investigators] from

> going any further. People were told to stand down. You name the

> agency, they were told to stand down". The operative added, "People

> who were perceived to be gumshoes on [this matter] suddenly found

> themselves hammered from all different directions. The interest from

> the middle bureaucracy was not that there had been a security breach

> but that someone had bothered to investigate the breach. That was

> where the terror was".

>

>

> Choking off the press coverage

>

> There was similar pressure brought against the media venues that

> ventured to report out the allegations of 9/11- related Israeli

> espionage. A former ABC News employee high up in the network newsroom

> told me that when ABC News ran its June 2002 expos, on the celebratory

> New Jersey Israelis, "Enormous pressure was brought to bear by

> pro-Israeli organizations"--and this pressure began months before the

> piece was even close to airing. The source said that ABC News

> colleagues wondered, "how they [the pro-Israel organizations] found

> out we were doing the story. Pro- Israeli people were calling the

> president of ABC News. Barbara Walters was getting bombarded by calls.

> The story was a hard sell but ABC News came through the management

> insulated [reporters] from the pressure".

>

> The experience of Carl Cameron, chief Washington correspondent at Fox

> News Channel and the first mainstream U.S. reporter to present the

> allegations of Israeli surveillance of the 9/11 hijackers, was perhaps

> more typical, both in its particulars and aftermath. The attack

> against Cameron and Fox News was spearheaded by a pro-Israel lobby

> group called the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in

> America (CAMERA), which operated in tandem with the two most highly

> visible powerhouse Israel lobbyists, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)

> and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (itself currently

> embroiled in a spy scandal connected to the Defense Department and

> Israeli Embassy). "CAMERA pep- pered the shit out of us", Carl Cameron

> told me in 2002, referring to an e-mail bombardment that eventually

> crashed the Fox News.com servers. Cameron himself received 700 pages

> of almost identical e-mail messages from hundreds of citizens (though

> he suspected these were spam identities). CAMERA spokesman Alex

> Safian later told me that Cameron's upbringing in Iran, where his

> father traveled as an archeologist, had rendered the reporter "very

> sympathetic to the Arab side". Safian added, "I think Cameron,

> personally, has a thing about Israel"--coded language implying that

> Cameron was an anti-Semite. Cameron was outraged at the accusation.

>

> According to a source at Fox News Channel, the president of the ADL,

> Abraham Foxman, telephoned executives at Fox News' parent, News Corp.,

> to demand a sit-down in the wake of the Cameron reportage. The source

> said that Foxman told the News Corp. executives, "Look, you guys have

> generally been pretty fair to Israel. What are you doing putting this

> stuff out there? You're killing us". The Fox News source continued,

> "As good old boys will do over coffee in Manhattan, it was like, well,

> what can we do about this? Finally, Fox News said, 'Stop the

> e-mailing. Stop slamming us. Stop being in our face, and we'll stop

> being in your face--by way of taking our story down off the web. We

> will not retract it; we will not disavow it; we stand by it. But we

> will at least take it off the web.'" Following this meeting, within

> four days of the posting of Cameron's series on

>

> Fox News.com, the transcripts disappeared, replaced by the message,

> "This story no longer exists".

>

>

>

> What did Mossad know and tell the U.S.?

>

> Whether or not Israeli spies had detailed foreknowledge of the 9/11

> attacks, the Israeli authorities knew enough to warn the U.S.

> government in the summer of 2001 that an attack was on the horizon.

> The British Sunday Telegraph reported on September 16, 2001, that two

> senior agents with the Mossad were dispatched to Washington in August

> 2001 "to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many

> as 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation". The Telegraph

> quoted a "senior Israeli security official" as saying the Mossad

> experts had "no specific information about what was being planned".

> Still, the official told the Telegraph, the Mossad contacts had

> "linked the plot to Osama bin Laden". Likewise, Die Zeit correspondent

> Oliver Schr"m reported that on August 23, 2001, the Mossad "handed its

> American counterpart a list of names of terrorists who were staying in

> the U.S. and were presumably planning to launch an attack in the

> foreseeable future". Fox News' Carl Cameron, in May 2002, also

> reported warnings by Israel: "Based on its own intelligence, the

> Israeli government provided 'general' information to the United States

> in the second week of August that an al-Qaeda attack was imminent".

> The U.S. government later claimed these warnings were not specific

> enough to allow any mitigating action to be taken. Mossad expert

> Gordon Thomas, author of Gideon's Spies, says German intelligence

> sources told him that as late as August 2001 Israeli spies in the

> United States had made surveillance contacts with "known supporters of

> bin Laden in the U.S.A. It was those surveillance contacts that later

> raised the question: how much prior knowledge did Mossad have and at

> what stage?"

>

> According to Die Zeit, the Mossad did provide the U.S. government with

> the names of suspected terrorists Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf

> al-Hazmi, who would eventually hijack the Pentagon plane. It is worth

> noting that Mihdhar and Hazmi were among the hijackers who operated in

> close proximity to Israeli "art students" in Hollywood, Florida, and

> to the Urban Moving Systems Israelis in northern New Jersey. Moreover,

> Hazmi and at least three "art students" visited Oklahoma City on

> almost the same dates, from April 1 through April 4, 2001. On August

> 24, 2001, a day after the Mossad's briefing, Mihdhar and Hazmi were

> placed by the CIA on a terrorist watch list; additionally, it was only

> after the Mossad warning, as reported by Die Zeit, that the CIA, on

> August 27, informed the FBI of the presence of the two terrorists. But

> by then the cell was already in hiding, preparing for attack.

>

> The CIA, along with the 9/11 Commission in its adoption of the CIA

> story, claims that Mihdhar and Hazmi were placed on the watch list

> solely due to the agency's own efforts, with no help from Mossad.

> Their explanation of how the pair came to be placed on the watch list,

> however, is far from credible and may have served as a cover story to

> obscure the Mossad briefing [see Ketcham's sidebar story -- "The Kuala

> Lumpur Deceit"]. This brings up the possibility that the CIA may have

> known about the existence of the alleged Israeli agents and their

> mission, but sought, naturally, to keep it quiet. A second, more

> troubling scenario, is that the CIA may have subcontracted to Mossad,

> given that the agency was both prohibited by law from conducting

> intelligence operations on U.S. soil, and lacked a pool of competent

> Arabic-fluent field officers. In such a scenario, the CIA would either

> have worked actively with the Israelis or quietly abetted an

> independent operation on U.S. soil. In his 9/11 investigative book,

> The Looming Tower, author Lawrence Wright notes that FBI

> counterterrorism agents, infuriated at the CIA's failure to fully

> share information about Mihdhar and Hazmi, speculated that "the agency

> was shielding Mihdhar and Hazmi because it hoped to recruit them". The

> two al-Qaeda men, Wright notes, "must have seemed like attractive

> opportunities; however, once they entered the United States they were

> the province of the FBI..." Wright further observes that the CIA's

> reticence to share its information was due to a fear "that

> prosecutions resulting from specific intelligence might compromise its

> relationship with foreign services". When in the spring of 2002 the

> scenario of CIA's domestic subcontracting to foreign intelligence was

> posed to the veteran CIA/NSA intelligence operative, with whom I spoke

> extensively, the operative didn't reject it out of hand. The operative

> noted that in recent years the CIA's human intelligence assets, known

> as "humint" -- spooks on the ground who conduct surveillances, make

> contacts, and infiltrate the enemy -- had been "eviscerated" in favor

> of the NSA's far less perilous "sigint", or signals intelligence

> program, the remote interception of electronic communications. As a

> result, "U.S. intelligence finds itself going back to sources that you

> may not necessarily like to go back to, but are required to", the

> veteran intelligence operative said. "We don't like the fact, but our

> humint structures are gone. Israeli intel's humint is as strong as

> ever. If you have an intel gap, those gaps are not closed overnight.

> It takes years and years of diligent work, a high degree of security,

> talented and dedicated people, willing management and a steady hand.

> It is not a fun business, and it's certainly not one without its

> dangers. If you lose that capability, well organizations find

> themselves having to make a pact with the devil. The problem [in U.S.

> intel] is very great".

>

> If such an understanding did exist between CIA and Mossad with regard

> to al-Qaeda's U.S. operatives, the complicity would explain a number

> of oddities: it would explain the CIA's nearly incoherent, and perhaps

> purposely deceptive, reconstruction of events as to how Mihdhar and

> Hazmi joined the watch list; it might even explain the apparent

> brazenness of the Israeli New Jersey cell celebrating on the morning

> of 9/11 (protected under the CIA wing, they were free to behave as

> they pleased). It would also explain the assertion in one of the

> leading Israeli dailies, Yedioth Ahronoth, that in the months prior to

> 9/11, when the Israeli "art students" were being identified and

> rounded up, the CIA "actively promoted their expulsion". The

> implication in the Yedioth Ahronoth article was that the CIA was

> simply being careless, not trying to spirit the Israelis safely out of

> the country. At this point we cannot be certain.

>

> Israeli spying against the U.S. is of course hotly denied by both

> governments. In 2002, responding to my own questions about the "art

> students", Israeli embassy spokesman Mark Regev issued a blanket

> denial. "Israel does not spy on the United States", Regev told me. The

> pronouncements from officialdom are strictly pro forma, as it is no

> secret that spying by Israel on the United States has been

> wide-ranging and unabashed. A 1996 General Accounting Office report,

> for example, found that Israel "conducts the most aggressive espionage

> operation against the United States of any U.S. ally". More recently,

> a former intelligence official told the Los Angeles Times in 2004 that

> "[t]here is a huge, aggressive, ongoing set of Israeli activities

> directed against the United States". It is also routine that Israeli

> spying is ignored or downplayed by the U.S. government (the case of

> convicted spy Jonathan Pollard, sentenced to life in prison in 1986,

> is a dramatic exception). According to the American Prospect, over the

> last 20 years at least six sealed indictments have been issued against

> individuals allegedly spying "on Israel's behalf", but the cases were

> resolved "through diplomatic and intelligence channels" rather than a

> public airing in the courts. Career Justice Department and

> intelligence officials who track Israeli espionage told the Prospect

> of "long-standing frustration among investigators and prosecutors who

> feel that cases that could have been made successfully against Israeli

> spies were never brought to trial, or that the investigations were

> shut down prematurely".

>

>

>

> The Questions That Await Answers

>

> Remarkably, the Urban Moving Systems Israelis, when interrogated by

> the FBI, explained their motives for "celebration" on the New Jersey

> waterfront a celebration that consisted of cheering, smiling, shooting

> film with still and video cameras and, according to the FBI,

> "high-fiving" -- in the Machiavellian light of geopolitics. "Their

> explanation of why they were happy", FBI spokesman Margolin told me,

> "was that the United States would now have to commit itself to

> fighting [Middle East] terrorism, that Americans would have an

> understanding and empathy for Israel's circumstances, and that the

> attacks were ultimately a good thing for Israel". When reporters on

> the morning of 9/11 asked former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin

> Netanyahu about the effect the attacks would have on Israeli- American

> relations, he responded with a similar gut analysis: "It's very good",

> he remarked. Then he amended the statement: "Well, not very good, but

> it will generate immediate sympathy [for Israel from Americans]".

>

> What is perhaps most damning is that the Israelis' celebration on the

> New Jersey waterfront occurred in the first sixteen minutes after the

> initial crash, when no one was aware this was a terrorist attack. In

> other words, from the time the first plane hit the north tower, at

> 8:46 a.m., to the time the second plane hit the south tower, at 9:02

> a.m., the overwhelming assumption of news outlets and government

> officials was that the plane's impact was simply a terrible accident.

> It was only after the second plane hit that suspicions were aroused.

> Yet if the men were cheering for political reasons, as they reportedly

> told the FBI, they obviously believed they were witnessing a terrorist

> act, and not an accident.

>

> After returning safely to Israel in the late autumn of 2001, three of

> the five New Jersey Israelis spoke on a national talk show that

> winter. Oded Ellner, who on the afternoon of September 11 had, like

> his compatriots, protested to arresting officer Sgt. Dennis Rivelli

> that "we're Israeli", admitted to the interviewer: "We are coming from

> a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document

> the event". By his own admission, then, Ellner stood on the New Jersey

> waterfront documenting with film and video a terrorist act before

> anyone knew it was a terrorist act.

>

> One obvious question among many comes to mind: If these men were

> trained as professional spies, why did they exhibit such outright

> oafishness at the moment of truth on the waterfront? The ABC network

> source close to the 20/20 report noted one of the more disturbing

> explanations proffered by counterintelligence investigators at the

> FBI: "The Israelis felt that in some way their intelligence had worked

> out -- i.e., they were celebrating their own acumen and ability as

> intelligence agents".

>

> The questions abound: Did the Urban Moving Systems Israelis, ready to

> "document the event", arrive at the waterfront before the first plane

> came in from the north? And if they arrived right after, why did they

> believe it was a terrorist attack? What about the strange tale of the

> "art students"? Could they have been mere hustlers, as they claimed,

> who ended up repeatedly crossing paths with federal agents and living

> next door to most of the 9/11 hijackers by coincidence? Did the

> Israeli authorities find out more about the impending attacks than

> they shared with their U.S. counterparts? Or did the Israeli spies on

> the ground only intercept vague chatter that, in their view, did not

> warrant breaking cover to share the information? On the other hand,

> did the U.S. government receive more advance information about the

> attacks from Israeli authorities than it is willing to admit? What

> about the 9/11 Commission's eliding of reported Israeli warnings that

> may have led to the watch- listing of Mihdhar and Hazmi? Were the

> Israeli warnings purposely washed from the historical record? Did the

> CIA know more about pre-9/11 Israeli spying than it has admitted?

>

> The unfortunate fact is that the truth may never be uncovered, not by

> officialdom, and certainly not by a passive press. James Bamford, who

> in a coup of reporting during the 1980s revealed the inner workings of

> the NSA in The Puzzle Palace, points to the "key problem": "The

> Israelis were all sent out of the country", he says. "There's no nexus

> left. The FBI just can't go knocking on doors in Israel. They need to

> work with the State Department. They need letters rogatory, where you

> ask a government of a foreign country to get answers from citizens in

> that country". The Israeli government will not likely comply. So any

> investigation "is now that much more complicated", says Bamford. He

> recalls a story he produced for ABC News concerning two murder

> suspects -- U.S. citizens -- who fled to Israel and fought extradition

> for ten years. "The Israelis did nothing about it until I went to

> Israel, knocking on doors, and finally found the two suspects. I think

> it'd be a great idea to go over and knock on their doors", says Bamford.

>

> The suspects are gone. The trail is cold. Yet many of the key facts

> and promising leads sit freely on the web, in the archives, safe in

> the news-morgues at 20/20 and The Forward and Die Zeit. An

> investigator close to the matter says it reminds him of the Antonioni

> film "Blow-Up", a movie about a photographer who discovers the

> evidence of a covered-up murder hidden before his very eyes in the

> frame of an enlarged photograph. It's a mystery that no one appears

> eager to solve.

>

>

> See Also:

>

>

> The Kuala Lumpur Deceit: a CIA Cover Up by Christopher Ketcham

> Ketcham's Story: Coming in From the Cold by Alexander Cockburn and

> Jeffrey St. Clair

>

>

> Christopher Ketcham is a freelance journalist who has written for

> Harper's and Salon. Many of his writings, including his groundbreaking

> story on the Israeli art students, can be read on his website

> http://www.christopherketcham.com. He can be reached at:

> cketcham99@mindspring.com

>

>

On Mar 11, 10:51 pm, jazzerci...@hotmail.com (-) wrote:

> March 7, 2007

> A CounterPunch Special Investigation

>

> High-Fivers and Art Student Spies

> What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?

>

> By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

>

> On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, an FBI bulletin known as a

> BOLO -- "be on lookout" -- was issued with regard to three suspicious

> men who that morning were seen leaving the New Jersey waterfront

> minutes after the first plane hit World Trade Center 1. Law

> enforcement officers across the New York-New Jersey area were warned

> in the radio dispatch to watch for a "vehicle possibly related to New

> York terrorist attack":

>

> White, 2000 Chevrolet van with 'Urban Moving Systems'

> sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ,

> at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade

> Center Three individuals with van were seen celebrating

> after initial impact and subsequent explosion. FBI Newark

> Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold

> for prints and detain individuals.

>

> At 3:56 p.m., twenty-five minutes after the issuance of the FBI BOLO,

> officers with the East Rutherford Police Department stopped the

> commercial moving van through a trace on the plates. According to the

> police report, Officer Scott DeCarlo and Sgt. Dennis Rivelli

> approached the stopped van, demanding that the driver exit the

> vehicle. The driver, 23-year-old Sivan Kurzberg, refused and "was

> asked several more times [but] appeared to be fumbling with a black

> leather fanny pouch type of bag". With guns drawn, the police then

> "physically removed" Kurzberg, while four other men -- two more men

> had apparently joined the group since the morning -- were also removed

> from the van, handcuffed, placed on the grass median and read their

> Miranda rights.

>

> They had not been told the reasons for their arrest. Yet, according to

> DeCarlo's report, "this officer was told without question by the

> driver [sivan Kurzberg],'We are Israeli. We are not your problem.Your

> problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.'" Another

> of the five Israelis, again without prompting, told Officer DeCarlo --

> falsely -- that "we were on the West Side Highway in New York City

> during the incident". From inside the vehicle the officers, who were

> quickly joined by agents from the FBI, retrieved multiple passports

> and $4,700 in cash stuffed in a sock. According to New Jersey's Bergen

> Record, which on September 12 reported the arrest of the five

> Israelis, an investigator high up in the Bergen County law enforcement

> hierarchy stated that officers had also discovered in the vehicle

> "maps of the city with certain places highlighted. It looked like

> they're hooked in with this", the source told the Record, referring to

> the 9/11 attacks. "It looked like they knew what was going to happen

> when they were at Liberty State Park."

>

> The five men were indeed Israeli citizens. They claimed to be in the

> country working as movers for Urban Moving Systems Inc., which

> maintained a warehouse and office in Weehawken, New Jersey. They were

> held for 71 days in a federal detention center in Brooklyn, New York,

> during which time they were repeatedly interrogated by FBI and CIA

> counterterrorism teams, who referred to the men as the "high-fivers"

> for their celebratory behavior on the New Jersey waterfront. Some were

> placed in solitary confinement for at least forty days; some were

> given as many as seven liedetector tests. One of the Israelis, Paul

> Kurzberg, brother of Sivan, refused to take a lie-detector test for

> ten weeks. Then he failed it.

>

> Meanwhile, two days after the men were picked up, the owner of Urban

> Moving Systems, Dominik Suter, a 31- year-old Israeli national,

> abandoned his business and fled the United States for Israel. Suter's

> departure was abrupt, leaving behind coffee cups, sandwiches, cell

> phones and computers strewn on office tables and thousands of dollars

> of goods in storage. Suter was later placed on the same FBI suspect

> list as 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and other hijackers and

> suspected al-Qaeda sympathizers, suggesting that U.S. authorities felt

> Suter may have known something about the attacks. The suspicion, as

> the investigation unfolded, was that the men working for Urban Moving

> Systems were spies. Who exactly was handling them, and who or what

> they were targeting, was as yet uncertain.

