| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Sep 28, 2003 4:53 am Post subject: Israeli Company Says Workers Warned 2 Hours Before 911 |
| Subj: Re: Israeli Company Says Workers Warned 2 Hours Before 911
Date: 9/27/03 10:50:34 AM Pacific Daylight Time
To: RePorterNoteBook
The reason I asked for you to resend (the article which you did below along with your commentary which is right on) is because this Zionist (Jew) Lally Weymouth was on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" yesterday (as you can watch by clicking on the first link after arriving at the following URL) spinning and truth distorting about the Israelis giving warning to the employees at the World Trade Center before the 9/11 attack as I would like to send her your write-up (to her lweymouth@newsweek.com address) as she is the daughter of Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham (note how the Alexander Cockburn article referenced below after your write-up mentioned that the Washington Post is owned by a Jewish family as Lally Weymouth also mentioned that her brother is involved with the publishing of the Washington Post-her Zionist bias for Israel in this "Washington Journal" segment is incredible for a publication like Newsweek which she is the diplomatic correspondent for as Newsweek has an association with the Washington Post):
http://www.c-span.org/search/basic.asp?ResultStart=1&ResultCount=10&BasicQueryText=weymouth&image1.x=39&image1.y=10
Check this excellent format via www.whatreallyhappened.com:
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/spyring.html
Look at how JINSA suppressed the story (as JINSA Zionist extremists Richard Perle, Doug Feith, John Bolton, and Paul Wolfowitz who used to be even if he claims not to be now, wanted regime change in Iraq and beyond, so did they have anything to do with 9/11 along with their Likud cronies in Israel?):
http://www.rense.com/general18/jinsa.htm
In a message dated 9/27/03 9:22:58 AM Pacific Daylight Time, RePorterNoteBook writes:
Israeli Company Says Workers Warned 2 Hours Before 911
RePortersNoteBook memo: This story showed up a couple of years ago. It is interesting that it's back. Are they trying to explain it away? After reading all the comments on the Internet.
Also the first two arrests on 911 were Israeli nationals. About a week later on the David Letterman Show, Dan Rather reported his disgust of "Middle Easterners" jumping on top of a truck from the George Washington Bridge in celebration. He knew they were Israelis who were arrested on the spot. The first group were a bunch of Israelis on a terrace a few blocks form the World Trade Center, video taping the falling of the twin towers and laughing about it. This bizarre behavior prompted a resident in an adjacent building to call the police. When these arrests happened CBS and the rest of the mainstream press did report it accurately, by pointing out they were Israeli nationals. Now the new vernacular is "Middle Easterners." I wonder why?
--------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=77744&contrassID=
/has%5C
Israel's Odigo Says Workers Warned 2 Hours Before 911
Yuval Dror
Ha'aretz Daily
9-21-3
Odigo, the instant messaging service, says that two of its workers received
messages two hours before the Twin Towers attack on September 11 predicting
the attack would happen, and the company has been cooperating with Israeli
and American law enforcement, including the FBI, in trying to find the
original sender of the message predicting the attack.
Micha Macover, CEO of the company, said the two workers received the
messages and immediately after the terror attack informed the company's
management, which immediately contacted the Israeli security services,
which brought in the FBI.
"I have no idea why the message was sent to these two workers, who don't
know the sender. It may just have been someone who was joking and turned
out they accidentally got it right. And I don't know if our information was
useful in any of the arrests the FBI has made," said Macover. Odigo is a
U.S.-based company whose headquarters are in New York, with offices in
Herzliya.
As an instant messaging service, Odigo users are not limited to sending
messages only to people on their "buddy" list, as is the case with ICQ, the
other well-known Israeli instant messaging application.
Odigo usually zealously protects the privacy of its registered users, said
Macover, but in this case the company took the initiative to provide the
law enforcement services with the originating Internet Presence address of
the message, so the FBI could track down the Internet Service Provider, and
the actual sender of the original message.
----------------------
"Many rabbis and professionals have told me recently that they fear for their jobs should they even begin to articulate their doubts about Israeli policy--much less give explicit support to calls for an end to the occupation."
-- Rabbi Michael Lerner
Published on Sunday, April 28, 2002 in the Los Angeles Times
======================
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----British Scholar and Philosopher Bryan Magee in 1997
Chinese Axiom:
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When knowledge is extended, the will becomes sincere.
When the will is sincere, the mind is correct.
When the mind is correct, the self is cultivated.