>

> It was New York's venerable Jewish weekly The Forward that broke this

> story in the spring of 2002, after months of footwork. The Forward

> reported that the FBI had finally concluded that at least two of the

> men were agents working for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence

> agency, and that Urban Moving Systems, the ostensible employer of the

> five Israelis, was a front operation. Two former CIA officers

> confirmed this to me, noting that movers' vans are a common

> intelligence cover. The Forward also noted that the Israeli government

> itself admitted that the men were spies. A "former high-ranking

> American intelligence official", who said he was "regularly briefed on

> the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials", told

> reporter Marc Perelman that after American authorities confronted

> Jerusalem at the end of 2001, the Israeli government "acknowledged the

> operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington".

> Today, Perelman stands by his reporting. I asked him if his sources in

> the Mossad denied the story. "Nobody stopped talking to me", he said.

>

> In June 2002, ABC News' 20/20 followed up with its own investigation

> into the matter, coming to the same conclusion as The Forward. Vincent

> Cannistraro, former chief of operations for counterterrorism with the

> CIA, told 20/20 that some of the names of the five men appeared as

> hits in searches of an FBI national intelligence database. Cannistraro

> told me that the question that most troubled FBI agents in the weeks

> and months after 9/11 was whether the Israelis had arrived at the site

> of their "celebration" with foreknowledge of the attack to come. From

> the beginning, "the FBI investigation operated on the premise that the

> Israelis had foreknowledge", according to Cannistraro. A second former

> CIA counterterrorism officer who closely followed the case, but who

> spoke on condition of anonymity, told me that investigators were

> pursuing two theories. "One story was that [the Israelis] appeared at

> Liberty State Park very quickly after the first plane hit. The other

> was that they were at the park location already". Either way,

> investigators wanted to know exactly what the men were expecting when

> they got there.

>

> Before such issues had been fully explored, however, the investigation

> was shut down. Following what ABC News reported were "high-level

> negotiations between Israeli and U.S. government officials", a

> settlement was reached in the case of the five Urban Moving Systems

> suspects. Intense political pressure apparently had been brought to

> bear. The reputable Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported that by the last

> week of October 2001, some six weeks after the men had been detained,

> Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and two unidentified

> "prominent New York congressmen" were lobbying heavily for their

> release. According to a source at ABC News close to the 20/20 report,

> high-profile criminal lawyer Alan Dershowitz also stepped in as a

> negotiator on behalf of the men to smooth out differences with the

> U.S. government. (Dershowitz declined to comment for this article.)

> And so, at the end of November 2001, for reasons that only noted they

> had been working in the country illegally as movers, in violation of

> their visas, the men were flown home to Israel.

>

> Today, the crucial questions raised by this matter remain unanswered.

> There is sufficient reason -- from news reports, statements by former

> intelligence officials, an array of circumstantial evidence, and the

> reported acknowledgment by the Israeli government -- to believe that

> in the months before 9/11, Israel was running an active spy network

> inside the United States, with Muslim extremists as the target. Given

> Israel's concerns about Islamic terrorism as well as its long history

> of spying on U.S. soil, this does not come entirely as a shock. What's

> incendiary is the idea -- supported, though not proven, by several

> pieces of evidence -- that the Israelis did learn something about 9/11

> in advance but failed to share all of what they knew with American

> officials. The questions are disturbing enough to warrant a

> Congressional investigation.

>

> Yet none of this information found its way into Congress's joint

> committee report on the attacks, and it was not even tangentially

> referenced in the nearly 600 pages of the 9/11 Commission's final

> report. Nor would a single major media outlet track the revelations of

> The Forward and ABC News to investigate further. "There weren't even

> stories saying it was bullshit", says The Forward's Perelman.

> "Honestly, I was surprised". Instead, the story disappeared into the

> welter of anti-Israel 9/11 conspiracy theories.

>

> It's no small boon to the U.S. government that the story of

> 9/11-related Israeli espionage has been thus relegated: the story

> doesn't fit in the clean lines of the official narrative of the

> attacks. It brings up concerns not only about Israel's obligation not

> to spy inside the borders of the United States, its major benefactor,

> but about its possible failure to have provided the U.S. adequate

> warning of an impending devastating attack on American soil.

> Furthermore, the available evidence undermines the carefully

> cultivated image of sanctity that defines the U.S.- Israel

> relationship. These are all factors that help explain the story's

> disappearance, and they are compelling reasons to revisit it now.

>

> Torpedoing the FBI Probe

>

> All five future hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which rammed

> the Pentagon, maintained addresses or were active within a six-mile

> radius of towns associated with the Israelis employed at Urban Moving

> Systems. Hudson and Bergen counties, the areas where the Israelis were

> allegedly conducting surveillance, were a central staging ground for

> the hijackers of Flight 77 and their fellow al-Qaeda operatives.

> Mohammed Atta maintained a mail-drop address and visited friends in

> northern New Jersey; his contacts there included Hani Hanjour, the

> suicide pilot for Flight 77, and Majed Moqed, one of the strongmen who

> backed Hanjour in the seizing of the plane. Could the Israelis, with

> or without knowledge of the terrorists' plans, have been tracking the

> men who were soon to hijack Flight 77?

>

> In public statements, both the Israeli government and the FBI have

> denied that the Urban Moving Systems men were involved in an

> intelligence operation in the United States. "No evidence recovered

> suggested any of these Israelis had prior knowledge of the 9/11

> attack, and these Israelis are not suspected of working for Mossad",

> FBI spokesman Jim Margolin told me. (The Israeli embassy did not

> respond to questions for this article.) According to the source at ABC

> News, FBI investigators chafed at the denials from their higher-ups.

> "There is a lot of frustration inside the bureau about this case", the

> source told me. "They feel the higher echelons torpedoed the

> investigation into the Israeli New Jersey cell. Leads were not fully

> investigated". Among those lost leads was the figure of Dominik Suter,

> whom the U.S. authorities apparently never attempted to contact.

> Intelligence expert and author James Bamford told me there was similar

> frustration within the CIA: "People I've talked to at the CIA were

> outraged at what was going on. They thought it was outrageous that

> there hadn't been a real investigation, that the facts were hanging

> out there without any conclusion."

>

> However, what was "absolutely certain", according to Vincent

> Cannistraro, was that the five Israelis formed part of a surveillance

> network in the New York- New Jersey area. The network's purpose was to

> track radical Islamic extremists and/or supporters of militant

> Palestinian groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The former CIA

> counterterrorism officer who spoke anonymously told me that FBI

> investigators determined that the suspect Israelis were serving as

> Arabic-speaking linguists "running technical operations" in northern

> New Jersey's extensive Muslim communities. The former CIA officer said

> the operations included taps on telephones, placement of microphones

> in rooms and mobile surveillance. The source at ABC News agreed: "Our

> conclusion was that they were Arab linguists involved in monitoring

> operations, i.e., electronic surveillance. People at FBI concur with

> this". The ABC News source added, "What we heard was that the Israelis

> may have picked up chatter that something was going to happen on the

> morning of 9/11".

>

> The former CIA counterterrorism officer told me: "There was no

> question but that [the order to close down the investigation] came

> from the White House. It was immediately assumed at CIA headquarters

> that this basically was going to be a cover-up so that the Israelis

> would not be implicated in any way in 9/11. Bear in mind that this was

> a political issue, not a law enforcement or intelligence issue. If

> somebody says we don't want the Israelis implicated in this -- we know

> that they've been spying the hell out of us, we know that they

> possibly had information in advance of the attacks, but this would be

> a political nightmare to deal with."

>

> The Israeli "Art Student" Spies

>

> There is a second piece of evidence that suggests Israeli operatives

> were spying on al-Qaeda in the United States. It is writ in the

> peculiar tale of the Israeli "art students", detailed by this reporter

> for Salon.com in 2002, following the leaking of an internal memo

> circulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration's Office of Security

> Programs. The June 2001 memo, issued three months before the 9/11

> attacks, reported that more than 120 young Israeli citizens, posing as

> art students and peddling cheap paintings, had been repeatedly -- and

> seemingly inexplicably -- attempting to penetrate DEA offices and

> other law enforcement and Defense Department offices across the

> country. The DEA report stated that the Israelis may have been engaged

> in "an organized intelligence gathering activity", but to what end,

> U.S. investigators, in June 2001, could not determine. The memo

> briefly floated the possibility that the Israelis were engaged in

> trafficking the drug ecstasy. According to the memo, "the most

> activity [was] reported in the state of Florida" during the first half

> of 2001, where the town of Hollywood appeared to be "a central point

> for these individuals with several having addresses in this area".

>

> In retrospect, the fact that a large number of "art students" operated

> out of Hollywood is intriguing, to say the least. During 2001, the

> city, just north of Miami, was a hotbed of al-Qaeda activity and

> served as one of the chief staging grounds for the hijacking of the

> World Trade Center planes and the Pennsylvania plane; it was home to

> fifteen of the nineteen future hijackers, nine in Hollywood and six in

> the surrounding area. Among the 120 suspected Israeli spies posing as

> art students, more than thirty lived in the Hollywood area, ten in

> Hollywood proper. As noted in the DEA report, many of these young men

> and women had training as intelligence and electronic intercept

> officers in the Israeli military -- training and experience far beyond

> the compulsory service mandated by Israeli law. Their "traveling in

> the U.S. selling art seem[ed] not to fit their background", according

> to the DEA report.

>

> One "art student" was a former Israeli military intelligence officer

> named Hanan Serfaty, who rented two Hollywood apartments close to the

> mail drop and apartment of Mohammed Atta and four other hijackers.

> Serfaty was moving large amounts of cash: he carried bank slips

> showing more than $100,000 deposited from December 2000 through the

> first quarter of 2001; other bank slips showed withdrawals for about

> $80,000 during the same period. Serfaty's apartments, serving as crash

> pads for at least two other "art students", were located at 4220

> Sheridan Street and 701 South 21st Avenue. Lead hijacker Mohammed

> Atta's mail drop was at 3389 Sheridan Street--approximately 2,700 feet

> from Serfaty's Sheridan Street apartment. Both Atta and Marwan

> al-Shehhi, the suicide pilot on United Airlines Flight 175, which

> smashed into World Trade Center 2, lived in a rented apartment at 1818

> Jackson Street, some 1,800 feet from Serfaty's South 21st Avenue

> apartment.

>

> In fact, an improbable series of coincidences emerges from a close

> reading of the 2001 DEA memo, the 9/11 Commission's staff statements

> and final report, FBI and Justice Department watch lists, hijacker

> timelines compiled by major media and statements by local, state and

> federal law enforcement personnel. In at least six urban centers,

> suspected Israeli spies and 9/11 hijackers and/or al-Qaeda-connected

> suspects lived and operated near one another, in some cases less than

> half a mile apart, for various periods during 2000-01 in the run-up to

> the attacks. In addition to northern New Jersey and Hollywood,

> Florida, these centers included Arlington and Fredericksburg,

> Virginia; Atlanta; Oklahoma City; Los Angeles; and San Diego.

>

> Israeli "art students" also lived close to terror suspects in and

> around Dallas, Texas. A 25-year-old "art student" named Michael

> Calmanovic, arrested and questioned by Texas-based DEA officers in

> April 2001, maintained a mail drop at 3575 North Beltline Road, less

> than a thousand feet from the 4045 North Beltline Road apartment of

> Ahmed Khalefa, an FBI terror suspect. Dallas and its environs,

> especially the town of Richardson, Texas, throbbed with "art student"

> activity. Richardson is notable as the home of the Holy Land

> Foundation, an Islamic charity designated as a terrorist funder by the

> European Union and U.S. government in December 2001. Sources in 2002

> told The Forward, in a report unrelated to the question of the "art

> students", that "Israeli intelligence played a key role in helping the

> Bush administration to crack down on Islamic charities suspected of

> funneling money to terrorist groups, most notably the Richardson,

> Texas-based Holy Land Foundation, last December [2001]".

>

> It's plausible that the intelligence prompting the shutdown of the

> Holy Land Foundation came from "art student" spies in the Richardson area.

>

> Others among the "art students" had specific backgrounds in electronic

> surveillance or military intelligence, or were associated with Israeli

> wiretapping and surveillance firms, which prompted further concerns

> among U.S. investigators. DEA agents described Michael Calmanovic, for

> example, as "a recently discharged electronic intercept operator for

> the Israeli military". Lior Baram, questioned near Hollywood, Fla., in

> January 2001, said he had served two years in Israeli intelligence

> "working with classified information". Hanan Serfaty, who maintained

> the Hollywood apartments near Atta and his cohorts, served in the

> Israeli military between the ages of 18 and 21. Serfaty refused to

> disclose his activities between the ages of 21 and 24, including his

> activities since arriving in the U.S.A. in 2000. The French daily Le

> Monde meanwhile reported that six "art students" were apparently using

> cell phones that had been purchased by a former Israeli vice consul in

> the U.S.A.

>

> Suspected Israeli spy Tomer Ben Dor, questioned at Dallas-Fort Worth

> Airport in May 2001, worked for the Israeli wiretapping and electronic

> eavesdropping company NICE Systems Ltd. (NICE Systems' American

> subsidiary, NICE Systems Inc., is located in Rutherford, New Jersey,

> not far from the East Rutherford site where the five Israeli "movers"

> were arrested on the afternoon of September 11.) Ben Dor carried in

> his luggage a print-out of a computer file that referred to "DEA

> Groups". How he acquired information about so-called "DEA Groups" --

> via, for example, his own employment with an Israeli wiretapping

> company -- was never determined, according to DEA documents.

>

> "Art student" Michal Gal, arrested by DEA investigators in Irving,

> Texas, in the spring of 2001, was released on a $10,000 cash bond

> posted by Ophir Baer, an employee of the Israeli telecommunications

> software company Amdocs Inc., which provides phone-billing technology

> to clients that include some of the largest phone companies in the

> United States as well as U.S. government agencies. Amdocs, whose

> executive board has been heavily stocked with retired and current

> members of the Israeli government and military, has been investigated

> at least twice in the last decade by U.S. authorities on charges of

> espionage-related leaks of data that the company assured was secure.

> (The company strenuously denies any wrong-doing.)

>

> According to the former CIA counterterrorism officer with knowledge of

> investigations into 9/11-related Israeli espionage, when law

> enforcement officials examined the "art students" phenomenon, they

> came to the tentative conclusion that "the Israelis likely had a huge

> spy operation in the U.S. and that they had succeeded in identifying a

> number of the hijackers". The German daily Die Zeit reached the same

> conclusion in 2002, reporting that "Mossad agents in the U.S. were in

> all probability surveilling at least four of the 19 hijackers". The

> Fox News Channel also reported that U.S. investigators suspected that

> Israelis were spying on Muslim militants in the United States. "There

> is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks,

> but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered

> intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it", Fox

> correspondent Carl Cameron reported in a December 2001 series that was

> the first major expos, of allegations of 9/11-related Israeli

> espionage. "A highly placed investigator said there are 'tie-ins'. But

> when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying,

> 'evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell

> you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified

> information.'"

>

> One element of the allegations has never been clearly understood: if

> the "art students" were indeed spies targeting Muslim extremists that

> included al-Qaeda, why would they also be surveilling DEA agents in

> such a compromising manner? Why, in other words, would foreign spies

> bumble into federal offices by the scores and risk exposing their

> operation? An explanation is that a number of the art students were,

> in fact, young Israelis engaged in a mere art scam and unknowingly

> provided cover for real spies. Investigative journalist John Sugg, who

> as senior editor for the Creative Loafing newspaper chain reported on

> the "art students" in 2002, told me that investigators he spoke to

> within FBI felt the "art student" ring functioned as a wide-ranging

> cover that was counterintuitive in its obviousness. DEA investigators,

> for example, uncovered evidence connecting the Israeli "art students"

> to known ecstasy trafficking operations in New York and Florida. This

> was, according to Sugg, planted information. "The explanation was that

> when our FBI guys started getting interested in these folks [the art

> students] -- when they got too close to what the real purpose was --

> the Israelis threw in an ecstasy angle", Sugg told me. "The argument

> being that if our guys thought the Israelis were involved in a

> smuggling ring, then they wouldn't see the real purpose of the

> operation". Sugg, who is writing a book that explores the tale of the

> "art students", told me that several sources within the FBI, and at

> least one source formerly with Israeli intelligence, suggested that

> "the bumbling aspect of the art student thing was intentional."

>

> When I reported on the matter for Salon.com in 2002, a veteran U.S.

> intelligence operative with experience subcontracting both for the CIA

> and the NSA suggested a similar possibility. "It was a noisy

> operation", the veteran intelligence operative said. The operative

> referred me to the film Victor, Victoria. "It was about a woman

> playing a man playing a woman. Perhaps you should think about this

> from that aspect and ask yourself if you wanted to have something that

> was in your face, that didn't make sense, that couldn't possibly be

> them". The intelligence operative added, "Think of it this way: how

> could the experts think this could actually be something of any value?

> Wouldn't they dismiss what they were seeing?" U.S. and Israeli

> officials, dismissing charges of espionage as an "urban myth", have

> publicly claimed that the Israeli "art students" were guilty only of

> working on U.S. soil without proper credentials. The stern denials

> issued by the Justice Department were widely publicized in the

> Washington Post and elsewhere, and the endnote from officialdom and in

> establishment media by the spring of 2002 was that the "art students"

> had been rounded up and deported simply because of harmless visa

> violations. The FBI, for its part, refused to confirm or deny the "art

> students" espionage story. "Regarding FBI investigations into Israeli

> art students", spokesman Jim Margolin told me, "the FBI cannot comment

> on any of those investigations." As with the New Jersey Israelis, the

> investigation into the Israeli "art students" appears to have been

> halted by orders from on high. The veteran CIA/NSA intelligence

> operative told me in 2002 that there was "a great press to discredit

> the story, discredit the connections, prevent [investigators] from

> going any further. People were told to stand down. You name the

> agency, they were told to stand down". The operative added, "People

> who were perceived to be gumshoes on [this matter] suddenly found

> themselves hammered from all different directions. The interest from

> the middle bureaucracy was not that there had been a security breach

> but that someone had bothered to investigate the breach. That was

> where the terror was".

>

> Choking off the press coverage

>

> There was similar pressure brought against the media venues that

> ventured to report out the allegations of 9/11- related Israeli

> espionage. A former ABC News employee high up in the network newsroom

> told me that when ABC News ran its June 2002 expos, on the celebratory

> New Jersey Israelis, "Enormous pressure was brought to bear by

> pro-Israeli organizations"--and this pressure began months before the

> piece was even close to airing. The source said that ABC News

> colleagues wondered, "how they [the pro-Israel organizations] found

> out we were doing the story. Pro- Israeli people were calling the

> president of ABC News. Barbara Walters was getting bombarded by calls.

> The story was a hard sell but ABC News came through the management

> insulated [reporters] from the pressure".