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The Jewish Ruling Class
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(1) My Life as an “Anti-Semite” by Alexander Cockburn
(2) He Deserved More than a Pie in the Face
(3) Hollywood "Gay Mafia"
(1) My Life as an “Anti-Semite” by Alexander Cockburn
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 19:18:42 EDT From: RePorterNoteBook@aol. com
My Life as an “Anti-Semite”
Alexander Cockburn
http://www.counterpunch.com
{this item appears to have been scanned in. In places, the text jumps
from frame to frame. But the item is not available except by
subscription - one must be grateful even for this version}
Right in the wake of then-House majority leader Dick Armey’s ex plicit
call in mid-2002 for two million Palestinians to be booted out of the
West Bank, and East Jerusalem and Gaza as well, came yet one more of
those earnest articles accusing a vague entity called “the left “ of
anti--Semitism. This one was in Salon, by a man called Dennis Fox,
identified as an associate professor of legal studies and psychology at
the University of Illinois. Salon titled Fox’s contribution, ”The shame
of the pro-Palestinian left:Ignorance and anti-Semitism are undercutting
the moral legitimacy of Israel’s critics “.
Over the past 20 years I’ve learned there’s a quick way of figuring out
just how badly Israel is behaving. You see a brisk uptick in the number
of articles here accusing the left of anti-Semitism. These articles
adopt varying strategies, but the most obvious one is that nowhere in
them is there much sign that the author feels it necessary to concede
that Israel is a racist state whose obvious and provable intent is to
continue to steal Palestinian land, oppress Palestinians, herd them into
smaller and smaller enclaves and ultimately drive them into the sea or
Lebanon or Jordan or Dearborn or the space in Dallas-Fort Worth airport
between the third and fourth runways (the bold Armey plan) .
Eschewing these realities, the author feels entirely at liberty to
stigmatize the left as stained with anti-Semitism. The real problem is
most Jews here just don’t like hearing bad things said about Israel,
same way they don’t like reading articles about the Jewish lobby here.
Mention the lobby and someone will rush into print saying “Cockburn toys
with the old anti-Semitic canard that the Jews control the press “.
Back in the 1970s when muteness on the topic of how Israel was treating
Palestinians was near total in the United States, I’d get the
“anti-Semite “ slur hurled at me once in a while for writing about such
nono stuff as Begin’s fascist roots in Betar, or the torture of
Palestinians by Israel’s security forces. I minded then, as I mind now,
but overuse has drained the term of much clout. The other day I even got
accused of anti-Semitism for mentioning that the Jews founded Hollywood,
which they most certainly did, as Neil Gabler recently recounted in a
very funny, pro-Semitic book.
The encouraging fact is that despite the best efforts of the Southern
Poverty Law Center to prove that the Nazis are about to march down Main
Street, there’s remarkably little anti-Semitism in the US, and none that
I’ve ever been able to detect on the American left, which is of course
amply stocked with Jews. It’s comical to find people like Fox trudging
all the way back to the 60s to dig up the necessary anti-Semitic jibe.
Being called an anti-Semite these days isn’t what it once was. The term
has been relentlessly cheapened. As Michael Neumann writes in his piece
in The Politics of Anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism is “action or propaganda
designed to hurt Jews not because of anything they could avoid doing but
because they are what they are “.
But nowadays people don’t flourish the charge of anti-Semitism because
they’ve heard someone quoting the Protocols or saying that the Jews kill
Christian babies.
“The encouraging fact is that despite the best efforts of the Southern
Poverty Law Center to prove that the Nazis are about to march down Main
Street, there’s remark-ably little anti-Semitism in the US. ”
”Anti-Semitism “ has become like a flit gun to squirt at every
inconvenient fly on the window pane. I saw 2002 as a year when the
Israel lobby was worrying that the grip of the gag rule might be
loosening a trifle. Now, the original gag rule was adopted by the US
House of Representatives in 1836, resolving that “all petitions,
memorials, resolutions, propositions, or papers, relating in any way, or
to any extent whatsoever, to the subject of slavery, shall, without
being either printed or referred, be laid on the table, and that no
further action whatever shall be had thereon “.
The parallel gag rule these days concerns Israel, a collective agreement
by our legislators and the larger political community that any
discussion of the conduct of any government of Israel, of the
relationship of the United States to Israel, of the power of the
pro-Israel lobby in the United States, be kept as near to zero as is
possible.
In the 1970s and early 1980s when I began writing on these issues, the
gag rule was riding high, amid general agreement in respectable circles
that Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was on the money when she
declared flatly that there was no such thing as a Palestinian. Back then
Joan Peters got an enthusiastic reception for her book From Time
Immemorial, which advanced the mad thesis that Palestinians in Israel
were all relatively recent immigrants from adjacent Arab countries.
Things have improved since then, though not for the Palestinians, who in
those days had UN Resolution 242 to comfort them, instead of the
mini-Bantustans promised them in George Bush’s “road map “. Here in the
US there’s general agreement that there are people who can be fairly
called Palestinians, though beyond this concession there’s no agreement
about anything.