>

> The experience of Carl Cameron, chief Washington correspondent at Fox

> News Channel and the first mainstream U.S. reporter to present the

> allegations of Israeli surveillance of the 9/11 hijackers, was perhaps

> more typical, both in its particulars and aftermath. The attack

> against Cameron and Fox News was spearheaded by a pro-Israel lobby

> group called the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in

> America (CAMERA), which operated in tandem with the two most highly

> visible powerhouse Israel lobbyists, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)

> and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (itself currently

> embroiled in a spy scandal connected to the Defense Department and

> Israeli Embassy). "CAMERA pep- pered the shit out of us", Carl Cameron

> told me in 2002, referring to an e-mail bombardment that eventually

> crashed the Fox News.com servers. Cameron himself received 700 pages

> of almost identical e-mail messages from hundreds of citizens (though

> he suspected these were spam identities). CAMERA spokesman Alex

> Safian later told me that Cameron's upbringing in Iran, where his

> father traveled as an archeologist, had rendered the reporter "very

> sympathetic to the Arab side". Safian added, "I think Cameron,

> personally, has a thing about Israel"--coded language implying that

> Cameron was an anti-Semite. Cameron was outraged at the accusation.

>

> According to a source at Fox News Channel, the president of the ADL,

> Abraham Foxman, telephoned executives at Fox News' parent, News Corp.,

> to demand a sit-down in the wake of the Cameron reportage. The source

> said that Foxman told the News Corp. executives, "Look, you guys have

> generally been pretty fair to Israel. What are you doing putting this

> stuff out there? You're killing us". The Fox News source continued,

> "As good old boys will do over coffee in Manhattan, it was like, well,

> what can we do about this? Finally, Fox News said, 'Stop the

> e-mailing. Stop slamming us. Stop being in our face, and we'll stop

> being in your face--by way of taking our story down off the web. We

> will not retract it; we will not disavow it; we stand by it. But we

> will at least take it off the web.'" Following this meeting, within

> four days of the posting of Cameron's series on

>

> Fox News.com, the transcripts disappeared, replaced by the message,

> "This story no longer exists".

>

> What did Mossad know and tell the U.S.?

>

> Whether or not Israeli spies had detailed foreknowledge of the 9/11

> attacks, the Israeli authorities knew enough to warn the U.S.

> government in the summer of 2001 that an attack was on the horizon.

> The British Sunday Telegraph reported on September 16, 2001, that two

> senior agents with the Mossad were dispatched to Washington in August

> 2001 "to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many

> as 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation". The Telegraph

> quoted a "senior Israeli security official" as saying the Mossad

> experts had "no specific information about what was being planned".

> Still, the official told the Telegraph, the Mossad contacts had

> "linked the plot to Osama bin Laden". Likewise, Die Zeit correspondent

> Oliver Schr"m reported that on August 23, 2001, the Mossad "handed its

> American counterpart a list of names of terrorists who were staying in

> the U.S. and were presumably planning to launch an attack in the

> foreseeable future". Fox News' Carl Cameron, in May 2002, also

> reported warnings by Israel: "Based on its own intelligence, the

> Israeli government provided 'general' information to the United States

> in the second week of August that an al-Qaeda attack was imminent".

> The U.S. government later claimed these warnings were not specific

> enough to allow any mitigating action to be taken. Mossad expert

> Gordon Thomas, author of Gideon's Spies, says German intelligence

> sources told him that as late as August 2001 Israeli spies in the

> United States had made surveillance contacts with "known supporters of

> bin Laden in the U.S.A. It was those surveillance contacts that later

> raised the question: how much prior knowledge did Mossad have and at

> what stage?"

>

> According to Die Zeit, the Mossad did provide the U.S. government with

> the names of suspected terrorists Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf

> al-Hazmi, who would eventually hijack the Pentagon plane. It is worth

> noting that Mihdhar and Hazmi were among the hijackers who operated in

> close proximity to Israeli "art students" in Hollywood, Florida, and

> to the Urban Moving Systems Israelis in northern New Jersey. Moreover,

> Hazmi and at least three "art students" visited Oklahoma City on

> almost the same dates, from April 1 through April 4, 2001. On August

> 24, 2001, a day after the Mossad's briefing, Mihdhar and Hazmi were

> placed by the CIA on a terrorist watch list; additionally, it was only

> after the Mossad warning, as reported by Die Zeit, that the CIA, on

> August 27, informed the FBI of the presence of the two terrorists. But

> by then the cell was already in hiding, preparing for attack.

>

> The CIA, along with the 9/11 Commission in its adoption of the CIA

> story, claims that Mihdhar and Hazmi were placed on the watch list

> solely due to the agency's own efforts, with no help from Mossad.

> Their explanation of how the pair came to be placed on the watch list,

> however, is far from credible and may have served as a cover story to

> obscure the Mossad briefing [see Ketcham's sidebar story -- "The Kuala

> Lumpur Deceit"]. This brings up the possibility that the CIA may have

> known about the existence of the alleged Israeli agents and their

> mission, but sought, naturally, to keep it quiet. A second, more

> troubling scenario, is that the CIA may have subcontracted to Mossad,

> given that the agency was both prohibited by law from conducting

> intelligence operations on U.S. soil, and lacked a pool of competent

> Arabic-fluent field officers. In such a scenario, the CIA would either

> have worked actively with the Israelis or quietly abetted an

> independent operation on U.S. soil. In his 9/11 investigative book,

> The Looming Tower, author Lawrence Wright notes that FBI

> counterterrorism agents, infuriated at the CIA's failure to fully

> share information about Mihdhar and Hazmi, speculated that "the agency

> was shielding Mihdhar and Hazmi because it hoped to recruit them". The

> two al-Qaeda men, Wright notes, "must have seemed like attractive

> opportunities; however, once they entered the United States they were

> the province of the FBI..." Wright further observes that the CIA's

> reticence to share its information was due to a fear "that

> prosecutions resulting from specific intelligence might compromise its

> relationship with foreign services". When in the spring of 2002 the

> scenario of CIA's domestic subcontracting to foreign intelligence was

> posed to the veteran CIA/NSA intelligence operative, with whom I spoke

> extensively, the operative didn't reject it out of hand. The operative

> noted that in recent years the CIA's human intelligence assets, known

> as "humint" -- spooks on the ground who conduct surveillances, make

> contacts, and infiltrate the enemy -- had been "eviscerated" in favor

> of the NSA's far less perilous "sigint", or signals intelligence

> program, the remote interception of electronic communications. As a

> result, "U.S. intelligence finds itself going back to sources that you

> may not necessarily like to go back to, but are required to", the

> veteran intelligence operative said. "We don't like the fact, but our

> humint structures are gone. Israeli intel's humint is as strong as

> ever. If you have an intel gap, those gaps are not closed overnight.

> It takes years and years of diligent work, a high degree of security,

> talented and dedicated people, willing management and a steady hand.

> It is not a fun business, and it's certainly not one without its

> dangers. If you lose that capability, well organizations find

> themselves having to make a pact with the devil. The problem [in U.S.

> intel] is very great".

>

> If such an understanding did exist between CIA and Mossad with regard

> to al-Qaeda's U.S. operatives, the complicity would explain a number

> of oddities: it would explain the CIA's nearly incoherent, and perhaps

> purposely deceptive, reconstruction of events as to how Mihdhar and

> Hazmi joined the watch list; it might even explain the apparent

> brazenness of the Israeli New Jersey cell celebrating on the morning

> of 9/11 (protected under the CIA wing, they were free to behave as

> they pleased). It would also explain the assertion in one of the

> leading Israeli dailies, Yedioth Ahronoth, that in the months prior to

> 9/11, when the Israeli "art students" were being identified and

> rounded up, the CIA "actively promoted their expulsion". The

> implication in the Yedioth Ahronoth article was that the CIA was

> simply being careless, not trying to spirit the Israelis safely out of

> the country. At this point we cannot be certain.

>

> Israeli spying against the U.S. is of course hotly denied by both

> governments. In 2002, responding to my own questions about the "art

> students", Israeli embassy spokesman Mark Regev issued a blanket

> denial. "Israel does not spy on the United States", Regev told me. The

> pronouncements from officialdom are strictly pro forma, as it is no

> secret that spying by Israel on the United States has been

> wide-ranging and unabashed. A 1996 General Accounting Office report,

> for example, found that Israel "conducts the most aggressive espionage

> operation against the United States of any U.S. ally". More recently,

> a former intelligence official told the Los Angeles Times in 2004 that

> "[t]here is a huge, aggressive, ongoing set of Israeli activities

> directed against the United States". It is also routine that Israeli

> spying is ignored or downplayed by the U.S. government (the case of

> convicted spy Jonathan Pollard, sentenced to life in prison in 1986,

> is a dramatic exception). According to the American Prospect, over the

> last 20 years at least six sealed indictments have been issued against

> individuals allegedly spying "on Israel's behalf", but the cases were

> resolved "through diplomatic and intelligence channels" rather than a

> public airing in the courts. Career Justice Department and

> intelligence officials who track Israeli espionage told the Prospect

> of "long-standing frustration among investigators and prosecutors who

> feel that cases that could have been made successfully against Israeli

> spies were never brought to trial, or that the investigations were

> shut down prematurely".

>

> The Questions That Await Answers

>

> Remarkably, the Urban Moving Systems Israelis, when interrogated by

> the FBI, explained their motives for "celebration" on the New Jersey

> waterfront a celebration that consisted of cheering, smiling, shooting

> film with still and video cameras and, according to the FBI,

> "high-fiving" -- in the Machiavellian light of geopolitics. "Their

> explanation of why they were happy", FBI spokesman Margolin told me,

> "was that the United States would now have to commit itself to

> fighting [Middle East] terrorism, that Americans would have an

> understanding and empathy for Israel's circumstances, and that the

> attacks were ultimately a good thing for Israel". When reporters on

> the morning of 9/11 asked former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin

> Netanyahu about the effect the attacks would have on Israeli- American

> relations, he responded with a similar gut analysis: "It's very good",

> he remarked. Then he amended the statement: "Well, not very good, but

> it will generate immediate sympathy [for Israel from Americans]".

>

> What is perhaps most damning is that the Israelis' celebration on the

> New Jersey waterfront occurred in the first sixteen minutes after the

> initial crash, when no one was aware this was a terrorist attack. In

> other words, from the time the first plane hit the north tower, at

> 8:46 a.m., to the time the second plane hit the south tower, at 9:02

> a.m., the overwhelming assumption of news outlets and government

> officials was that the plane's impact was simply a terrible accident.

> It was only after the second plane hit that suspicions were aroused.

> Yet if the men were cheering for political reasons, as they reportedly

> told the FBI, they obviously believed they were witnessing a terrorist

> act, and not an accident.

>

> After returning safely to Israel in the late autumn of 2001, three of

> the five New Jersey Israelis spoke on a national talk show that

> winter. Oded Ellner, who on the afternoon of September 11 had, like

> his compatriots, protested to arresting officer Sgt. Dennis Rivelli

> that "we're Israeli", admitted to the interviewer: "We are coming from

> a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document

> the event". By his own admission, then, Ellner stood on the New Jersey

> waterfront documenting with film and video a terrorist act before

> anyone knew it was a terrorist act.

>

> One obvious question among many comes to mind: If these men were

> trained as professional spies, why did they exhibit such outright

> oafishness at the moment of truth on the waterfront? The ABC network

> source close to the 20/20 report noted one of the more disturbing

> explanations proffered by counterintelligence investigators at the

> FBI: "The Israelis felt that in some way their intelligence had worked

> out -- i.e., they were celebrating their own acumen and ability as

> intelligence agents".

>

> The questions abound: Did the Urban Moving Systems Israelis, ready to

> "document the event", arrive at the waterfront before the first plane

> came in from the north? And if they arrived right after, why did they

> believe it was a terrorist attack? What about the strange tale of the

> "art students"? Could they have been mere hustlers, as they claimed,

> who ended up repeatedly crossing paths with federal agents and living

> next door to most of the 9/11 hijackers by coincidence? Did the

> Israeli authorities find out more about the impending attacks than

> they shared with their U.S. counterparts? Or did the Israeli spies on

> the ground only intercept vague chatter that, in their view, did not

> warrant breaking cover to share the information? On the other hand,

> did the U.S. government receive more advance information about the

> attacks from Israeli authorities than it is willing to admit? What

> about the 9/11 Commission's eliding of reported Israeli warnings that

> may have led to the watch- listing of Mihdhar and Hazmi? Were the

> Israeli warnings purposely washed from the historical record? Did the

> CIA know more about pre-9/11 Israeli spying than it has admitted?

>

> The unfortunate fact is that the truth may never be uncovered, not by

> officialdom, and certainly not by a passive press. James Bamford, who

> in a coup of reporting during the 1980s revealed the inner workings of

> the NSA in The Puzzle Palace, points to the "key problem": "The

> Israelis were all sent out of the country", he says. "There's no nexus

> left. The FBI just can't go knocking on doors in Israel. They need to

> work with the State Department. They need letters rogatory, where you

> ask a government of a foreign country to get answers from citizens in

> that country". The Israeli government will not likely comply. So any

> investigation "is now that much more complicated", says Bamford. He

> recalls a story he produced for ABC News concerning two murder

> suspects -- U.S. citizens -- who fled to Israel and fought extradition

> for ten years. "The Israelis did nothing about it until I went to

> Israel, knocking on doors, and finally found the two suspects. I think

> it'd be a great idea to go over and knock on their doors", says Bamford.

>

> The suspects are gone. The trail is cold. Yet many of the key facts

> and promising leads sit freely on the web, in the archives, safe in

> the news-morgues at 20/20 and The Forward and Die Zeit. An

> investigator close to the matter says it reminds him of the Antonioni

> film "Blow-Up", a movie about a photographer who discovers the

> evidence of a covered-up murder hidden before his very eyes in the

> frame of an enlarged photograph. It's a mystery that no one appears

> eager to solve.

>

> See Also:

>

> The Kuala Lumpur Deceit: a CIA Cover Up by Christopher Ketcham

> Ketcham's Story: Coming in From the Cold by Alexander Cockburn and

> Jeffrey St. Clair

>

> Christopher Ketcham is a freelance journalist who has written for

> Harper's and Salon. Many of his writings, including his groundbreaking

> story on the Israeli art students, can be read on his websitewww.christopherketcham.com. He can be reached at:

> cketcha...@mindspring.com

On Sun, 11 Mar 2007 21:32:52 -0600, Notan

<notan@ddressthatcanbespammed> wrote:

>- wrote:

>

><pages of drivel snipped>

>

>Zzzzzzzz...

>

>Someone, please wake me up when "-" has something worthwhile to say.

>

>Thanks!

The first I heard of the supposed allegation that Israelis

knew in advance was that William Pierce of the neo nazi National

Alliance claimed there were Israeli students "high fiving" after the

planes hit the towers, but Pierce didn't remind anyone to take a look

at his internet radio broadcast of September 8th, 2001, where he gave

his followers warning that something was going to happen on 911. That,

my friend, is chutzpah.

Some while later the FBI announced that they had reason to

believe that neo nazis and some terrorist groups from Arabia were

allied. Duh!

Scotius <wolvzbro@mnsi.net> wrote:

> The first I heard of the supposed allegation that Israelis

> knew in advance was that William Pierce of the neo nazi National

> Alliance claimed there were Israeli students "high fiving" after the

> planes hit the towers, but Pierce didn't remind anyone to take a look

> at his internet radio broadcast of September 8th, 2001, where he gave

> his followers warning that something was going to happen on 911. That,

> my friend, is chutzpah.

> Some while later the FBI announced that they had reason to

> believe that neo nazis and some terrorist groups from Arabia were

> allied. Duh!

Such bullshit. That William Pierce broadcast is archived at

http://www.natvan.com/pub/2001/090801.txt . He says:

"Then you send out reporters to interview a few Nervous Nellies

and self-righteous soccer moms who will say how shocked and

horrified they are that `hate' has raised its ugly head in their peaceful

community. You quote one of them saying she is saddened that in

the 21st century there still are bigoted people who have not accepted

equality and multiculuralism. And you report that a team of police

officers is going door to door collecting the material that was

distributed before it disturbs more citizens. All of this usually is

enough to convince at least the dimwits in the community that there

is something dangerous and threatening about anyone who tries

to distribute material which calls into question the equality of the

races or the desirability of more multiculturalism. If one of these

more impressionable citizens sees one of us coming, he'll run for

cover and dial 911." - William Pierce

Later he then says:

"I spoke with other people just a couple of years ago who really

believed that at midnight on December 31, 1999, airliners would fall

from the sky and elevators all over the world would stop working.

I laughed at their claims that there would be chaos on New Year's

Day 2000 and then explained to them why they were wrong and that

the whole Y2K hoax was being promoted by hucksters who had something

to sell. Then they became hostile and accused me of working for the

enemies of America because I encouraged people not to waste time and

money preparing for what they claimed was the imminent Y2K disaster."

- William Pierce

-----------------

Multiculturalists such as "Scotius" rely upon lies and misquotes

for research. They excuse their lies and misquotes as multiculturalism.

As I have stated earlier, if William Pierce had provided premonition then

why wasn't the FBI, Secret Service, and NORAD listening ?

- regards

- jb

---------------------------------------------------

Index of /pub

http://www.natvan.com/pub/

---------------------------------------------------

American Dissident Voices Broadcast of Sept 22, 2001:

http://www.natvan.com/pub/2001/092201.txt

American Dissident Voices Broadcast of September 22, 2001

Who Is Guilty?

By Dr. William Pierce

Hello!

Observing the responses to last week's attacks on the Pentagon and the

World Trade Center has been interesting, to say the least. It has been

11 days now, and nearly every spokesman for the controlled media and for

the government has been avoiding the obvious question: "Why was the

United States attacked?"

Nearly all of them are afraid of that question; they are pretending that

there is no answer to that question, that there was no reason for the

attack, that it was an unprovoked attack -- because the answer to the

question, "Why was America attacked?" also is obvious. We were attacked

because we have been letting ourselves be used to do all of Israel's

dirty work in the Middle East. We were attacked because we have

supported -- militarily or diplomatically or financially -- every bit of

aggression and every atrocity Israel has committed against its neighbors

for the past half-century. Everyone in the world with even half a brain

understands that, even if talking about it is considered Politically

Incorrect.

I've been warning about reprisals against the United States for many

years. Seven years ago, on February 25, 1994, an American Jew, Baruch

Goldstein, walked into a mosque in Hebron and machine-gunned

Palestinians at prayer, killing 29 of them before running out of

ammunition and being beaten to death by the Palestinian survivors. This

act of mass murder immediately made Goldstein a saint for religious Jews

everywhere. They built a shrine to him near Hebron, and Jews from the

United States and other countries still make pilgrimages to this shrine.

There were no reprisals from the Palestinians at the time, and the mass

media in the United States barely mentioned the massacre, even though

the murderer, Goldstein, was an American. But the Palestinians -- and

Muslims everywhere -- remember such things. They blame not just the

Jews, but also the people who finance and arm and shelter the Jews: that

is, they blame America. And right after the massacre I warned all of my

fellow Americans in an article I wrote for my magazine National

Vanguard. The article was titled "Stay Out of Tall Buildings," and it

reported the massacre and the minimal response of the media here, and

then it warned, and I quote: "New Yorkers who work in tall office

buildings -- anything close to the size of the World Trade Center --

might consider wearing hardhats to work for the next few months."

Well, of course, it took the Muslims more than a few months, and there

were many more American provocations meanwhile. But last week the

response eventually came. Of course there had been lesser responses

earlier -- the bombing of a couple of American embassies in Africa and

of the U.S. Navy destroyer, the USS Cole, for example -- but those

events were a long way from here, and to most Americans they weren't

real: hardly enough to distract them from the latest ball game on TV.

What happened last week finally caught the attention of the American

people. It's about time that Americans began to pay attention to such

things.

Unfortunately, the great majority of Americans still get all of their

opinions and attitudes from TV, and so they will not learn what they

should learn from last week's attacks. What they're learning from TV is

that the attacks were "unprovoked," that the attackers were "cowards,"

and that "we'll smoke them out of their holes, by golly." They're also

taking to heart a lot of slogans along the lines of: "We're the greatest

country on earth, and these attacks will only unite us and help us all

pull together." When real lemmings hear slogans like that they become

misty-eyed, put their right hands over their hearts, and begin singing

"The Star-Spangled Banner." And they begin looking for enemies, so they

can demonstrate their patriotism, a sentiment which will be in fashion

again for a few months.

One lemming was arrested in Washington trying to ram his car into the

Saudi Arabian Embassy. Others around the country have been throwing

bricks through the windows of mosques. All of them have been flying

American flags. But among all of them there is hardly a grain of

understanding. The dimwit who tried to ram the Saudi Arabian Embassy

doesn't understand that the Saudi government is more afraid of Muslim

fundamentalists than anyone in the West is. If Muslim fundamentalism

experiences a surge of growth as a consequence of the success of the

attacks last week, it will be either the government of Saudi Arabia or

that of Egypt that will fall first, followed quickly by every other

Middle Eastern government that has collaborated with the Jews -- or,

what is the same thing, with America.

And the chests of all the dimwits swell with pride when their government

in Washington rattles its sabers and issues demands to the government of

Pakistan and other governments in the Middle East. Washington has

demanded cooperation with its effort to catch the people who attacked

New York and Washington last week. The rulers and top politicians in

these countries are pledging their cooperation, for their own reasons,

but this sort of thing doesn't sit well with their countrymen. Patriotic

Pakistanis, both among the educated classes and among the religious

elements, can only hate America even more as a result of these

humiliating demands and the ignominious response of their own leaders.

Of course, I don't know who organized the attacks on Washington and New

York last week. Neither does Mr. Bush, and I doubt that he will know

with any degree of certainty even when he begins ordering missile

attacks against various Middle Eastern targets, more for proving his

"leadership" to the flag-waving lemmings here than for actually

punishing the people who organized the events of last week.

Aside from these domestic political considerations, the principal

determinant of the American response will be whatever the Jews think is

best for Israel. Former Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu set

the tone last week while the fire was still burning in the Pentagon and

in some of the buildings of the World Trade Center complex. He said that

it will not be enough to kill Osama bin Laden and his followers; the

United States must destroy all of the governments of those countries

where terrorist groups might arise in the future. We must do it now,

Netanyahu demanded, while there is popular support among the American

people for such a pre-emptive war. If you wait, Netanyahu said, you will

lose your chance. New and stronger terrorist organizations will spring

up to take the place of Osama bin Laden's group. So strike now! And

other Jewish leaders, both in Israel and in the United States, were

pushing similarly for a full-scale pre-emptive war.

There's no doubt that the U.S. military forces could depopulate the

entire Middle East with ease. With minimal loss to ourselves, we could

make a huge, self-illuminated, glass parking lot out of Pakistan,

Afghanistan, Iran, and all of the other countries bordering the Persian

Gulf, the Red Sea, and the eastern Mediterranean -- except Israel, of

course. Actually, that's not the solution the Jews prefer. Instead they

want us to send in ground troops, whip their armies, take over their

countries, and install puppet governments that will follow the Jews'

orders. Then they can control and milk the whole area. That grinning

idiot we have in the White House, George Bush, is perfectly willing to

go along with such a scheme if that's what they tell him to do. The

media are sampling public opinion now and reporting that most of the

lemmings will go along too.

Whether or not that is the way the Bush government goes remains to be

seen. There are serious liabilities and risks if the United States

undertakes such a major, protracted war. Occupation armies will be

required to keep the area pacified. And even though the lemmings are

feeling all warm and fuzzy and patriotic and morally indignant now in

the wake of last week's attacks, they may become restless during a

protracted war intended to bring the whole Middle East under Jewish

hegemony, especially when our casualties begin mounting. Presumably all

of these considerations will be taken into account before the Bush

government is told what to do. Mr. Bush's advisers also should take into

account what happened to the Soviet Union during its attempt to conquer

Afghanistan. The Soviet Union spent more than eight years trying to whip

Afghanistan's Muslim guerrillas and had 15,000 of its own soldiers

killed in the attempt before finally giving up in 1989. And during this

attempt the Soviets already had a pro-Soviet government in Kabul: a

government whose leaders were condemned as traitors and infidels and

butchered by the Muslims as soon as the Red Army pulled out. Any

government of Afghanistan that might otherwise be inclined to make a

deal with the United States certainly will remember that.

Of course, just because the Soviet Union was unable to whip Afghanistan

doesn't mean that the United States can't do it -- if the U.S.

government is willing to make a big enough effort and to sacrifice the

lives of enough Americans. We certainly have more than enough firepower,

more than enough high-tech weaponry, to do the job. We are a bit short

in some departments, to be sure: intelligence, for example. I am

astounded that as complex an operation as that against the World Trade

Center and the Pentagon last week could have been planned and carried

out without the Bush government having any hint of what was going on.

Was this another Pearl Harbor scenario, where our government knew of an

impending attack but pretended it knew nothing and waited for the attack

to come so as to have an excuse for becoming involved in a war? The

Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, of which the Roosevelt

government had plenty of forewarning, transformed the sentiment of the

American public from anti-war to pro-war overnight and allowed the

Roosevelt government to become fully involved in the war against

Germany, which was Japan's ally. Roosevelt was itching for a war because

all the Jews around him were pushing for it. Did the Bush government

know about last week's attack ahead of time but pretended not to so as

to have an excuse for launching a war against the Jews' enemies in the

Middle East? I really don't know. I think it much more likely that the

government of Israel had some intelligence about the attack ahead of

time and deliberately withheld that intelligence from the United States.

That's the sort of thing the Israelis often have done in the past, and

they certainly welcomed last week's attack.

Well, that's a minor question. The big question is: Why should we start

another war now? What advantage do we gain, even if we pulverize

Afghanistan and kill its entire population? Do we thereby prevent any

further attacks against America by people in the Middle East who object

to our government's support of Israel? I think not. Afghanistan is not

the only country in the Middle East capable of supporting guerrilla

fighters, and guerrillas who are willing to sacrifice their own lives by

flying into their targets will not be easily intimidated. We may be able

to install puppet governments and occupation armies to support those

governments everywhere in the Middle East, and we may be able to

introduce all sorts of new security programs in the United States

intended to make the job of an attacker more difficult, but the ultimate

cost of all this will be very, very high. And again, the question is,

why should we do these things? Why should we continue making ourselves a

target for terrorists so that these things even bear consideration?

You know, there are Americans who have a chip-on-the-shoulder attitude.

They don't want to hear that we should stop letting Israel wag America

like its tail. They don't want to hear that we should stop doing the

things in the Middle East that make the people of the Middle East

retaliate against us. Their attitude is, "By God, nobody's going to tell

us what to do. We'll continue supporting Israel with money, weapons, and

diplomacy if we want to, whether it's in America's interests or not, and

if any of those towel-heads in the Middle East don't like it we'll kick

their asses. We're bigger and tougher than anybody else, and we'll push

anybody around we want to, and they'd better not complain about it."

This swaggering, bully-boy attitude is what we're hearing from some

American politicians now who're courting Jewish support -- and also from

some military leaders with political ambitions, unfortunately.

I think that's really stupid. Let's let the attacks on New York and

Washington last week serve as a wake-up call for every thinking

American: a wake-up call for us to begin paying attention to our

government's policies and to begin insisting that our government act

only to protect and promote the interests of the American people, and

nothing else. For far too long we have watched cynically from the

sidelines as our government became more and more corrupt, more and more

irresponsible, more and more negligent of America's interests. We

watched the Jews corrupt our political system with their money and their

media and then use America's power and wealth for their own purposes.

Most Americans, because of the Jewish control of their mass media, are

not aware of this, but thinking people in most of the rest of the world

certainly are aware of the way we're being used. This has earned America

the contempt of the whole world, including not only Israel's enemies,

but Israel itself. The deliberate Israeli attempt to sink our ship the

USS Liberty in 1967 was just one indicator of that contempt, which has

grown more profound since.

You know, there are two reasons why the people of the Middle East hate

America. One reason is that to the Muslims America is the Great Satan,

the corrupter of the world. They don't want us meddling in their affairs

and trying to change the ideas and attitudes of their people. They don't

want our Hollywood films and our Madison Avenue fashions and our

immorality and our lust for money to corrupt their people. They don't

want to be contaminated by us. They want us to take all of our Jewish

fashions and our Jewish television and our Jewish attitudes and ideas

and get out of their lives, go home, leave them alone. For many Muslims

the view of America as the Great Satan, the great corrupter, as an

actual source of corruption in the Middle East, is enough reason to

attack us.

But if we were not meddling in their affairs, if we were not supporting

puppet governments in their part of the world, if we were not supporting

Israel, if we were not bringing our corruption to them, if we would in

fact go home and leave them alone, their contempt for our lack of

character and morality would not be a sufficient motive for them to

attack us over here. The reason for their attack last week is our

support for Israel's aggression against them. Our lying media and our

lying politicians in Washington will deny that, but it is crystal clear

to anyone with eyes to see; it is obvious to thinking people everywhere.

The attack last week was not "unprovoked." We were attacked because we

support Israel financially, diplomatically, and militarily. As long as

we continue to support Israel we will remain a target for the patriots

and the religious fundamentalists of every other country in the Middle

East. Is that really what we want to do? Does that really serve

America's interests?

I think not. Let's emphasize just two things in connection with last

week's attack. First, anybody in the media or in the government, any

politician or other public figure, who tells us that the attack was

"unprovoked" is lying to us: consciously and deliberately lying, because

although the lemmings may not know any better, every government official

and every media boss does know better. And anyone who deliberately lies

to the American people on such an important matter is thereby declaring

himself an enemy of America, an enemy of the American people, whether

the liar is George Bush or a top media Jew or a general in the Pentagon.

Anyone who tries to steer us away from the truth that this attack was a

retaliation for the American support of Israel's atrocious behavior in

the Middle East is an enemy of America.

Second, when we hear media spokesmen or government spokesmen tell us

sternly, their voices quivering with phony indignation, that we need to

hunt down and punish the evil men responsible for last week's attack, we

can only agree with them. Yes, the people responsible for the attack are

evil and should be hunted down and punished. But we don't have to go to

the Middle East to find the responsible people and punish them. They're

a lot closer than the Middle East. They're evil, but not because a lot

of Jewish real estate in New York was destroyed; yes, that's right, the

owner of the World Trade Center -- that is, the owner of a 99-year lease

on the property -- is a Jew, Larry Silverstein. They're evil, but not

because a great many Jewish lawyers and Jewish financial consultants and

Jewish middlemen had offices in the World Trade Center. They're evil

because thousands of young White women who worked as receptionists and

secretaries and file clerks in both the World Trade Center and the

Pentagon were killed, along with hundreds of airline passengers and crew

members. That is what calls for punishment.

And who are the evil men who should be punished, these men responsible

for the death of so many of our people? Mr. Bush assures us that he's

got the FBI and the CIA on their tails, and that he'll find them pretty

soon. Hey! Mr. Bush! Call off the FBI and the CIA. If you want to know

who's responsible, just walk into your bathroom and look in the mirror.

Of course, it's not really fair to put all of the blame on Mr. Bush. His

last ten or so predecessors in the White House also are responsible.

Republican and Democrat alike, they've all danced to whatever tune

Israel was playing. By ignoring America's interests and letting

themselves be used by Israel against Israel's neighbors for the past

half century, they all helped to incur the debt that was only partly

repaid last week.

And indeed, we can cast the net of blame much wider. We have a system of

government in the United States that the Jews have learned to

manipulate. With their money and their media they are able to swing

elections, buy politicians, and control public policy to suit

themselves, without regard for the interests of the American people.

After the Second World War they were determined to change American

immigration policy in a way that would dilute the White majority with a

flood of non-White immigrants, and they found a multitude of White

politicians and White clerics and White businessmen willing to

collaborate with them and push through the immigration changes they

wanted. And when the Jews launched the so-called "civil rights"

revolution in the 1960s, again they found many thousands of White

politicians and clerics and businessmen and lawyers to help them strike

down the laws against miscegenation and push through new legislation

requiring the racial integration of schools and workplaces and

neighborhoods.

And the same pattern can be seen in the entire history of America's

policy in the Middle East. From the beginning it has been a policy

intended to promote Jewish interests and to sacrifice American

interests, but the Jews could not have pushed these policies through by

themselves. They had a multitude of Gentile collaborators willing to

sacrifice the interests of the American people in order to curry favor

with the Jews. And these people, these traitors to their country and to

their race, who put their own selfish interests above those of their

people, certainly have been aware all along of the debt that was being

built up. Sally Soccer Mom and Joe Six Pack may not have figured out why

everyone in the Muslim world hates America's guts and why a few Muslims

are willing to die in order to punish America for what America has done

to them on behalf of Israel, but the traitors understand it perfectly

well. They understand who is responsible for last week's tragedy, and

that's why they all try to keep the public confused by always referring

to last week's attack as "unprovoked." And I'll guarantee you this:

America will continue to have tragedy after tragedy, not because we

don't have strict enough security measures at our airports, and not

because of Osama bin Laden, but because we don't have a government which

represents the interests of the American people. Until we regain control

of our own news and entertainment media and have leaders whose sole

concern is what's good for America -- not what will win them Jewish

support in the next election -- we'll remain a nation adrift, hated by

all, respected by none, and fair game for anyone who has a grievance

against us.

Thanks for being with me again today.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

2001 National Vanguard Books

http://www.natvan.com/pub/2001/092901.txt

American Dissident Voices Broadcast of September 29, 2001

Regaining Control

By Dr. William Pierce

Hello!

As I noted in my broadcast of September 15, and as various politicians

also have noted in a somewhat different sense, on September 11 America

entered a new era. For the first time in a long time American civilians

have had to pay a price in blood for abdicating their responsibility to

control their government. Excepting some entirely inconsequential

Japanese efforts against the Pacific Northwest during the early days of

the Second World War, the U.S. mainland suffered its first attack from

the air this month. In the past we dished it out -- the terror bombing

of German cities throughout the Second World War, the bombing of Baghdad

a decade ago, and the bombing of Belgrade in 1999, not to mention

selective air strikes against an aspirin factory in Sudan and against

the home of Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi -- but until this month the

American people hadn't been on the receiving end.

The psychological shock has been profound. The attitude used to be that

our government could do whatever it wanted to do against the people of

other countries, and Americans could enjoy the spectacle on TV from the

comfort of their living rooms, watching the bombs falling and buildings

burning while sipping their beer and munching potato chips. Americans

felt invulnerable, and the feeling of invulnerability led to a

diminished sense of responsibility. We could kick other people in the

teeth all day long, kill other people's wives and children, burn other

people's homes, and they couldn't do a thing about it. We didn't have to

worry about the consequences of our behavior.

Even Americans who disapproved strongly of the bombing of Belgrade by

Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton two years ago didn't disapprove as

strongly as they would have if it had seemed more real to them, instead

of just a spectacle on TV. What happened in New York and Washington this

month seemed very real indeed. What people saw on their television

screens -- and still are seeing as the wreckage continues to be cleared

and the corpses hauled away in body bags -- was a stark reminder of the

truth in the ancient adage: as ye sow, so shall ye reap.

That adage, of course, is about the last thing of which the media bosses

and their lackeys in the government wanted to be reminded. Mr. Bush

declared that what happened on September 11 was -- quote -- "an attack

against freedom and democracy," rather than retribution for anything we

had done. The people who seized the airliners and flew them into the

Pentagon and the World Trade Center are described as "cowards" and

characterized as hate-crazed loonies who hate America because America

stands for "freedom and democracy." Really: that's what the media bosses

and the politicians want us to believe.

And that's the excuse the Bush government is using for pressuring other

governments into collaborating in his new Persian Gulf war. This is not

a war to serve Israel or help the United States get revenge for the

September 11 attack, the Bush line goes; this is a war against the

enemies of freedom and democracy, wherever they may be. If you believe

in freedom and democracy then you must stand with us; those who are not

with us are with the terrorists.

No head of state anywhere believes Bush's baloney about the September 11

attack having been against "freedom and democracy." They all understand

with perfect clarity that it was a very specific retaliation for the

U.S. government's support of Israel's aggression in the Middle East. The

responses of other countries to Bush's efforts to build a coalition

reveal the worldwide spread of Jewish corruption. Some European

countries are nearly as much under Jewish media influence as the United

States and have governments nearly as corrupt. This is the case in the

United Kingdom and France, for example.

The situation is mixed in Islamic countries such as Pakistan and Turkey,

with corrupt governments but with populations relatively free of Jewish

media brainwashing. What we might hope for in Pakistan is an overthrow

of the present government; or, barring that, the large-scale sabotage of

any U.S. military effort mounted from Pakistan. Afghanistan, Iraq, and

Iran are almost the only countries showing any real character in

resisting the Bush government's efforts to build a pro-Israel coalition

in the Persian Gulf area under the pretext of waging war against the

enemies of freedom and democracy.

The most worrisome aspect of the present situation is the talk from Bush

administration officials about a full-scale war to take out Iran and

Iraq as well as Afghanistan, so that Israel will have a free hand in the

Middle East. That is the course that has been urged by Benyamin

Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon, and every other Jewish spokesman, both in

Israel and the United States, and the Bush administration is obediently

parroting that line. The banners on all of the TV news programs are

proclaiming a state of war. They don't report the news any longer; they

report the latest developments in -- quote -- "America's New War." That

is a deliberate effort to get the lemmings into a war mood. Of course,

Israel is never mentioned by those pushing for a full-scale war. The

purpose of the war has nothing to do with Israel, they would have us

believe; the war is to save freedom and democracy, and so we should wage

war not just against the people who attacked the United States on

September 11, but against all enemies of freedom and democracy. That's

the sort of lie that worked for two world wars in the past century, and

so the lemmings ought to go along with it again, they figure.