By 2002 it was getting harder and harder to foster the impression that
General Sharon was a man of peace, imbued with a constructive vision of
communal relations in the Holy Land. As the dust rose above demolished
homes on the West Bank and the enduring terror of the occupation
provoked retaliatory terror in the form of the ghastly, futile suicide
bombings, the predictable warnings against antiSemitism began to appear
in the liberal and left press. Then, it’s clear, the Israel lobby
decided to enforce the gag rule, by working successfully for the ouster
of two members of Congress who had defied it.
A torrent of money from out of state American Jewish organizations
smashed Earl Hilliard, the first elected black congressperson in Alabama
since Reconstruction, and you could have heard a mouse cough. Hilliard
had made the fatal error of calling for some measure of evenhandedness
in the Middle East. So he was targeted by AIPAC and the others. Down he
went, defeated in the Democratic primary by Artur Davis, a black lawyer
who obediently sang for his supper on the topic of Israel.
Then it was Cynthia McKinney’s turn.
An excellent liberal black congresswoman, McKinney hadn’t been cowed by
the Israel-right-or-wrong lobby and had called for a proper debate on
the Middle East, and for a real examination of the lead-up to 9/11. The
sky duly fell in on her. American Jewish money showered upon her
opponent, Denise Majette. Buckets of sewage were poured over McKinney’s
head in the Washington Post, and Cynthia Tucker, the black editorial
inhouse pundit at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, declared McKinney to
be “a fringe lunatic, well outside the congressional mainstream “.
Tucker asserted McKinney is “incapable of aiding any cause “ and had the
final pious effrontery to declare:”The plight of the Palestinians and
their desire for an independent homeland is a serious cause deserving of
thoughtful, mainstream advocates. Hilliard wasn’t one and neither is
McKinney. ”
McKinney’s opponent in the primary, Denise Majette, was a former judge
best known for her ardent support of Alan Keyes, a black aspirant for
the Republican nomination whose prime plank was opposition to abortion.
Normally a foe of choice would have brought the women’s movement racing
to the rescue. Not in McKinney’s case.
McKinney saw what happened to Hilliard, and that American Jewish money
was pumping up Majette’s challenge. So she went to Arab-American groups
to try to raise money to fight back. This allowed Tom Edsall to attack
her in the Washington Post as being in receipt of money from pro-terror
Muslims. Lots of nasty looking Arab/Muslim names suddenly filled
Edsall’s stories.
Down went McKinney.
Then it was Rep. James Moran’s turn, in hot water over his head for
having remarked in a March 3 town hall session last spring with his
constituents that, as quoted in the Virginia-area newspapers, ”if it
were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war
with Iraq, we would not be doing this “.
The House and Senate Democratic leaders, Nancy Pelosi and Tom Daschle,
hastened to denounce Moran’s remarks, and six Jewish House Democrats
took it upon themselves to advise Moran not to run for re-election in
2004. Should he do so, ”we cannot and will not support his candidacy “.
Moran was forced to give up on his positions as Democratic Party leader
in the mid-Atlantic region. The game plan is clearly what it was with
Hilliard of Alabama and McKinney of Georgia: breathe a word about
justice for Palestinians, and you’ll lose your seat. Moran is running
for reelection. And the decision will belong to the voters.
One reason Moran got attacked so hysterically is that Jewish nerves were
raw on precisely the point he raised, the role of Jewish opinion here in
pressing for the attack on Iraq. It was one thing for Pat Buchanan to
raise the issue of dual loyalty in the American Conservative, but when
Tim Russert started to press Richard Perle to assure the American
people, or at least the audience of “Meet the Press “ ((by no means the
same) , that he was advocating an attack on Iraq in the interests of the
United States, not some other power, we knew the gag rule had most
definitely slackened, if only for a moment. Suddenly researchers from
“Nightline “ ((one called me on the matter) and other mainstream outfits
rushed for copies of “ A Clean Break:A New Strategy for Securing the
Realm “, the 1996 briefing plan for Benjamin Netanyahu prepared by such
pro-Israel hawks as Perle, Douglas Feith and others high in the Bush
Administration, advocating attack on Iraq. It was now okay for reporters
(Robert Kaiser in the Washington Post, for example) to describe the
Jewish neocon lobby for war, starting with Perle, Wolfowitz and Feith,
and heading on down the list to Elliott Abrams, running the
Israel-Palestine portfolio at the National Security Council.
The op-ed pages duly began to vibrate with predictable charges from
people like Lawrence Kaplan of The New Republic that all this talk of
dual loyalty and Israel’s agenda was nothing but rank anti-Semitism. To
his credit, Michael Kinsley, editor of Slate, ran a piece saying that
uproar raised by American Jews was probably evidence that Moran was on
the money, and that when it came to testimonies to the power of the
Jewish lobby, none was more publicly boastful on the matter than AIPAC.