And if we believe the public opinion polls, they are right. The

intellectually challenged George Bush, who always has a sly little smirk

just about ready to break out whenever he's reciting his lines for the

TV cameras, has been portrayed by the media ever since September 11 as

the bold, determined, resolute leader of the nation, and he has the

approval of 90 per cent of the public. Furthermore, approximately 80 per

cent of the public will back him in a war against Afghanistan, and 70

per cent or so would like to see him take out Iraq while he's at it,

even though there's no indication Iraq had anything to do with the

September 11 attack. It really seems that the yahoo flag-wavers among

the lemmings have been absorbing the war-mongering propaganda of

Netanyahu and Sharon and the other Jews.

We ought to remind ourselves that this is the same American public that

gave Bill Clinton an overwhelming approval rating after he admitted

lying about his Oval Office affair with Monica Lewinsky. We also ought

always to be cautious in accepting the results of public opinion polls.

The Jews continuously sample public opinion on dozens of key issues, so

that the media can adjust their propaganda in order to keep opinion

moving in the way the Jews want it to move. If anything were to cause

public opinion to swing against Israel, however, they not only would

adjust their propaganda accordingly, they also would keep the negative

results strictly to themselves. They would tell Mr. Bush, -- quote --

"George, the latest polls show public opinion solidly in favor of

Israel, and the people will support a U.S. war against Israel's

enemies." Actually, in the present case, I have no reason to believe

that the opinion polls are not correct. The Jews are calling for a war,

the collaborators in our government are calling for a war, and the

lemmings are responding as they always have responded.

There are a couple of things that might derail the Jews' war plans. One

is the failure of the Bush government to build or to maintain its

coalition of collaborator governments in the Middle East. A popular

uprising in Pakistan might stiffen the spines of governments in several

other countries and cause them to reject collaboration as well. Without

land access to the countries the Jews want conquered, the Bush forces

will be restricted to aerial bombardment. They can kill a lot of people

and damage a lot of infrastructure that way, but they are not likely to

win a war.

Another thing which might put a monkey wrench in the war plans would be

more and larger strikes against the United States: that is, a

large-scale follow-up to the September 11 attack. Whether such a

follow-up has been prepared by the people who launched the September 11

attack -- or by others -- remains unknown at this time. The propaganda

of the media and of the Bush government is that the September 11 attack

helped to unify America, rouse our fighting spirit, and so forth. And

indeed, many people did run out and buy American flags. But there also

can be no doubt that many Americans have been unnerved by the September

11 attack.

As I mentioned at the beginning, what happened was a profound

psychological shock to many Americans who previously had felt

invulnerable. The collapse in the price of airline stocks is not due to

the loss of four aircraft or the expense of collecting fingernail

clippers and pocket knives from passengers; it is due to the fact that

many Americans are now afraid to fly.

If there is a large-scale follow-up to September 11 -- especially if it

comes in the form of a biological or chemical attack, with as many or

more casualties than the World Trade Center attack -- many Americans who

now are blindly following the party line on television may be ready to

break ranks and start thinking about why America is being attacked.

They'll want a better answer than the one they're getting from TV now:

namely, that the attack is because Osama bin Laden hates freedom and

democracy. A few of them will even begin to understand that the real

reason we are being attacked is because of our government's support for

Israel's atrocious behavior against its neighbors in the Middle East.

Well, I suppose that's a bit optimistic. Expecting Americans to begin

thinking is expecting too much. A large-scale follow-up to September 11

may cause panic, but probably not much understanding. It may make some

elements of the public more open to new ideas, but independent thinking

and understanding are fundamentally foreign to most of the public.

Today Sally Soccer-Mom and Joe Six-Pack don't have a clue about what's

really happening in their world, what the real issues are, and what's

really at stake. Sally and Joe always have been clueless, throughout all

of history. They are herd animals, and they know only what the herd

knows, care always and only about the things the herd cares about, cheer

always and only for whatever the herd is cheering for at the moment.

Let me give you one of those little capsule oversimplifications I'm fond

of. Although it is an oversimplification and is, therefore, not an exact

model of the real world, I find it very helpful in making sense out of

what's happening in the real world.

There are four basic types of people -- White people -- in the world:

First there are the Sally Soccer-Moms and the Joe Six-Packs. They

constitute about 95 per cent of the White population. Some are rich, and

some are poor; some are factory workers, and some are lawyers; some are

barely literate couch potatoes on welfare, and some are academics with

pretensions to intellectualism. What characterizes all of them is an

inability to think independently or to hold any opinion not held by the

herd. I often call them lemmings.

Second, there are the exploiters. They are rational people, who see the

world as it is and attempt to use the world -- including the rest of the

population -- for their own advantage. They recognize the lemmings for

what they are and manipulate them in order to use them, nearly always

through deception. Prior to the 20th century most of the exploiters have

been White people themselves: the leaders of the Church, the leading

members of the aristocracy, and the very wealthy -- the plutocrats --

for example. Exploiters have not necessarily been malevolent, nor have

they always been powerful. Aristocrats and plutocrats often have

advanced the interests of the herd while advancing their own interests.

What distinguishes exploiters is neither malevolence nor power, but

rather the ability to think independently and the placing of their

personal advantages ahead of everything else.

During roughly the past century an extremely dangerous transformation in

the racial nature of the exploiters has taken place. From nearly all

White, they have become substantially Jewish. The White exploiters,

instead of fighting off the exploitation of the White herd by Jews, have

made alliances with the Jews. They have made agreements with the Jews

for sharing the spoils. All of the top Jewish media bosses are

exploiters: Sumner Redstone, Michael Eisner, Gerald Levin, and the rest.

And so are White men like Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates.

Third, there are the Judases: White people who might be considered a

sub-type of the exploiters, but whose behavior is more in the nature of

knowingly cooperating with the exploiters or knowingly letting

themselves be used by the exploiters rather than engaging in

exploitation themselves. For the most part Judases are people who

understand the situation, more or less, and would be happy to be

exploiters but are not quite bright enough, tough enough, or energetic

enough, so they settle for collaboration. Many lower- and middle-echelon

Gentile media people fall into the Judas category, while other Gentile

media people -- especially those in the lowest echelon -- are merely

lemmings. The same can be said of politicians and bureaucrats. Bill

Clinton and George Bush are outstanding examples of Judases. Though

apparently in the top political echelon, neither has the qualities to be

a successful exploiter without Jewish backing. Clinton lacked the

self-discipline, and Bush lacks the intelligence. The ranks of the

bureaucracy, of the military leadership, and of the educational

establishment are filled with Judases and lemmings, with Judases

predominating in the upper ranks.

Fourth, there are the independent-minded people who understand much of

what is happening in the world -- that is, they are not lemmings -- and

are not inclined to be either exploiters or Judases. We'll call them

"observers." They make up somewhere between two and five per cent of the

White population. Observers are mainly interested in looking out for

themselves, but they're more concerned with the welfare of their fellows

than the exploiters are. They understand that as the herd fares, so fare

they. If the race goes down, everyone goes down with it. So they do feel

some sense of responsibility for what is happening in the world: just

not enough, in most cases.

I've always considered the observers the key element in our population:

certainly, the key element in getting the Jews off our backs and

regaining control of our destiny. Three of the four categories of people

in my oversimplified model understand the issues involved in what the

Bush government is doing now -- or at least they are capable of

understanding -- but the exploiters and the Judases don't care about the

things we care about. Only the observers -- two to five per cent of the

population -- are capable of understanding and caring. If something

happens to cause them to focus their minds on the simple fact that seven

thousand Americans were killed on September 11 as a direct consequence

of the Jewish control of the U.S. government -- seven thousand Americans

were killed because our government has for decades been used to further

the interests of Israel at the expense of the interests of the American

people -- if they will focus on that simple fact and also on the fact

that many more Americans are likely to die in the future if the Jewish

control of our government continues, perhaps some of them will put their

minds to the problem of breaking that control.

And so all of my own efforts have been directed toward helping the

observers to focus. I don't waste time now on the lemmings, because I

can't compete effectively with Hollywood and CNN for their attention --

although part of what I'm doing is building the media which will give us

the capability for competing in the future. I don't waste time on the

exploiters among my own people, because they won't break their alliances

with the Jews until they have been convinced that doing so will be to

their advantage, and the time when they can be convinced of that is

still a long way off. And I don't waste time on the Judases, because

such people aren't worth any time at all. The time will come for dealing

with them as they deserve, but that time isn't here quite yet.

But with the observers there is hope for doing things now, hope for

persuading some of them -- perhaps many of them -- that it is immoral

and irresponsible merely to sit and observe and do nothing while the

Jews and the Judases continue to use America, to use our people, for

their own purposes and in doing so to bring disaster after disaster down

on us and to insure a future of misery and shame for our children and

our grandchildren.

There is hardly anything more irresponsible than waging an unnecessary

war, hardly anything more reprehensible than waging a war for any reason

except to safeguard or promote the interests of one's own people. If

waging war against Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran were in the interests

of my people, then I would be for it.

You know, we've talked about this before, but it's worth reminding

ourselves again and again: there's more to the September 11 attack and

the Bush government's response to that attack than the simplistic

picture being presented to us by the government and the media. It's more

than a case of Osama bin Laden hit us, so now we're going to find him

and kill him. It's more than a case of we have been hurt by terrorists,

and so now we are going to wipe out the governments which make it

possible for terrorists to operate. If the U.S. government really

thought it worthwhile to wipe out the governments that sponsor terrorism

or harbor terrorists, the government of Israel should be the first one

to be wiped out. Israel has sponsored terrorism and assassination from

the beginning and still does. The current prime minister of Israel,

Ariel Sharon, is himself a professional terrorist who supervised the

massacre of thousands of Palestinian civilians in refugee camps in

Lebanon in 1982.

And it's not even a case of our excusing Israel's terrorism because

Israel is our friend. Israel is no friend of ours. Have we forgotten

Israel's terrorist attack on the USS Liberty, when the Israeli

government thought it would sink our ship, machine-gun everyone in the

Liberty's lifeboats, and then blame it on the Egyptians? The Israelis

almost got away with that.

No, terrorism is a hazard inherent in what the world has become.

Americans must deal with it as best they can, and that means dealing

with it intelligently; that means among other things understanding why

we have been attacked when we become the victims of terrorism, not

stupidly accepting the claim that it is because the terrorists hate our

"freedom and democracy" and then running off to start a new war on that

basis.

Finally, the most important thing for observers to focus on is this: the

calamity that befell America on September 11 was the consequence of our

having lost control of our own government. We want to avoid future

terror attacks, of course. But more important than that -- more

important than anything else -- is regaining control of our government

and never again permitting another country or another people to use us

for their own purposes.

Thanks for being with me again today.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

2001 National Vanguard Books

http://www.natvan.com/pub/2001/100601.txt

American Dissident Voices Broadcast of October 6, 2001

America's Real Enemies

By Dr. William Pierce

Hello!

Watching mainstream television news programs these days is a fascinating

experience -- and an enormously educational experience for those

Americans able to read between the lines. CNN Headline News still

carries the red, white, and blue banner "America's New War" in a

transparently obvious effort to build public support for a full-scale

war against Israel's enemies rather than a simple punitive expedition

against the group that organized the September 11 attack on New York and

Washington. Fox News, which is heavy on interviews with bureaucrats,

diplomats, generals, and the like, slants its interviewee choices and

the substance of the interviews to build public support in the same

direction.

There are plenty of knowledgeable Americans who are solidly against

dragging America into a war to clean up the Middle East for the benefit

of Israel, but they have no voice in the mainstream news media. The

people whose opinions are heard by the lemmings want everyone to believe

that the failure of the United States to take out Iraq and Iran now, in

the wake of the September 11 attack, will reveal us to the world as

spineless wimps just asking for another terrorist attack. They tell us

that every patriot should be in favor of a full-scale war against every

country in the Middle East that these pro-Israel hawks label as an enemy

of "freedom and democracy." And there are lots of reports on public

opinion polls aimed at convincing the lemmings that the public really

wants a full-scale war.

To me the interesting thing about this media effort is its obviousness.

It is so blatant that it should be quite clear to anyone able to observe

it with detachment: the media bosses want a war; the media deliberately

are pushing public opinion toward approval for a major war. Even clearer

is the lesson to be drawn from the way the news media avoid the obvious

questions: Why were we attacked? Did our government's policies in the

Middle East provoke the attack? If so, should we re-examine these

policies and perhaps change them, regardless of what we do to punish the

attackers? The media people and the "experts" they've been interviewing

shrink from such questions like a vampire shrinks from a crucifix. Any

sensible person would ask such questions, but the media and the people

they interview don't. Fascinating!

The most interesting people to watch giving their opinions in the media

are the Gentile neo-conservatives: the Jeanne Kirkpatricks, the George

Wills, the Jack Kemps, the William Buckleys, the Rush Limbaughs. These

are people -- writers, editors, bureaucrats, lecture-circuit types --

who make a pretense of conservatism and patriotism, and who keep the

businessman/Republican/flag-waving side of the public in line. They earn

their living by keeping their noses up under the Jews' coattails at all

times. They all understand that their magazines would disappear from the

newsstands, that their radio sponsors would cease being sponsors, and

that there would be no more lecture invitations if they failed to follow

the Jewish party line. They are a rabid bunch of attack dogs for the

Jews without any real patriotism or any sense of shame at all. Every one

of them is now beating the war drums on behalf of Israel and calling for

the annihilation of Israel's enemies.

These Gentile attack dogs for the Jews really have no opinions of their

own: they simply follow the party line which is laid down by Jews, most

of whom are behind the scenes. During the Clinton administration I

remarked more than once that it was the most Jewish government America

ever had had: a Jewish secretary of state, a Jewish secretary of

defense, a Jewish secretary of the Treasury, a Jewish secretary of

agriculture, two Jewish Supreme Court justices, a Jewish national

security adviser, a Jewish ambassador to the United Nations, and

hundreds of other Jews appointed by Clinton to powerful government

positions.

George Bush's government is different. The people out front, in the

public's eye, are Gentiles -- of a sort: a mulatto secretary of state, a

White Gentile secretary of defense, a Negress as a national security

adviser, a White Gentile Treasury secretary -- and, except for Federal

Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, no really prominent Jews. That is,

there are few Jews out front, where they can be seen. But the Jews are

there, just as in the Clinton government, but working behind the scenes.

There's Richard Perle, who's been gnawing at America's foundations since

the Nixon days, as one of Bush's principal advisers on military policy,

for example. And there's Paul Wolfowitz, nominally the deputy secretary

of defense, but in reality more influential in defense policy than his

nominal superior, Donald Rumsfeld. Wolfowitz and Perle both judge every

policy by the single criterion, "Is it good for the Jews?" And both are

relentless and outspoken advocates of the destruction of Iraq and Iran,

although there is no evidence that either of those countries had

anything to do with the September 11 attack. For Perle and Wolfowitz it

is sufficient that those countries are enemies of Israel. In a top-level

military strategy briefing for Bush on September 13, Wolfowitz urged --

quote -- "ending states who sponsor terrorism." That's still the

position of Perle and Wolfowitz and all of their neo-conservative camp

followers.

How do you "end a state"? What happens to the people?

Hey, the people of Iraq and Iran aren't Jews, so don't worry about it!

What are you, some kind of bleeding-heart, liberal wimp? Don't ask

questions, just do it!

And, of course, no one among all of these bloodthirsty, neo-con

warmongers even hints at putting Israel on the list of "states who

sponsor terrorism" and which, therefore, needs to be "ended." Have you

ever heard of Mossad? That's not just some rogue group of assassins and

terrorists which operates without the sanction of the Israeli

government. It's an agency of the Israeli government. It's part of the

government of Israel. Mossad sends out its murder squads all over the

world to kill people the Israeli government doesn't like. Usually they

don't get caught, or if they do the media hush it up. But they've been

caught shooting a Moroccan with a silenced pistol in Norway, squirting

poison in the ear of a Muslim religious leader in Jordan, putting bombs

in the hotel rooms of Arab diplomats in Syria. They've shot down

civilian airliners if there was someone aboard they didn't like. They

send assassins dressed as Arabs into Palestinian towns to murder

Palestinian leaders in their homes in the dead of night. In 1981 Israeli

aircraft launched a surprise bombing raid on Baghdad to destroy a

research center there.

Israel has had several prime ministers who were professional terrorists

before they went into politics, including Menachem Begin, Ehud Barak,

and Ariel Sharon, the current prime minister. The first leaders of the

state of Israel were terrorists who carried out the terror bombing of

the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 91 people. Ever hear

of letter bombs? They are an Israeli invention. The Mossad has sent

hundreds of letter bombs to scientists, journalists, and academics in

Egypt, Syria, and other countries to kill and terrorize Israel's

opponents.

Indeed, there are states in the Middle East which sponsor terrorism, in

some cases because they have no other way of fighting back against their

oppressors. But Israel has engaged in far more state-sponsored terrorism

than any other state in the region. And yet the "experts" who speak

grimly on American television about "ending states who sponsor

terrorism" pretend as if they have never heard of Israeli terrorism.

As I said, all of this is painfully obvious, more obvious than Jewish

television propaganda has been for a long time. After the Oklahoma City

bombing in 1995, the unanimous refusal of the controlled media and the

government to acknowledge that bombing as the outraged response of one

patriot to the Clinton government's massacre of innocents in the Branch

Davidian church in Waco two years earlier, and instead to attempt to

blame militias and political dissidents generally, was a pretty

transparent exercise in deceitful propaganda. But the present attempt by

the media and the government to deflect blame for September 11 from our

country's blind support for Israel is even more obvious. It provides a

wonderful education for those observers capable of being educated.

The effect on the general public of the pro-war propaganda today is

somewhat less salutary but still interesting. The lemmings are

responding as expected, but there is more diversity in the response of

the public than the media bosses like. I have a Jewish Telegraphic

Agency report on my desk showing the results of public opinion polls

taken in the United States a few days ago. The September 28 JTA report

is headed "Polls following terror attacks on U.S. give Israel high

marks." The first part of the report gives the depressing information we

expect. A poll of 1,011 Americans conducted by the Institute for Jewish

and Community Research and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the

Hudson Institute found that 92 per cent of those questioned endorse --

quote -- "full cooperation" between the United States and Israel in

combating terrorism. The president of the Institute for Jewish and

Community Research, Gary Tobin, was quoted, and I quote: "That's as

close to unanimous as you'll ever get in a national poll. It means that

the American public is almost completely behind Israel and American

support for Israel and American cooperation for Israel." -- end quote --

Well, the support is not quite as nearly unanimous as Mr. Tobin would

have us believe, but we'll get to that in a minute.