Moran himself was plummeting, whirling in the familiar downward spiral
of contrition and self-abasement. But did his remark about “strong
support “ for attack on Iraq in the Jewish community have any basis in
reality? What about American Jewish organizations? In the fall of 2002
the Forward reported that some Jewish groups, such as the Workmen’s
Circle, were angry at the way the Conference of Presidents of Major
American Jewish Organizations had been hijacked by the prowar faction
and by its mad-dog president, Mort Zuckerman, who was openly howling for
war in his own publication, U. S. News &World Report, as “the only
appropriate and acceptable course “. In mid-September 2002, Michelle
Goldberg began a piece on this topic in Salon with “Once a pillar of the
American peace movement, mainstream Jewish groups and leaders are now
among the strongest supporters of an American invasion of Baghdad. ” On
October 11 the Forward reported that a draft resolution of the 52-member
Conference supported “measures necessary to ensure Iraqi disarmament “.
Jack Rosen, president of the American Jewish Congress, was quoted by the
Forward as saying “the final statement ought to be crystal clear in
backing the President having to take unilateral action if necessary
against Iraq to eliminate weapons of mass destruction “.
Abe Foxman of the ADL called the resolution “a consensus document “, and
the Forward cited him as saying he would support a position that backs
the President in “whatever he decides he needs to do “.
Of course there were Jewish groups, not least in the big peace
coalitions, that were strongly and effectively antiwar. In January the
American Jewish Committee released a poll claiming that a majority of
American Jews - 59 percent - approved of US military action against Iraq
to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
Thirty-six percent opposed such action. These findings, the AJC also
emphasized, were comparable to the attitudes of the general American
population. It’s at the elite level that the Jewish voices one heard
were overwhelmingly pressing for war. Back once more to Moran. What was
the precise nature of his supposedly “antiIsrael “ record that the
rabbis in his district were now seeking to avenge? In a speech to the
American Muslim Council, Moran, who has traveled extensively in the
Midor, given the broader Christian evangelical alliance with Sharon, in
the Republican Party either.
It’s supposedly the third rail in political and cultural life here even
to have a discussion of Zionist influence in the media. Obviously, Jews
don’t “control “ the media. All the same, Jewish families are
proprietors of some of the most powerful newspapers in the country. Is
it likely that this has no bearing on their coverage of the Middle East?
So, it’s reasonable to point out that Jewish families control the New
York Times and Washington Post and to put up for discussion whether this
affects the editorial stance of both newspapers. But it is also true
that the most rabid of all papers in its Israel-right-or-wrong stance is
the Wall Street Journal, which is not Jewish owned and whose most
influential editor was Robert Bartley, a midwestern Christian.
The economic and political commentator (and former denizen of The Wall
Street Journal editorial page) Jude Wanniski remarked in his web
newsletter
It’s supposedly the third rail in political and cultural life here even
to have a discussion of Zionist influence in the media.
Middle East, said Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was coming to
Washington “probably seeking a warrant from President Bush to kill at
will with weapons we have paid for “. True enough. In a 1996 Jerusalem
Post op-ed, Moran described an Israeli border policeman beating an
unarmed Palestinian. ”The unarmed youth was held on the ground while
police officers armed with guns and clubs climbed over each other’s
backs to land their own blows on his body “, Moran wrote. ”Most of the
witnesses to this scene said it happens all the time. When Israeli
police and Palestinians are concerned there is no justice or fair play.
Might makes right. I witnessed the police laughing and making
self-congratulatory gestures after the beating. ”
How encouraging to know that an elected US representative had the sinew
to describe such a scene, sinew lacking in most US reporters deployed in
Israel. But, alas, such indignation, in Nancy Pelosi’s words about
Moran’s remarks in Virginia, has “no place in the Democratic Party “ -
at the time of the Billy Graham uproar that even if Jews don’t control
the media overall, it is certainly true to say that they control
discussion of Israel in the media here.
Some time in the spring of 2002 I wrote an item for a column I was doing
at the time for New York Press. Later, the column went up on our
CounterPunch website (counterpunch. org) , which has around 50, 000
regular visitors a day.
“There are a number of stories sloshing around the news now “, I wrote,
”that have raised discussion of Israel and of the posture of American
Jews to an acrid level. The purveyor of anthrax may have been a former
government scientist of Jewish ethnic extraction with a record of
baiting a colleague of Arab origins, acting with the intent to blame the
anthrax on Muslim terrorists.