A second poll of 1,032 Americans, conducted by CNN, USA Today, and

Gallup, found 55 per cent of Americans saying they back Israel in its

conflict with the Palestinians, while only seven per cent back the

Palestinians. The pro-Israel results are up from about 40 per cent

before September 11, while the pro-Palestinian results remained

relatively unchanged. The JTA report quotes Tim Wuliger, president of

the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the huge and powerful

pro-Israel lobby feared by every politician in Washington. "These polls

demonstrate the solidarity between Americans and Israelis," Wuliger

said. "In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on America,

Americans understand that we should support another country which has

been relentlessly attacked by terrorists and which shares our values of

democracy, sanctity of human life, and tolerance for differences in

personal beliefs." Really, that's what the Jew said: Israel, where

collective punishment and the torture and killing of prisoners are

government policy -- Israel, the world capital of the White slave trade,

where buying and selling kidnapped Gentile women as sex slaves is legal

-- is a country that respects the "sanctity of human life." What Wuliger

forgot to mention is that religious Jews believe that only Jews are

human.

The JTA report also quotes David Makofsky, of the Washington Institute

for Near East Policy, another pro-Israel group. Makofsky says that the

rise in sympathy for the Jewish state is a direct result of Americans

experiencing firsthand the threat of terrorism that has plagued Israel.

"Americans identify with Israel's plight," he said.

Could it possibly be that the way the Jewish news media present the news

to the American people, always representing the efforts of Palestinians

attempting to regain their country as "terrorism" and the efforts of the

Israelis to repress them as "self-defense," has something to do with the

way Americans view the situation in the Middle East?

Well, of course, it does. Nevertheless, a larger portion of the American

public than I would have guessed apparently haven't been fooled by the

spin put on the news by the controlled media. The Jewish poll I just

cited, which showed 92 per cent of the public agreeing that the United

States should cooperate with Israel in combating terrorism, found that

slightly more than 20 per cent of the respondents blamed the September

attack on U.S. support for Israel. The implication is that many of those

who understand that U.S. support for Israel was the cause of the attack

still are willing to collaborate with Israel. In any case, the 20 per

cent figure is encouraging. Also encouraging is the finding that those

most likely to blame Israel are young people and people with relatively

high incomes.

Another finding of the same poll is that 12 per cent of the public

believe that we now should distance ourselves from Israel, while 74 per

cent believe that we should not, with the pro-Israel respondents

concentrated in the Bible Belt, where many primitive Christians actually

accept the claim of the Jews to be God's Chosen People. Remember, these

are the findings of a poll taken by a Jewish organization and reported

by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, where the motive is to absolve Israel

of blame and show maximum U.S. support for the Jewish state.

A separate poll taken by Time and CNN reports that 21 per cent of the

respondents feel less favorable toward Israel after the attack, while

only 10 per cent feel more favorable. The 21 per cent figure in this

poll is consistent with the finding of the Jewish poll that 20 per cent

of the public blame the attack on U.S. support for Israel.

Polls can be tricky, with the results very much dependent on the exact

wording of the questions, but certainly the polls cited in the JTA

report are encouraging, indicating that a significant portion of the

public is able to see the obvious. Perhaps lemmings make up only about

80 per cent of the population instead of the 95 per cent I have

estimated in the past.

The unfortunate fact remains, however, that although approximately one

in every five Americans understands that the September 11 attack was the

consequence of our government's support for Israel's aggression in the

Middle East, one never would guess that from watching television news,

where the pretense is rigidly maintained that U.S. support for Israel

had nothing to do with the attack: that it was an attack by people who

simply hate our "freedom and democracy," as George Bush puts it. Not one

of the "experts" being interviewed daily on television will give the

slightest hint that anyone except a few "haters" and "extremists"

believes otherwise. That must be intimidating to the enlightened 20 per

cent: no one wants to be labeled a "hater" or an "extremist." And, of

course, it's intended to be intimidating; it's intended to keep the one

in five who understands from explaining the facts to the four in five

who don't.

It will, of course, be yet another tragedy for Americans if we let

ourselves be lied into another war to advance the interests of the Jews

at the expense of our own. There is an even greater tragedy looming than

another war, however: that is the loss of our most fundamental freedoms.

The same people who are using the September 11 attack as a pretext to

push America into a full-scale war on behalf of Israel also are using it

as a pretext to stifle dissent. They have the lemmings under control,

but they're worried about that 20 per cent or so of the population who

aren't buying the television propaganda that the attack was "unprovoked"

and that it was an attack on "freedom and democracy." They want to use

the power of government to shut these people up, so that they can't

influence others.

Intimidation through propaganda is a powerful weapon in the hands of the

warmongers. Perhaps you remember how it was during the previous Persian

Gulf war, ten years ago. Flag-waving yahoos were ready to beat up anyone

who didn't seem an enthusiastic enough supporter of the war effort.

Anyone who questioned America's terror-bombing of Baghdad was looked at

with scorn and considered a subversive. The lemmings all tied yellow

ribbons to everything in sight -- parking meters, door knobs, their car

antennas, the fences around their yards, the columns on their front

porches -- lest anyone suspect that they weren't gung ho to kill as many

Iraqis as possible.

The same war fever is being encouraged by the media and the government

today. But that's not enough to satisfy the warmongers, because some

people just aren't intimidated. The warmongers want to lock those people

up. So-called "conservatives" in our government have wanted for years to

have the power to silence troublemakers, dissidents, anyone who refused

to march in lockstep with everyone else. Our present attorney general,

John Ashcroft, is one of the worst of these. They want new laws to

permit them to suppress any speech or opinion or activity they don't

like. Believe me, despite their claims of support for freedom and the

Bill of Rights, these lying bastards do want to take away our freedom.

They are far more dangerous enemies of America's freedom than Osama bin

Laden could ever hope to be.

They are disguising their fight against our freedom as a fight against

terrorism. They already are ramming new laws through state legislatures,

and they certainly will be pushing hard for new Federal laws as well.

They want laws that not only will give the FBI and other secret police

agencies additional powers to tap people's telephones and read their

e-mail and scrutinize their bank records, but will broaden the

definition of "terrorism" greatly. They want laws that will define as a

'terrorist" anyone who speaks in favor of or helps support a person who

has been labeled by the government a "terrorist," or an organization

which has been labeled a "terrorist organization." They want laws that

will make such a person subject to the death penalty. And who will

decide which organizations are "terrorist organizations"?

Hey, you don't have to worry about that! Mr. Wolfowitz and his helpers

in the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center will

make a list. Attorney General Ashcroft will endorse the list. And if

someone is charged under the law with being a terrorist, and you don't

think he is and you give him a donation to help him hire a lawyer to

defend himself, you have just given money to a terrorist and will be

charged with being a terrorist yourself. Pretty slick, eh?

The people who are pushing for these new laws, ostensibly to protect

Americans from terrorism, are the same people who for more than a decade

have been backing "hate crime" and "speech crime" laws. All of the laws,

whether ostensibly against "hate" or against "terrorism," have exactly

the same purpose, and it's not really about terrorism at all: it is to

silence dissenters, to silence people with Politically Incorrect ideas.

The Jews and their Gentile hangers-on are afraid that the 20 per cent of

the public that doesn't believe the propaganda coming from television

will be able to influence the other 80 per cent if they aren't muzzled.

The people in New York and Hollywood and Washington who truly hate

America's freedom are hell bent on using the tragedy of September 11 as

an excuse to stamp out that freedom. They are America's real enemies.

They are the ones against whom we should wage an all-out war, until the

last of them has been annihilated.

Thanks for being with me again today.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

2001 National Vanguard Books

- wrote:

<pages of drivel snipped>

Zzzzzzzz...

--

Notan

Notan <notan@ddressthatcanbespammed> wrote:

> Zzzzzzzz...

If you snooze, you lose.

In article <tifdv21hk4tfga1t84u3aip95411b0ttfr@4ax.com>, Scotius wrote:

>

> The first I heard of the supposed allegation that Israelis

> knew in advance was that William Pierce of the neo nazi National

> Alliance claimed there were Israeli students "high fiving" after the

> planes hit the towers, but Pierce didn't remind anyone to take a look

> at his internet radio broadcast of September 8th, 2001, where he gave

> his followers warning that something was going to happen on 911. That,

> my friend, is chutzpah.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. It didn't take a

genius to predict the events of Sept 2001. One of the WTC

parking garage bombers was up for sentencing that day.

Any observer of world politics knew the radical fringe of

political Islam is full of cults weirder and wackier than

the Branch Davidians, and that the World Trade Center

(and Wall Street) was the devil's headquarters on earth in

some of those cults.

CNN ran years-old tape of a Lebanese street protest on the

afternoon of 9-11, and said it was Palestinians celebrating

the day's events. All channels of our local TV news repeated

that report without question. All news media were full of

lies and speculation that day, why would Natvan hate radio

be any different?

> Some while later the FBI announced that they had reason to

> believe that neo nazis and some terrorist groups from Arabia were

> allied. Duh!

News Flash! FBI has reason to believe bears poop in the forest

and the Pope is Catholic. Neonazy hate groups will take any

allies they can find, including pseudo islamic hate groups.

Cameron

- wrote:

> Notan <notan@ddressthatcanbespammed> wrote:

>> Zzzzzzzz...

>

>

> If you snooze, you lose.

Nothing to lose, if it's nothing but ignorant rhetoric.

--

Notan

On Mon, 12 Mar 2007 02:51:52 GMT, jazzerciser@hotmail.com (-) wrote:

>

>March 7, 2007

>A CounterPunch Special Investigation

>

>

>High-Fivers and Art Student Spies

>What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?

They probably knew that the leader of the neo nazi "National

Alliance" in the US (William Pierce) gave his followers warning on

September 8th that an attack was going to occur on 911.

>

>By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

>

>

>On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, an FBI bulletin known as a

>BOLO -- "be on lookout" -- was issued with regard to three suspicious

>men who that morning were seen leaving the New Jersey waterfront

>minutes after the first plane hit World Trade Center 1. Law

>enforcement officers across the New York-New Jersey area were warned

>in the radio dispatch to watch for a "vehicle possibly related to New

>York terrorist attack":

>

> White, 2000 Chevrolet van with 'Urban Moving Systems'

> sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ,

> at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade

> Center Three individuals with van were seen celebrating

> after initial impact and subsequent explosion. FBI Newark

> Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold

> for prints and detain individuals.

William Pierce mentioned that, but didn't remind anyone of his

September 8th broadcast, wherein he said "...some of these brainwashed

lemmings finding National Alliance literature, might be tempted to RUN

FOR COVER, AND DIAL 911". Yes, he knew. Did the Israelis tell him?

Haha idiot. Your neo nazi hero was caught, and you've been too.

>

>At 3:56 p.m., twenty-five minutes after the issuance of the FBI BOLO,

>officers with the East Rutherford Police Department stopped the

>commercial moving van through a trace on the plates. According to the

>police report, Officer Scott DeCarlo and Sgt. Dennis Rivelli

>approached the stopped van, demanding that the driver exit the

>vehicle. The driver, 23-year-old Sivan Kurzberg, refused and "was

>asked several more times [but] appeared to be fumbling with a black

>leather fanny pouch type of bag". With guns drawn, the police then

>"physically removed" Kurzberg, while four other men -- two more men

>had apparently joined the group since the morning -- were also removed

>from the van, handcuffed, placed on the grass median and read their

>Miranda rights.

>

>They had not been told the reasons for their arrest. Yet, according to

>DeCarlo's report, "this officer was told without question by the

>driver [sivan Kurzberg],'We are Israeli. We are not your problem.Your

>problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.'" Another

>of the five Israelis, again without prompting, told Officer DeCarlo --

>falsely -- that "we were on the West Side Highway in New York City

>during the incident". From inside the vehicle the officers, who were

>quickly joined by agents from the FBI, retrieved multiple passports

>and $4,700 in cash stuffed in a sock. According to New Jersey's Bergen

>Record, which on September 12 reported the arrest of the five

>Israelis, an investigator high up in the Bergen County law enforcement

>hierarchy stated that officers had also discovered in the vehicle

>"maps of the city with certain places highlighted. It looked like

>they're hooked in with this", the source told the Record, referring to

>the 9/11 attacks. "It looked like they knew what was going to happen

>when they were at Liberty State Park."

Well, let's suppose then that these guys were some religious

zealots from Israel... the kind who believe that whatever makes

terrorists look bad is good for them. Okay then, that's five nutcases.

Are we to also suppose that no one in Israel thought it would be a bad

thing if their only patron superpower was hit with an economy

threatening attack?

How was it that a neo nazi was able to give his followers

advance warning on September 8th 2001, of the attacks to come on 911?

Answer that, or shut yer yap - Got it bitchboy?

>

>The five men were indeed Israeli citizens. They claimed to be in the

>country working as movers for Urban Moving Systems Inc., which

>maintained a warehouse and office in Weehawken, New Jersey. They were

>held for 71 days in a federal detention center in Brooklyn, New York,

>during which time they were repeatedly interrogated by FBI and CIA

>counterterrorism teams, who referred to the men as the "high-fivers"

>for their celebratory behavior on the New Jersey waterfront. Some were

>placed in solitary confinement for at least forty days; some were

>given as many as seven liedetector tests. One of the Israelis, Paul

>Kurzberg, brother of Sivan, refused to take a lie-detector test for

>ten weeks. Then he failed it.

>

>Meanwhile, two days after the men were picked up, the owner of Urban

>Moving Systems, Dominik Suter, a 31- year-old Israeli national,

>abandoned his business and fled the United States for Israel. Suter's

>departure was abrupt, leaving behind coffee cups, sandwiches, cell

>phones and computers strewn on office tables and thousands of dollars

>of goods in storage. Suter was later placed on the same FBI suspect

>list as 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and other hijackers and

>suspected al-Qaeda sympathizers, suggesting that U.S. authorities felt

>Suter may have known something about the attacks. The suspicion, as

>the investigation unfolded, was that the men working for Urban Moving

>Systems were spies. Who exactly was handling them, and who or what

>they were targeting, was as yet uncertain.

>

>It was New York's venerable Jewish weekly The Forward that broke this

>story in the spring of 2002, after months of footwork. The Forward

>reported that the FBI had finally concluded that at least two of the

>men were agents working for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence

>agency, and that Urban Moving Systems, the ostensible employer of the

>five Israelis, was a front operation. Two former CIA officers

>confirmed this to me, noting that movers' vans are a common

>intelligence cover. The Forward also noted that the Israeli government

>itself admitted that the men were spies. A "former high-ranking

>American intelligence official", who said he was "regularly briefed on

>the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials", told

>reporter Marc Perelman that after American authorities confronted

>Jerusalem at the end of 2001, the Israeli government "acknowledged the

>operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington".

>Today, Perelman stands by his reporting. I asked him if his sources in

>the Mossad denied the story. "Nobody stopped talking to me", he said.

>

>In June 2002, ABC News' 20/20 followed up with its own investigation

>into the matter, coming to the same conclusion as The Forward. Vincent

>Cannistraro, former chief of operations for counterterrorism with the

>CIA, told 20/20 that some of the names of the five men appeared as

>hits in searches of an FBI national intelligence database. Cannistraro

>told me that the question that most troubled FBI agents in the weeks

>and months after 9/11 was whether the Israelis had arrived at the site

>of their "celebration" with foreknowledge of the attack to come. From

>the beginning, "the FBI investigation operated on the premise that the

>Israelis had foreknowledge", according to Cannistraro. A second former

>CIA counterterrorism officer who closely followed the case, but who

>spoke on condition of anonymity, told me that investigators were

>pursuing two theories. "One story was that [the Israelis] appeared at

>Liberty State Park very quickly after the first plane hit. The other

>was that they were at the park location already". Either way,

>investigators wanted to know exactly what the men were expecting when

>they got there.

>

>Before such issues had been fully explored, however, the investigation

>was shut down. Following what ABC News reported were "high-level

>negotiations between Israeli and U.S. government officials", a

>settlement was reached in the case of the five Urban Moving Systems

>suspects. Intense political pressure apparently had been brought to

>bear. The reputable Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported that by the last

>week of October 2001, some six weeks after the men had been detained,

>Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and two unidentified

>"prominent New York congressmen" were lobbying heavily for their

>release. According to a source at ABC News close to the 20/20 report,

>high-profile criminal lawyer Alan Dershowitz also stepped in as a

>negotiator on behalf of the men to smooth out differences with the

>U.S. government. (Dershowitz declined to comment for this article.)

>And so, at the end of November 2001, for reasons that only noted they

>had been working in the country illegally as movers, in violation of

>their visas, the men were flown home to Israel.

>

>Today, the crucial questions raised by this matter remain unanswered.

>There is sufficient reason -- from news reports, statements by former

>intelligence officials, an array of circumstantial evidence, and the

>reported acknowledgment by the Israeli government -- to believe that

>in the months before 9/11, Israel was running an active spy network

>inside the United States, with Muslim extremists as the target. Given

>Israel's concerns about Islamic terrorism as well as its long history

>of spying on U.S. soil, this does not come entirely as a shock. What's

>incendiary is the idea -- supported, though not proven, by several

>pieces of evidence -- that the Israelis did learn something about 9/11

>in advance but failed to share all of what they knew with American

>officials. The questions are disturbing enough to warrant a

>Congressional investigation.

>

>Yet none of this information found its way into Congress's joint

>committee report on the attacks, and it was not even tangentially

>referenced in the nearly 600 pages of the 9/11 Commission's final

>report. Nor would a single major media outlet track the revelations of

>The Forward and ABC News to investigate further. "There weren't even

>stories saying it was bullshit", says The Forward's Perelman.

>"Honestly, I was surprised". Instead, the story disappeared into the

>welter of anti-Israel 9/11 conspiracy theories.

>

>It's no small boon to the U.S. government that the story of

>9/11-related Israeli espionage has been thus relegated: the story

>doesn't fit in the clean lines of the official narrative of the

>attacks. It brings up concerns not only about Israel's obligation not

>to spy inside the borders of the United States, its major benefactor,

>but about its possible failure to have provided the U.S. adequate

>warning of an impending devastating attack on American soil.

>Furthermore, the available evidence undermines the carefully

>cultivated image of sanctity that defines the U.S.- Israel

>relationship. These are all factors that help explain the story's

>disappearance, and they are compelling reasons to revisit it now.

>

>

>

>Torpedoing the FBI Probe

>

>All five future hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which rammed

>the Pentagon, maintained addresses or were active within a six-mile

>radius of towns associated with the Israelis employed at Urban Moving

>Systems. Hudson and Bergen counties, the areas where the Israelis were

>allegedly conducting surveillance, were a central staging ground for

>the hijackers of Flight 77 and their fellow al-Qaeda operatives.

>Mohammed Atta maintained a mail-drop address and visited friends in

>northern New Jersey; his contacts there included Hani Hanjour, the

>suicide pilot for Flight 77, and Majed Moqed, one of the strongmen who

>backed Hanjour in the seizing of the plane. Could the Israelis, with

>or without knowledge of the terrorists' plans, have been tracking the

>men who were soon to hijack Flight 77?

>

>In public statements, both the Israeli government and the FBI have

>denied that the Urban Moving Systems men were involved in an

>intelligence operation in the United States. "No evidence recovered

>suggested any of these Israelis had prior knowledge of the 9/11

>attack, and these Israelis are not suspected of working for Mossad",

>FBI spokesman Jim Margolin told me. (The Israeli embassy did not

>respond to questions for this article.) According to the source at ABC

>News, FBI investigators chafed at the denials from their higher-ups.