“Rocketing around the web and spilling into the press are many stories
about Israeli spies in America at the time of 9/ 11. On various accounts
of unknown reliability, they were trailing Atta and his as-
“As the dust rose above demolished homes on the West Bank and the
enduring terror of the occupation provoked retalia-tory terror in the
form of the ghastly, futile suicide bombings, the predictable warnings
against anti-Semitism began to ap-pear in the liberal and left press. ”
Associates, knew what was going to happen but did nothing or were simply
spying on US facilities. Some posing as art students have been expelled,
according to the AP. Finally, there’s Sharon’s bloody repression of the
Palestinians, and Israel’s apparently powerful role in Bush’s foreign
policy. ” You’d have thought I’d urged America’s youth to immerse
themselves in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. People wrote in
demanding that I acknowledge the Israeli spy ring story had been
“discredited “. I declined to do so, citing some very good columns by
Justin Raimondo on the antiwar. com site, also the work of reporter John
Sugg of the Atlanta-based Creative Loafing alternative weekly chain, and
Jane’s Intelligence Digest. I could also have mentioned Carl Cameron’s
four-part series on Fox News, altogether the single most comprehensive
overview of Israel’s secret war, and Le Monde, as well as Insight, the
magazine supplement of the Washington Times.
Jane’s put it well, remarking in a March 15 dispatch:”It is rather
strange that the US media, with one notable exception, seems to be
ignoring what may well prove to be the most explosive story since the
September 11 attacks - the alleged breakup of a major Israeli espionage
operation in the United States which aimed to infiltrate both the
Justice and Defence departments and which may also have been tracking
Al-Qaeda terrorists before the aircraft hijackings took place. ”
At the time I was driving a 1985 Ford Escort (diesel wagon) across the
country from South Carolina. As I headed off down the road from
Greenville, SC, towards Birmingham, AL, my cellphone rang. It was a
fellow from The New Republic called Frank something or other, who said
he wanted to quiz me about some recent remarks of mine about the
Internet being awash with anti-Israel material. Amid the crackle and
hiss of the ether and the roar of the interstate it was hard to hear
Frank through the no-hands speaker on my dashboard, but eventually I
caught his purpose and asked him flatly, in more-or-less these words,
”Frank, is your purpose to accuse me of disseminating anti-Semitic
libels, under the guise of relaying rumors on the Internet? ” Frank
allowed jovially as how that was indeed his intent.
I told him that in my opinion the stories about Israeli spies, as
categorized in a US inter-agency report, as discussed on Fox News, by
the French site Intelligence Online and various other news sources
including the British Jane’s, were legitimate topics of comment, as were
the stories about anthrax dissemination involving an anti-Arab
researcher.
We went back and forth on such issues until the static got too bad.
Later I retrieved a magnanimous message from Frank Foer, as his name
turned out to be, saying that he was conferring with associates about
whether to deal with me in The New Republic. So I assumed that at some
point Cockburn would be stigmatized yet again as the purveyor of
anti-Semitic filth.
Eventually Foer’s piece, for the online New Republic, tumbled into my
inbox, where I read it after enjoying some spectacular barbecue at
Dreamland in Birmingham, AL. After a pro forma linking of my name with
that of Louis Farrakhan, Foer conceded that I had in the past denounced
expressions of anti-Semitism but that was now moot given the fact that
in an allusion to Gabler’s book on Hollywood I had pointed out that Sam
Goldwyn, Bill Fox and another mogul had all grown up within 50 miles of
each other in Galicia. In Foer’s view this was not the mere relaying by
me of an interesting fact but a culpable demonstration of anti-Semitism.
Then he got down to business, focussing on the paragraph quoted above,
where I’d brought up the Israeli spy story and the anthrax conundrum.
”To be fair “, he wrote, ”Cockburn doesn’t exactly endorse these
theories â*|. Indeed, when I reached Cockburn to ask him about these
conspiracies, he insisted he was just reporting what was already in
circulation. â*˜I don’t think I said they are true. I don’t know there’s
enough exterior evidence to determine whether they are true or not. ’”
“But, of course, ” Foer crowed, , ”that last sentence is the giveaway.
There most certainly is enough exterior evidence to determine whether
the stories are true or not. The answer is that they are not. They are
wild rumors circulating, if at all, in some of the least credible
corners of the Internet. No respectable media outlet has given these
stories credence. Merely by stating that these ideas are in circulation,
merely by saying it’s impossible to judge their veracity, Cockburn
confers these ideas with legitimacy. ” Case proved. . But â*| “some of
the least credible corners of the Internet “? No one from The New
Republic likes antiwar. com and Justin Raimondo, and maybe he was
throwing in Fox News but surely not Le Monde and Jane’s Intelligence
Digest.
“Consider, for example, ” Foer went on, ”the story about the mad Jew
scientists out to ruin the Muslims. I searched for it on the Lexis-Nexis
news database
[Assaad’s ] honor we created this beast;; it represents life lower than
yeast. ’ The camel, it notes, each week will be given â*˜to who did the
least’. The poem also doubles as an ode to each of the participants who
adorned the camel, who number at least six and referred to themselves as
â*˜the camel club’. Two - Dr. Philip M. Zack and Dr. Marian K. Rippy -
voluntarily left Fort Detrick soon after Assaad brought the poem to the
attention of supervisors. ”
Foer also missed the complete account on the anthrax investigation
posted on Salon. com, in a story dated January 26, 2002. Not to mention
the Philadelphia Inquirer story, dated FebCounterPunch. . . . It’s been
our experience that we’ve had differences with our writers. It’s a
strength of the magazine that it accommodates a range of perspectives.
’” Isn’t it great to have an editor whose first instinct is to stand up
for a 20-year veteran of The Nation’s columns! “There are some
perspectives that shouldn’t be accommodated “, Foer concluded.
So you should know that these days it’s clear evidence of anti-Semitism
to have written an item that pisses off someone at The New Republic,
with which I have had combative relations for the past 30 years, as
would anyone with a moral fiber in his body. Could anyone sink lower
than Foer? Detrick scientist, Dr. Philip Zack, who was videotaped going
into the lab at night after hours, and who was at the center of the
anti-Assaad clique.
According to the Courant, ”Assaad said he was working on the Saturday
before Easter 1991, just after the Persian Gulf War had ended, when he
discovered an eight-page poem in his mailbox.
The poem, which became a court exhibit, is 47 stanzas - 235 lines in
all, many of them lewd, mocking Assaad. The poem also refers to another
creation of the scientists who wrote it - a rubber camel outfitted with
all manner of sexually explicit appendages. The poem reads:â*˜In but
came up with nothing - not one single mention of the story in a
mainstream news outlet. ” Foer hadn’t tried very hard. A quick
punch-through on Google brought four rather lengthy and detailed stories
in the “mainstream “ media on the harassment of Dr. Ayaad Assaad, a
former Fort Detrick scientist, who was driven out of his job by people
whose hatred of Arabs seemed to verge on the psychotic. The Hartford
Courant ran two long stories:one report on how many samples of deadly
anthrax and other bioterror toxins had gone missing from the Army’s Fort
Detrick facility, and another on the campaign against Dr. Assaad - the
connecting tissue being another Fort
The game plan is clearly what it was with Hilliard of Alabama and
McKinney of Georgia: breathe a word about justice for Palestinians, and
you’ll lose your seat.
February 28, 2002. He also blithely ignored major media coverage of the
Israeli spy story. Why should he dally with fact when he was hurrying to
issue judgement:”Cockburn’s column goes way beyond legitimate criticism
of Israel. It’s akin to the rantings of pitchfork Pat Buchanan, whose
anti-Semitism The Nation has condemned. So you would expect the magazine
to take a tough stance on the anti-Semitism in its own backyard. But
when I asked The Nation’s editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, about Cockburn,
she could only lamely distance herself from the piece:â*˜This didn’t
appear in The Nation. I don’t read Yes!Eric Alterman adduced as a proof
of my anti-Semitism the fact that I had been rude, more than once, about
Irving Howe. Puts me up there with the Cossacks, doesn’t it?
You’ll find this piece along with essays by Jeffrey St Clair, Edward
Said, Michael Neumann, Jeffrey Blankfort, Yury Avnery and others, in The
Politics of AntiSemitism, published by CounterPunch/ AK Press October l.
Order your copy now from CounterPunch’s Becky Grant at the discounted
rate of $10. 50, S/H included. Call l-800-840-3683 with credit card in
hand, or send cheque to CounterPunch, po box 228, Petrolia, Ca 95558. CP | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Nov 03, 2003 4:28 am Post subject: SUNDAY HERALD ARTICLE ON ISRAELI MOSSAD 9/11 CONNECTION |
| Subj: Urgent for Neil Mackay Regarding His Israeli Mossad 9/11 Story in Sunday Herald
Date: 11/2/03 1:30:38 PM Pacific Standard Time
From: MORRIS434
To: neil.mackayDear Mr. Mackay,
Your article (included below) about the Israeli Mossad agents connected to 9/11 is absolutely excellent.. In his book "By Way of Deception", former Israeli Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky mentions that the Israelis had information about a coming bombing attack on US interests in Lebanon and did not convey the full extent of such beforehand (with an apparent motivation similar to what you present in your article below with regard to the tragic 9/11 attack). In your excellent article, you also did not include mention of the warning that was given to Israelis at the World Trade Center as conveyed in Israel's Haaretz newspaper (here is that article):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2003/09/28/israeli-company-says-workers-warned-2-hours-before-911.php
Israeli Company Says Workers Warned 2 Hours Before 911
RePortersNoteBook memo: This story showed up a couple of years ago. It is interesting that it's back. Are they trying to explain it away? After reading all the comments on the Internet.