>"There is a lot of frustration inside the bureau about this case", the

>source told me. "They feel the higher echelons torpedoed the

>investigation into the Israeli New Jersey cell. Leads were not fully

>investigated". Among those lost leads was the figure of Dominik Suter,

>whom the U.S. authorities apparently never attempted to contact.

>Intelligence expert and author James Bamford told me there was similar

>frustration within the CIA: "People I've talked to at the CIA were

>outraged at what was going on. They thought it was outrageous that

>there hadn't been a real investigation, that the facts were hanging

>out there without any conclusion."

>

>However, what was "absolutely certain", according to Vincent

>Cannistraro, was that the five Israelis formed part of a surveillance

>network in the New York- New Jersey area. The network's purpose was to

>track radical Islamic extremists and/or supporters of militant

>Palestinian groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The former CIA

>counterterrorism officer who spoke anonymously told me that FBI

>investigators determined that the suspect Israelis were serving as

>Arabic-speaking linguists "running technical operations" in northern

>New Jersey's extensive Muslim communities. The former CIA officer said

>the operations included taps on telephones, placement of microphones

>in rooms and mobile surveillance. The source at ABC News agreed: "Our

>conclusion was that they were Arab linguists involved in monitoring

>operations, i.e., electronic surveillance. People at FBI concur with

>this". The ABC News source added, "What we heard was that the Israelis

>may have picked up chatter that something was going to happen on the

>morning of 9/11".

>

>The former CIA counterterrorism officer told me: "There was no

>question but that [the order to close down the investigation] came

>from the White House. It was immediately assumed at CIA headquarters

>that this basically was going to be a cover-up so that the Israelis

>would not be implicated in any way in 9/11. Bear in mind that this was

>a political issue, not a law enforcement or intelligence issue. If

>somebody says we don't want the Israelis implicated in this -- we know

>that they've been spying the hell out of us, we know that they

>possibly had information in advance of the attacks, but this would be

>a political nightmare to deal with."

>

>

>

>The Israeli "Art Student" Spies

>

>There is a second piece of evidence that suggests Israeli operatives

>were spying on al-Qaeda in the United States. It is writ in the

>peculiar tale of the Israeli "art students", detailed by this reporter

>for Salon.com in 2002, following the leaking of an internal memo

>circulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration's Office of Security

>Programs. The June 2001 memo, issued three months before the 9/11

>attacks, reported that more than 120 young Israeli citizens, posing as

>art students and peddling cheap paintings, had been repeatedly -- and

>seemingly inexplicably -- attempting to penetrate DEA offices and

>other law enforcement and Defense Department offices across the

>country. The DEA report stated that the Israelis may have been engaged

>in "an organized intelligence gathering activity", but to what end,

>U.S. investigators, in June 2001, could not determine. The memo

>briefly floated the possibility that the Israelis were engaged in

>trafficking the drug ecstasy. According to the memo, "the most

>activity [was] reported in the state of Florida" during the first half

>of 2001, where the town of Hollywood appeared to be "a central point

>for these individuals with several having addresses in this area".

>

>In retrospect, the fact that a large number of "art students" operated

>out of Hollywood is intriguing, to say the least. During 2001, the

>city, just north of Miami, was a hotbed of al-Qaeda activity and

>served as one of the chief staging grounds for the hijacking of the

>World Trade Center planes and the Pennsylvania plane; it was home to

>fifteen of the nineteen future hijackers, nine in Hollywood and six in

>the surrounding area. Among the 120 suspected Israeli spies posing as

>art students, more than thirty lived in the Hollywood area, ten in

>Hollywood proper. As noted in the DEA report, many of these young men

>and women had training as intelligence and electronic intercept

>officers in the Israeli military -- training and experience far beyond

>the compulsory service mandated by Israeli law. Their "traveling in

>the U.S. selling art seem[ed] not to fit their background", according

>to the DEA report.

>

>One "art student" was a former Israeli military intelligence officer

>named Hanan Serfaty, who rented two Hollywood apartments close to the

>mail drop and apartment of Mohammed Atta and four other hijackers.

>Serfaty was moving large amounts of cash: he carried bank slips

>showing more than $100,000 deposited from December 2000 through the

>first quarter of 2001; other bank slips showed withdrawals for about

>$80,000 during the same period. Serfaty's apartments, serving as crash

>pads for at least two other "art students", were located at 4220

>Sheridan Street and 701 South 21st Avenue. Lead hijacker Mohammed

>Atta's mail drop was at 3389 Sheridan Street--approximately 2,700 feet

>from Serfaty's Sheridan Street apartment. Both Atta and Marwan

>al-Shehhi, the suicide pilot on United Airlines Flight 175, which

>smashed into World Trade Center 2, lived in a rented apartment at 1818

>Jackson Street, some 1,800 feet from Serfaty's South 21st Avenue

>apartment.

>

>In fact, an improbable series of coincidences emerges from a close

>reading of the 2001 DEA memo, the 9/11 Commission's staff statements

>and final report, FBI and Justice Department watch lists, hijacker

>timelines compiled by major media and statements by local, state and

>federal law enforcement personnel. In at least six urban centers,

>suspected Israeli spies and 9/11 hijackers and/or al-Qaeda-connected

>suspects lived and operated near one another, in some cases less than

>half a mile apart, for various periods during 2000-01 in the run-up to

>the attacks. In addition to northern New Jersey and Hollywood,

>Florida, these centers included Arlington and Fredericksburg,

>Virginia; Atlanta; Oklahoma City; Los Angeles; and San Diego.

>

>Israeli "art students" also lived close to terror suspects in and

>around Dallas, Texas. A 25-year-old "art student" named Michael

>Calmanovic, arrested and questioned by Texas-based DEA officers in

>April 2001, maintained a mail drop at 3575 North Beltline Road, less

>than a thousand feet from the 4045 North Beltline Road apartment of

>Ahmed Khalefa, an FBI terror suspect. Dallas and its environs,

>especially the town of Richardson, Texas, throbbed with "art student"

>activity. Richardson is notable as the home of the Holy Land

>Foundation, an Islamic charity designated as a terrorist funder by the

>European Union and U.S. government in December 2001. Sources in 2002

>told The Forward, in a report unrelated to the question of the "art

>students", that "Israeli intelligence played a key role in helping the

>Bush administration to crack down on Islamic charities suspected of

>funneling money to terrorist groups, most notably the Richardson,

>Texas-based Holy Land Foundation, last December [2001]".

>

>It's plausible that the intelligence prompting the shutdown of the

>Holy Land Foundation came from "art student" spies in the Richardson area.

>

>Others among the "art students" had specific backgrounds in electronic

>surveillance or military intelligence, or were associated with Israeli

>wiretapping and surveillance firms, which prompted further concerns

>among U.S. investigators. DEA agents described Michael Calmanovic, for

>example, as "a recently discharged electronic intercept operator for

>the Israeli military". Lior Baram, questioned near Hollywood, Fla., in

>January 2001, said he had served two years in Israeli intelligence

>"working with classified information". Hanan Serfaty, who maintained

>the Hollywood apartments near Atta and his cohorts, served in the

>Israeli military between the ages of 18 and 21. Serfaty refused to

>disclose his activities between the ages of 21 and 24, including his

>activities since arriving in the U.S.A. in 2000. The French daily Le

>Monde meanwhile reported that six "art students" were apparently using

>cell phones that had been purchased by a former Israeli vice consul in

>the U.S.A.

>

>Suspected Israeli spy Tomer Ben Dor, questioned at Dallas-Fort Worth

>Airport in May 2001, worked for the Israeli wiretapping and electronic

>eavesdropping company NICE Systems Ltd. (NICE Systems' American

>subsidiary, NICE Systems Inc., is located in Rutherford, New Jersey,

>not far from the East Rutherford site where the five Israeli "movers"

>were arrested on the afternoon of September 11.) Ben Dor carried in

>his luggage a print-out of a computer file that referred to "DEA

>Groups". How he acquired information about so-called "DEA Groups" --

>via, for example, his own employment with an Israeli wiretapping

>company -- was never determined, according to DEA documents.

>

>"Art student" Michal Gal, arrested by DEA investigators in Irving,

>Texas, in the spring of 2001, was released on a $10,000 cash bond

>posted by Ophir Baer, an employee of the Israeli telecommunications

>software company Amdocs Inc., which provides phone-billing technology

>to clients that include some of the largest phone companies in the

>United States as well as U.S. government agencies. Amdocs, whose

>executive board has been heavily stocked with retired and current

>members of the Israeli government and military, has been investigated

>at least twice in the last decade by U.S. authorities on charges of

>espionage-related leaks of data that the company assured was secure.

>(The company strenuously denies any wrong-doing.)

>

>According to the former CIA counterterrorism officer with knowledge of

>investigations into 9/11-related Israeli espionage, when law

>enforcement officials examined the "art students" phenomenon, they

>came to the tentative conclusion that "the Israelis likely had a huge

>spy operation in the U.S. and that they had succeeded in identifying a

>number of the hijackers". The German daily Die Zeit reached the same

>conclusion in 2002, reporting that "Mossad agents in the U.S. were in

>all probability surveilling at least four of the 19 hijackers". The

>Fox News Channel also reported that U.S. investigators suspected that

>Israelis were spying on Muslim militants in the United States. "There

>is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks,

>but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered

>intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it", Fox

>correspondent Carl Cameron reported in a December 2001 series that was

>the first major expos

On 12 Mar 2007 07:32:40 -0700, "hohenseerick@yahoo.com"

<hohenseerick@yahoo.com> wrote:

>On Mar 11, 10:51 pm, jazzerci...@hotmail.com (-) wrote:

>> March 7, 2007

>> A CounterPunch Special Investigation

Rick, before we go on with this discussion, do you have an

e-mail address where I can send you an MP3 file, and if so do you have

access to a computer where you'll be able to listen to it?

>>

>> High-Fivers and Art Student Spies

>> What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?

>>

>> By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

>>

>> On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, an FBI bulletin known as a

>> BOLO -- "be on lookout" -- was issued with regard to three suspicious

>> men who that morning were seen leaving the New Jersey waterfront

>> minutes after the first plane hit World Trade Center 1. Law

>> enforcement officers across the New York-New Jersey area were warned

>> in the radio dispatch to watch for a "vehicle possibly related to New

>> York terrorist attack":

>>

>> White, 2000 Chevrolet van with 'Urban Moving Systems'

>> sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ,

>> at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade

>> Center Three individuals with van were seen celebrating

>> after initial impact and subsequent explosion. FBI Newark

>> Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold

>> for prints and detain individuals.

>>

>> At 3:56 p.m., twenty-five minutes after the issuance of the FBI BOLO,

>> officers with the East Rutherford Police Department stopped the

>> commercial moving van through a trace on the plates. According to the

>> police report, Officer Scott DeCarlo and Sgt. Dennis Rivelli

>> approached the stopped van, demanding that the driver exit the

>> vehicle. The driver, 23-year-old Sivan Kurzberg, refused and "was

>> asked several more times [but] appeared to be fumbling with a black

>> leather fanny pouch type of bag". With guns drawn, the police then

>> "physically removed" Kurzberg, while four other men -- two more men

>> had apparently joined the group since the morning -- were also removed

>> from the van, handcuffed, placed on the grass median and read their

>> Miranda rights.

>>

>> They had not been told the reasons for their arrest. Yet, according to

>> DeCarlo's report, "this officer was told without question by the

>> driver [sivan Kurzberg],'We are Israeli. We are not your problem.Your

>> problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.'" Another

>> of the five Israelis, again without prompting, told Officer DeCarlo --

>> falsely -- that "we were on the West Side Highway in New York City

>> during the incident". From inside the vehicle the officers, who were

>> quickly joined by agents from the FBI, retrieved multiple passports

>> and $4,700 in cash stuffed in a sock. According to New Jersey's Bergen

>> Record, which on September 12 reported the arrest of the five

>> Israelis, an investigator high up in the Bergen County law enforcement

>> hierarchy stated that officers had also discovered in the vehicle

>> "maps of the city with certain places highlighted. It looked like

>> they're hooked in with this", the source told the Record, referring to

>> the 9/11 attacks. "It looked like they knew what was going to happen

>> when they were at Liberty State Park."

>>

>> The five men were indeed Israeli citizens. They claimed to be in the

>> country working as movers for Urban Moving Systems Inc., which

>> maintained a warehouse and office in Weehawken, New Jersey. They were

>> held for 71 days in a federal detention center in Brooklyn, New York,

>> during which time they were repeatedly interrogated by FBI and CIA

>> counterterrorism teams, who referred to the men as the "high-fivers"

>> for their celebratory behavior on the New Jersey waterfront. Some were

>> placed in solitary confinement for at least forty days; some were

>> given as many as seven liedetector tests. One of the Israelis, Paul

>> Kurzberg, brother of Sivan, refused to take a lie-detector test for

>> ten weeks. Then he failed it.

>>

>> Meanwhile, two days after the men were picked up, the owner of Urban

>> Moving Systems, Dominik Suter, a 31- year-old Israeli national,

>> abandoned his business and fled the United States for Israel. Suter's

>> departure was abrupt, leaving behind coffee cups, sandwiches, cell

>> phones and computers strewn on office tables and thousands of dollars

>> of goods in storage. Suter was later placed on the same FBI suspect

>> list as 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and other hijackers and

>> suspected al-Qaeda sympathizers, suggesting that U.S. authorities felt

>> Suter may have known something about the attacks. The suspicion, as

>> the investigation unfolded, was that the men working for Urban Moving

>> Systems were spies. Who exactly was handling them, and who or what

>> they were targeting, was as yet uncertain.

>>

>> It was New York's venerable Jewish weekly The Forward that broke this

>> story in the spring of 2002, after months of footwork. The Forward

>> reported that the FBI had finally concluded that at least two of the

>> men were agents working for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence

>> agency, and that Urban Moving Systems, the ostensible employer of the

>> five Israelis, was a front operation. Two former CIA officers

>> confirmed this to me, noting that movers' vans are a common

>> intelligence cover. The Forward also noted that the Israeli government

>> itself admitted that the men were spies. A "former high-ranking

>> American intelligence official", who said he was "regularly briefed on

>> the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials", told

>> reporter Marc Perelman that after American authorities confronted

>> Jerusalem at the end of 2001, the Israeli government "acknowledged the

>> operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington".

>> Today, Perelman stands by his reporting. I asked him if his sources in

>> the Mossad denied the story. "Nobody stopped talking to me", he said.

>>

>> In June 2002, ABC News' 20/20 followed up with its own investigation

>> into the matter, coming to the same conclusion as The Forward. Vincent

>> Cannistraro, former chief of operations for counterterrorism with the

>> CIA, told 20/20 that some of the names of the five men appeared as

>> hits in searches of an FBI national intelligence database. Cannistraro

>> told me that the question that most troubled FBI agents in the weeks

>> and months after 9/11 was whether the Israelis had arrived at the site

>> of their "celebration" with foreknowledge of the attack to come. From

>> the beginning, "the FBI investigation operated on the premise that the

>> Israelis had foreknowledge", according to Cannistraro. A second former

>> CIA counterterrorism officer who closely followed the case, but who

>> spoke on condition of anonymity, told me that investigators were

>> pursuing two theories. "One story was that [the Israelis] appeared at

>> Liberty State Park very quickly after the first plane hit. The other

>> was that they were at the park location already". Either way,

>> investigators wanted to know exactly what the men were expecting when

>> they got there.

>>

>> Before such issues had been fully explored, however, the investigation

>> was shut down. Following what ABC News reported were "high-level

>> negotiations between Israeli and U.S. government officials", a

>> settlement was reached in the case of the five Urban Moving Systems

>> suspects. Intense political pressure apparently had been brought to

>> bear. The reputable Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported that by the last

>> week of October 2001, some six weeks after the men had been detained,

>> Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and two unidentified

>> "prominent New York congressmen" were lobbying heavily for their

>> release. According to a source at ABC News close to the 20/20 report,

>> high-profile criminal lawyer Alan Dershowitz also stepped in as a

>> negotiator on behalf of the men to smooth out differences with the

>> U.S. government. (Dershowitz declined to comment for this article.)

>> And so, at the end of November 2001, for reasons that only noted they

>> had been working in the country illegally as movers, in violation of

>> their visas, the men were flown home to Israel.

>>

>> Today, the crucial questions raised by this matter remain unanswered.

>> There is sufficient reason -- from news reports, statements by former

>> intelligence officials, an array of circumstantial evidence, and the

>> reported acknowledgment by the Israeli government -- to believe that

>> in the months before 9/11, Israel was running an active spy network

>> inside the United States, with Muslim extremists as the target. Given

>> Israel's concerns about Islamic terrorism as well as its long history

>> of spying on U.S. soil, this does not come entirely as a shock. What's

>> incendiary is the idea -- supported, though not proven, by several

>> pieces of evidence -- that the Israelis did learn something about 9/11

>> in advance but failed to share all of what they knew with American

>> officials. The questions are disturbing enough to warrant a

>> Congressional investigation.

>>

>> Yet none of this information found its way into Congress's joint

>> committee report on the attacks, and it was not even tangentially

>> referenced in the nearly 600 pages of the 9/11 Commission's final

>> report. Nor would a single major media outlet track the revelations of

>> The Forward and ABC News to investigate further. "There weren't even

>> stories saying it was bullshit", says The Forward's Perelman.

>> "Honestly, I was surprised". Instead, the story disappeared into the

>> welter of anti-Israel 9/11 conspiracy theories.

>>

>> It's no small boon to the U.S. government that the story of

>> 9/11-related Israeli espionage has been thus relegated: the story

>> doesn't fit in the clean lines of the official narrative of the

>> attacks. It brings up concerns not only about Israel's obligation not

>> to spy inside the borders of the United States, its major benefactor,

>> but about its possible failure to have provided the U.S. adequate

>> warning of an impending devastating attack on American soil.

>> Furthermore, the available evidence undermines the carefully

>> cultivated image of sanctity that defines the U.S.- Israel

>> relationship. These are all factors that help explain the story's

>> disappearance, and they are compelling reasons to revisit it now.

>>

>> Torpedoing the FBI Probe

>>

>> All five future hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which rammed

>> the Pentagon, maintained addresses or were active within a six-mile

>> radius of towns associated with the Israelis employed at Urban Moving

>> Systems. Hudson and Bergen counties, the areas where the Israelis were

>> allegedly conducting surveillance, were a central staging ground for

>> the hijackers of Flight 77 and their fellow al-Qaeda operatives.

>> Mohammed Atta maintained a mail-drop address and visited friends in

>> northern New Jersey; his contacts there included Hani Hanjour, the

>> suicide pilot for Flight 77, and Majed Moqed, one of the strongmen who

>> backed Hanjour in the seizing of the plane. Could the Israelis, with

>> or without knowledge of the terrorists' plans, have been tracking the

>> men who were soon to hijack Flight 77?