Also the first two arrests on 911 were Israeli nationals. About a week later on the David Letterman Show, Dan Rather reported his disgust of "Middle Easterners" jumping on top of a truck from the George Washington Bridge in celebration. He knew they were Israelis who were arrested on the spot. The first group were a bunch of Israelis on a terrace a few blocks form the World Trade Center, video taping the falling of the twin towers and laughing about it. This bizarre behavior prompted a resident in an adjacent building to call the police. When these arrests happened CBS and the rest of the mainstream press did report it accurately, by pointing out they were Israeli nationals. Now the new vernacular is "Middle Easterners." I wonder why?
--------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=77744&contrassID=
/has%5C
Israel's Odigo Says Workers Warned 2 Hours Before 911
Yuval Dror
Ha'aretz Daily
9-21-3
Odigo, the instant messaging service, says that two of its workers received
messages two hours before the Twin Towers attack on September 11 predicting
the attack would happen, and the company has been cooperating with Israeli
and American law enforcement, including the FBI, in trying to find the
original sender of the message predicting the attack.
Micha Macover, CEO of the company, said the two workers received the
messages and immediately after the terror attack informed the company's
management, which immediately contacted the Israeli security services,
which brought in the FBI.
"I have no idea why the message was sent to these two workers, who don't
know the sender. It may just have been someone who was joking and turned
out they accidentally got it right. And I don't know if our information was
useful in any of the arrests the FBI has made," said Macover. Odigo is a
U.S.-based company whose headquarters are in New York, with offices in
Herzliya.
As an instant messaging service, Odigo users are not limited to sending
messages only to people on their "buddy" list, as is the case with ICQ, the
other well-known Israeli instant messaging application.
Odigo usually zealously protects the privacy of its registered users, said
Macover, but in this case the company took the initiative to provide the
law enforcement services with the originating Internet Presence address of
the message, so the FBI could track down the Internet Service Provider, and
the actual sender of the original message.
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2003/02/16/israeli-spy-rumors-fly-on-gusts-of-truth-with-9-11.php
Sunday Herald - 02 November 2003
http://ww1.sundayherald.com/37707
Five Israelis were seen filming as jet liners ploughed into the Twin Towers
on September 11, 2001 ...
Were they part of a massive spy ring which shadowed the 9/11 hijackers and
knew that al-Qaeda planned a devastating terrorist attack on the USA? Neil
Mackay investigates
------------------------------------------------------
THERE was ruin and terror in Manhattan, but, over the Hudson River in New
Jersey, a handful of men were dancing. As the World Trade Centre burned and
crumpled, the five men celebrated and filmed the worst atrocity ever
committed on American soil as it played out before their eyes.
Who do you think they were? Palestinians? Saudis? Iraqis, even? Al-Qaeda,
surely? Wrong on all counts. They were Israelis - and at least two of them
were Israeli intelligence agents, working for Mossad, the equivalent of MI6
or the CIA.
Their discovery and arrest that morning is a matter of indisputable fact.
To those who have investigated just what the Israelis were up to that day,
the case raises one dreadful possibility: that Israeli intelligence had
been shadowing the al-Qaeda hijackers as they moved from the Middle East
through Europe and into America where they trained as pilots and prepared
to suicide-bomb the symbolic heart of the United States. And the motive? To
bind America in blood and mutual suffering to the Israeli cause.
After the attacks on New York and Washington, the former Israeli Prime
Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was asked what the terrorist strikes would
mean for US-Israeli relations. He said: "It's very good." Then he corrected
himself, adding: "Well, it's not good, but it will generate immediate
sympathy [for Israel from Americans]."
If Israel's closest ally felt the collective pain of mass civilian deaths
at the hands of terrorists, then Israel would have an unbreakable bond with
the world's only hyperpower and an effective free hand in dealing with the
Palestinian terrorists who had been murdering its innocent civilians as the
second intifada dragged on throughout 2001.
It's not surprising that the New Jersey housewife who first spotted the
five Israelis and their white van wants to preserve her anonymity. She's
insisted that she only be identified as Maria. A neighbour in her apartment
building had called her just after the first strike on the Twin Towers.
Maria grabbed a pair of binoculars and, like millions across the world, she
watched the horror of the day unfold.
As she gazed at the burning towers, she noticed a group of men kneeling on
the roof of a white van in her parking lot. Here's her recollection: "They
seemed to be taking a movie. They were like happy, you know ... they didn't
look shocked to me. I thought it was strange."
Maria jotted down the van's registration and called the police. The FBI was
alerted and soon there was a statewide all points bulletin put out for the
apprehension of the van and its occupants. The cops traced the number,
establishing that it belonged to a company called Urban Moving.