>>

>> In public statements, both the Israeli government and the FBI have

>> denied that the Urban Moving Systems men were involved in an

>> intelligence operation in the United States. "No evidence recovered

>> suggested any of these Israelis had prior knowledge of the 9/11

>> attack, and these Israelis are not suspected of working for Mossad",

>> FBI spokesman Jim Margolin told me. (The Israeli embassy did not

>> respond to questions for this article.) According to the source at ABC

>> News, FBI investigators chafed at the denials from their higher-ups.

>> "There is a lot of frustration inside the bureau about this case", the

>> source told me. "They feel the higher echelons torpedoed the

>> investigation into the Israeli New Jersey cell. Leads were not fully

>> investigated". Among those lost leads was the figure of Dominik Suter,

>> whom the U.S. authorities apparently never attempted to contact.

>> Intelligence expert and author James Bamford told me there was similar

>> frustration within the CIA: "People I've talked to at the CIA were

>> outraged at what was going on. They thought it was outrageous that

>> there hadn't been a real investigation, that the facts were hanging

>> out there without any conclusion."

>>

>> However, what was "absolutely certain", according to Vincent

>> Cannistraro, was that the five Israelis formed part of a surveillance

>> network in the New York- New Jersey area. The network's purpose was to

>> track radical Islamic extremists and/or supporters of militant

>> Palestinian groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The former CIA

>> counterterrorism officer who spoke anonymously told me that FBI

>> investigators determined that the suspect Israelis were serving as

>> Arabic-speaking linguists "running technical operations" in northern

>> New Jersey's extensive Muslim communities. The former CIA officer said

>> the operations included taps on telephones, placement of microphones

>> in rooms and mobile surveillance. The source at ABC News agreed: "Our

>> conclusion was that they were Arab linguists involved in monitoring

>> operations, i.e., electronic surveillance. People at FBI concur with

>> this". The ABC News source added, "What we heard was that the Israelis

>> may have picked up chatter that something was going to happen on the

>> morning of 9/11".

>>

>> The former CIA counterterrorism officer told me: "There was no

>> question but that [the order to close down the investigation] came

>> from the White House. It was immediately assumed at CIA headquarters

>> that this basically was going to be a cover-up so that the Israelis

>> would not be implicated in any way in 9/11. Bear in mind that this was

>> a political issue, not a law enforcement or intelligence issue. If

>> somebody says we don't want the Israelis implicated in this -- we know

>> that they've been spying the hell out of us, we know that they

>> possibly had information in advance of the attacks, but this would be

>> a political nightmare to deal with."

>>

>> The Israeli "Art Student" Spies

>>

>> There is a second piece of evidence that suggests Israeli operatives

>> were spying on al-Qaeda in the United States. It is writ in the

>> peculiar tale of the Israeli "art students", detailed by this reporter

>> for Salon.com in 2002, following the leaking of an internal memo

>> circulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration's Office of Security

>> Programs. The June 2001 memo, issued three months before the 9/11

>> attacks, reported that more than 120 young Israeli citizens, posing as

>> art students and peddling cheap paintings, had been repeatedly -- and

>> seemingly inexplicably -- attempting to penetrate DEA offices and

>> other law enforcement and Defense Department offices across the

>> country. The DEA report stated that the Israelis may have been engaged

>> in "an organized intelligence gathering activity", but to what end,

>> U.S. investigators, in June 2001, could not determine. The memo

>> briefly floated the possibility that the Israelis were engaged in

>> trafficking the drug ecstasy. According to the memo, "the most

>> activity [was] reported in the state of Florida" during the first half

>> of 2001, where the town of Hollywood appeared to be "a central point

>> for these individuals with several having addresses in this area".

>>

>> In retrospect, the fact that a large number of "art students" operated

>> out of Hollywood is intriguing, to say the least. During 2001, the

>> city, just north of Miami, was a hotbed of al-Qaeda activity and

>> served as one of the chief staging grounds for the hijacking of the

>> World Trade Center planes and the Pennsylvania plane; it was home to

>> fifteen of the nineteen future hijackers, nine in Hollywood and six in

>> the surrounding area. Among the 120 suspected Israeli spies posing as

>> art students, more than thirty lived in the Hollywood area, ten in

>> Hollywood proper. As noted in the DEA report, many of these young men

>> and women had training as intelligence and electronic intercept

>> officers in the Israeli military -- training and experience far beyond

>> the compulsory service mandated by Israeli law. Their "traveling in

>> the U.S. selling art seem[ed] not to fit their background", according

>> to the DEA report.

>>

>> One "art student" was a former Israeli military intelligence officer

>> named Hanan Serfaty, who rented two Hollywood apartments close to the

>> mail drop and apartment of Mohammed Atta and four other hijackers.

>> Serfaty was moving large amounts of cash: he carried bank slips

>> showing more than $100,000 deposited from December 2000 through the

>> first quarter of 2001; other bank slips showed withdrawals for about

>> $80,000 during the same period. Serfaty's apartments, serving as crash

>> pads for at least two other "art students", were located at 4220

>> Sheridan Street and 701 South 21st Avenue. Lead hijacker Mohammed

>> Atta's mail drop was at 3389 Sheridan Street--approximately 2,700 feet

>> from Serfaty's Sheridan Street apartment. Both Atta and Marwan

>> al-Shehhi, the suicide pilot on United Airlines Flight 175, which

>> smashed into World Trade Center 2, lived in a rented apartment at 1818

>> Jackson Street, some 1,800 feet from Serfaty's South 21st Avenue

>> apartment.

>>

>> In fact, an improbable series of coincidences emerges from a close

>> reading of the 2001 DEA memo, the 9/11 Commission's staff statements

>> and final report, FBI and Justice Department watch lists, hijacker

>> timelines compiled by major media and statements by local, state and

>> federal law enforcement personnel. In at least six urban centers,

>> suspected Israeli spies and 9/11 hijackers and/or al-Qaeda-connected

>> suspects lived and operated near one another, in some cases less than

>> half a mile apart, for various periods during 2000-01 in the run-up to

>> the attacks. In addition to northern New Jersey and Hollywood,

>> Florida, these centers included Arlington and Fredericksburg,

>> Virginia; Atlanta; Oklahoma City; Los Angeles; and San Diego.

>>

>> Israeli "art students" also lived close to terror suspects in and

>> around Dallas, Texas. A 25-year-old "art student" named Michael

>> Calmanovic, arrested and questioned by Texas-based DEA officers in

>> April 2001, maintained a mail drop at 3575 North Beltline Road, less

>> than a thousand feet from the 4045 North Beltline Road apartment of

>> Ahmed Khalefa, an FBI terror suspect. Dallas and its environs,

>> especially the town of Richardson, Texas, throbbed with "art student"

>> activity. Richardson is notable as the home of the Holy Land

>> Foundation, an Islamic charity designated as a terrorist funder by the

>> European Union and U.S. government in December 2001. Sources in 2002

>> told The Forward, in a report unrelated to the question of the "art

>> students", that "Israeli intelligence played a key role in helping the

>> Bush administration to crack down on Islamic charities suspected of

>> funneling money to terrorist groups, most notably the Richardson,

>> Texas-based Holy Land Foundation, last December [2001]".

>>

>> It's plausible that the intelligence prompting the shutdown of the

>> Holy Land Foundation came from "art student" spies in the Richardson area.

>>

>> Others among the "art students" had specific backgrounds in electronic

>> surveillance or military intelligence, or were associated with Israeli

>> wiretapping and surveillance firms, which prompted further concerns

>> among U.S. investigators. DEA agents described Michael Calmanovic, for

>> example, as "a recently discharged electronic intercept operator for

>> the Israeli military". Lior Baram, questioned near Hollywood, Fla., in

>> January 2001, said he had served two years in Israeli intelligence

>> "working with classified information". Hanan Serfaty, who maintained

>> the Hollywood apartments near Atta and his cohorts, served in the

>> Israeli military between the ages of 18 and 21. Serfaty refused to

>> disclose his activities between the ages of 21 and 24, including his

>> activities since arriving in the U.S.A. in 2000. The French daily Le

>> Monde meanwhile reported that six "art students" were apparently using

>> cell phones that had been purchased by a former Israeli vice consul in

>> the U.S.A.

>>

>> Suspected Israeli spy Tomer Ben Dor, questioned at Dallas-Fort Worth

>> Airport in May 2001, worked for the Israeli wiretapping and electronic

>> eavesdropping company NICE Systems Ltd. (NICE Systems' American

>> subsidiary, NICE Systems Inc., is located in Rutherford, New Jersey,

>> not far from the East Rutherford site where the five Israeli "movers"

>> were arrested on the afternoon of September 11.) Ben Dor carried in

>> his luggage a print-out of a computer file that referred to "DEA

>> Groups". How he acquired information about so-called "DEA Groups" --

>> via, for example, his own employment with an Israeli wiretapping

>> company -- was never determined, according to DEA documents.

>>

>> "Art student" Michal Gal, arrested by DEA investigators in Irving,

>> Texas, in the spring of 2001, was released on a $10,000 cash bond

>> posted by Ophir Baer, an employee of the Israeli telecommunications

>> software company Amdocs Inc., which provides phone-billing technology

>> to clients that include some of the largest phone companies in the

>> United States as well as U.S. government agencies. Amdocs, whose

>> executive board has been heavily stocked with retired and current

>> members of the Israeli government and military, has been investigated

>> at least twice in the last decade by U.S. authorities on charges of

>> espionage-related leaks of data that the company assured was secure.

>> (The company strenuously denies any wrong-doing.)

>>

>> According to the former CIA counterterrorism officer with knowledge of

>> investigations into 9/11-related Israeli espionage, when law

>> enforcement officials examined the "art students" phenomenon, they

>> came to the tentative conclusion that "the Israelis likely had a huge

>> spy operation in the U.S. and that they had succeeded in identifying a

>> number of the hijackers". The German daily Die Zeit reached the same

>> conclusion in 2002, reporting that "Mossad agents in the U.S. were in

>> all probability surveilling at least four of the 19 hijackers". The

>> Fox News Channel also reported that U.S. investigators suspected that

>> Israelis were spying on Muslim militants in the United States. "There

>> is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks,

>> but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered

>> intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it", Fox

>> correspondent Carl Cameron reported in a December 2001 series that was

>> the first major expos, of allegations of 9/11-related Israeli

>> espionage. "A highly placed investigator said there are 'tie-ins'. But

>> when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying,

>> 'evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell

>> you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified

>> information.'"

>>

>> One element of the allegations has never been clearly understood: if

>> the "art students" were indeed spies targeting Muslim extremists that

>> included al-Qaeda, why would they also be surveilling DEA agents in

>> such a compromising manner? Why, in other words, would foreign spies

>> bumble into federal offices by the scores and risk exposing their

>> operation? An explanation is that a number of the art students were,

>> in fact, young Israelis engaged in a mere art scam and unknowingly

>> provided cover for real spies. Investigative journalist John Sugg, who

>> as senior editor for the Creative Loafing newspaper chain reported on

>> the "art students" in 2002, told me that investigators he spoke to

>> within FBI felt the "art student" ring functioned as a wide-ranging

>> cover that was counterintuitive in its obviousness. DEA investigators,

>> for example, uncovered evidence connecting the Israeli "art students"

>> to known ecstasy trafficking operations in New York and Florida. This

>> was, according to Sugg, planted information. "The explanation was that

>> when our FBI guys started getting interested in these folks [the art

>> students] -- when they got too close to what the real purpose was --

>> the Israelis threw in an ecstasy angle", Sugg told me. "The argument

>> being that if our guys thought the Israelis were involved in a

>> smuggling ring, then they wouldn't see the real purpose of the

>> operation". Sugg, who is writing a book that explores the tale of the

>> "art students", told me that several sources within the FBI, and at

>> least one source formerly with Israeli intelligence, suggested that

>> "the bumbling aspect of the art student thing was intentional."

>>

>> When I reported on the matter for Salon.com in 2002, a veteran U.S.

>> intelligence operative with experience subcontracting both for the CIA

>> and the NSA suggested a similar possibility. "It was a noisy

>> operation", the veteran intelligence operative said. The operative

>> referred me to the film Victor, Victoria. "It was about a woman

>> playing a man playing a woman. Perhaps you should think about this

>> from that aspect and ask yourself if you wanted to have something that

>> was in your face, that didn't make sense, that couldn't possibly be

>> them". The intelligence operative added, "Think of it this way: how

>> could the experts think this could actually be something of any value?

>> Wouldn't they dismiss what they were seeing?" U.S. and Israeli

>> officials, dismissing charges of espionage as an "urban myth", have

>> publicly claimed that the Israeli "art students" were guilty only of

>> working on U.S. soil without proper credentials. The stern denials

>> issued by the Justice Department were widely publicized in the

>> Washington Post and elsewhere, and the endnote from officialdom and in

>> establishment media by the spring of 2002 was that the "art students"

>> had been rounded up and deported simply because of harmless visa

>> violations. The FBI, for its part, refused to confirm or deny the "art

>> students" espionage story. "Regarding FBI investigations into Israeli

>> art students", spokesman Jim Margolin told me, "the FBI cannot comment

>> on any of those investigations." As with the New Jersey Israelis, the

>> investigation into the Israeli "art students" appears to have been

>> halted by orders from on high. The veteran CIA/NSA intelligence

>> operative told me in 2002 that there was "a great press to discredit

>> the story, discredit the connections, prevent [investigators] from

>> going any further. People were told to stand down. You name the

>> agency, they were told to stand down". The operative added, "People

>> who were perceived to be gumshoes on [this matter] suddenly found

>> themselves hammered from all different directions. The interest from

>> the middle bureaucracy was not that there had been a security breach

>> but that someone had bothered to investigate the breach. That was

>> where the terror was".

>>

>> Choking off the press coverage

>>

>> There was similar pressure brought against the media venues that

>> ventured to report out the allegations of 9/11- related Israeli

>> espionage. A former ABC News employee high up in the network newsroom

>> told me that when ABC News ran its June 2002 expos, on the celebratory

>> New Jersey Israelis, "Enormous pressure was brought to bear by

>> pro-Israeli organizations"--and this pressure began months before the

>> piece was even close to airing. The source said that ABC News

>> colleagues wondered, "how they [the pro-Israel organizations] found

>> out we were doing the story. Pro- Israeli people were calling the

>> president of ABC News. Barbara Walters was getting bombarded by calls.

>> The story was a hard sell but ABC News came through the management

>> insulated [reporters] from the pressure".

>>

>> The experience of Carl Cameron, chief Washington correspondent at Fox

>> News Channel and the first mainstream U.S. reporter to present the

>> allegations of Israeli surveillance of the 9/11 hijackers, was perhaps

>> more typical, both in its particulars and aftermath. The attack

>> against Cameron and Fox News was spearheaded by a pro-Israel lobby

>> group called the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in

>> America (CAMERA), which operated in tandem with the two most highly

>> visible powerhouse Israel lobbyists, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)

>> and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (itself currently

>> embroiled in a spy scandal connected to the Defense Department and

>> Israeli Embassy). "CAMERA pep- pered the shit out of us", Carl Cameron

>> told me in 2002, referring to an e-mail bombardment that eventually

>> crashed the Fox News.com servers. Cameron himself received 700 pages

>> of almost identical e-mail messages from hundreds of citizens (though

>> he suspected these were spam identities). CAMERA spokesman Alex

>> Safian later told me that Cameron's upbringing in Iran, where his

>> father traveled as an archeologist, had rendered the reporter "very

>> sympathetic to the Arab side". Safian added, "I think Cameron,

>> personally, has a thing about Israel"--coded language implying that

>> Cameron was an anti-Semite. Cameron was outraged at the accusation.

>>

>> According to a source at Fox News Channel, the president of the ADL,

>> Abraham Foxman, telephoned executives at Fox News' parent, News Corp.,

>> to demand a sit-down in the wake of the Cameron reportage. The source

>> said that Foxman told the News Corp. executives, "Look, you guys have

>> generally been pretty fair to Israel. What are you doing putting this

>> stuff out there? You're killing us". The Fox News source continued,

>> "As good old boys will do over coffee in Manhattan, it was like, well,

>> what can we do about this? Finally, Fox News said, 'Stop the

>> e-mailing. Stop slamming us. Stop being in our face, and we'll stop

>> being in your face--by way of taking our story down off the web. We

>> will not retract it; we will not disavow it; we stand by it. But we

>> will at least take it off the web.'" Following this meeting, within

>> four days of the posting of Cameron's series on

>>

>> Fox News.com, the transcripts disappeared, replaced by the message,

>> "This story no longer exists".

>>

>> What did Mossad know and tell the U.S.?

>>

>> Whether or not Israeli spies had detailed foreknowledge of the 9/11

>> attacks, the Israeli authorities knew enough to warn the U.S.

>> government in the summer of 2001 that an attack was on the horizon.

>> The British Sunday Telegraph reported on September 16, 2001, that two

>> senior agents with the Mossad were dispatched to Washington in August

>> 2001 "to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many

>> as 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation". The Telegraph

>> quoted a "senior Israeli security official" as saying the Mossad

>> experts had "no specific information about what was being planned".

>> Still, the official told the Telegraph, the Mossad contacts had

>> "linked the plot to Osama bin Laden". Likewise, Die Zeit correspondent

>> Oliver Schr"m reported that on August 23, 2001, the Mossad "handed its

>> American counterpart a list of names of terrorists who were staying in

>> the U.S. and were presumably planning to launch an attack in the

>> foreseeable future". Fox News' Carl Cameron, in May 2002, also

>> reported warnings by Israel: "Based on its own intelligence, the

>> Israeli government provided 'general' information to the United States

>> in the second week of August that an al-Qaeda attack was imminent".

>> The U.S. government later claimed these warnings were not specific

>> enough to allow any mitigating action to be taken. Mossad expert

>> Gordon Thomas, author of Gideon's Spies, says German intelligence

>> sources told him that as late as August 2001 Israeli spies in the

>> United States had made surveillance contacts with "known supporters of

>> bin Laden in the U.S.A. It was those surveillance contacts that later

>> raised the question: how much prior knowledge did Mossad have and at

>> what stage?"

>>

>> According to Die Zeit, the Mossad did provide the U.S. government with

>> the names of suspected terrorists Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf

>> al-Hazmi, who would eventually hijack the Pentagon plane. It is worth

>> noting that Mihdhar and Hazmi were among the hijackers who operated in

>> close proximity to Israeli "art students" in Hollywood, Florida, and

>> to the Urban Moving Systems Israelis in northern New Jersey. Moreover,

>> Hazmi and at least three "art students" visited Oklahoma City on

>> almost the same dates, from April 1 through April 4, 2001. On August

>> 24, 2001, a day after the Mossad's briefing, Mihdhar and Hazmi were

>> placed by the CIA on a terrorist watch list; additionally, it was only

>> after the Mossad warning, as reported by Die Zeit, that the CIA, on

>> August 27, informed the FBI of the presence of the two terrorists. But

>> by then the cell was already in hiding, preparing for attack.