Police Chief John Schmidig said: "We got an alert to be on the lookout for
a white Chevrolet van with New Jersey registration and writing on the side.
Three individuals were seen celebrating in Liberty State Park after the
impact. They said three people were jumping up and down."
By 4pm on the afternoon of September 11, the van was spotted near New
Jersey's Giants stadium. A squad car pulled it over and inside were five
men in their 20s. They were hustled out of the car with guns levelled at
their heads and handcuffed.
In the car was $4700 in cash, a couple of foreign passports and a pair of
box cutters - the concealed Stanley Knife-type blades used by the 19
hijackers who'd flown jetliners into the World Trade Centre and Pentagon
just hours before. There were also fresh pictures of the men standing with
the smouldering wreckage of the Twin Towers in the background. One image
showed a hand flicking a lighter in front of the devastated buildings, like
a fan at a pop concert. The driver of the van then told the arresting
officers: "We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our
problems. The Palestinians are the problem."
His name was Sivan Kurzberg. The other four passengers were Kurzberg's
brother Paul, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari. The men were
dragged off to prison and transferred out of the custody of the FBI's
Criminal Division and into the hands of their Foreign Counterintelligence
Section - the bureau's anti-espionage squad.
A warrant was issued for a search of the Urban Moving premises in Weehawken
in New Jersey. Boxes of papers and computers were removed. The FBI
questioned the firm's Israeli owner, Dominik Otto Suter, but when agents
returned to re-interview him a few days later, he was gone. An employee of
Urban Moving said his co-workers had laughed about the Manhattan attacks
the day they happened. "I was in tears," the man said. "These guys were
joking and that bothered me. These guys were like, 'Now America knows what
we go through.'"
Vince Cannistraro, former chief of operations for counter-terrorism with
the CIA, says the red flag went up among investigators when it was
discovered that some of the Israelis' names were found in a search of the
national intelligence database. Cannistraro says many in the US
intelligence community believed that some of the Israelis were working for
Mossad and there was speculation over whether Urban Moving had been "set up
or exploited for the purpose of launching an intelligence operation against
radical Islamists".
This makes it clear that there was no suggestion whatsoever from within
American intelligence that the Israelis were colluding with the 9/11
hijackers - simply that the possibility remains that they knew the attacks
were going to happen, but effectively did nothing to help stop them.
After the owner vanished, the offices of Urban Moving looked as if they'd
been closed down in a big hurry. Mobile phones were littered about, the
office phones were still connected and the property of at least a dozen
clients were stacked up in the warehouse. The owner had cleared out his
family home in New Jersey and returned to Israel.
Two weeks after their arrest, the Israelis were still in detention, held on
immigration charges. Then a judge ruled that they should be deported. But
the CIA scuppered the deal and the five remained in custody for another two
months. Some went into solitary confinement, all underwent two polygraph
tests and at least one underwent up to seven lie detector sessions before
they were eventually deported at the end of November 2001. Paul Kurzberg
refused to take a lie detector test for 10 weeks, but then failed it. His
lawyer said he was reluctant to take the test as he had once worked for
Israeli intelligence in another country.
Nevertheless, their lawyer, Ram Horvitz, dismissed the allegations as
"stupid and ridiculous". Yet US government sources still maintained that
the Israelis were collecting information on the fundraising activities of
groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Mark Regev, of the Israeli embassy in
Washington, would have none of that and he said the allegations were
"simply false". The men themselves claimed they'd read about the World
Trade Centre attacks on the internet, couldn't see it from their office and
went to the parking lot for a better view. Their lawyers and the embassy
say their ghoulish and sinister celebrations as the Twin Towers blazed and
thousands died were due to youthful foolishness.
The respected New York Jewish newspaper, The Forward, reported in March
2002, however, that it had received a briefing on the case of the five
Israelis from a US official who was regularly updated by law enforcement
agencies. This is what he told The Forward: "The assessment was that Urban
Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it."
He added that "the conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local
Arabs", but the men were released because they "did not know anything about
9/11".
Back in Israel, several of the men discussed what happened on an Israeli
talk show. One of them made this remarkable comment: "The fact of the
matter is we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our
purpose was to document the event." But how can you document an event
unless you know it is going to happen?
We are now deep in conspiracy theory territory. But there is more than a
little circumstantial evidence to show that Mossad - whose motto is "By way
of deception, thou shalt do war" - was spying on Arab extremists in the USA
and may have known that September 11 was in the offing, yet decided to
withhold vital information from their American counterparts which could
have prevented the terror attacks.
Following September 11, 2001, more than 60 Israelis were taken into custody
under the Patriot Act and immigration laws. One highly placed investigator
told Carl Cameron of Fox News that there were "tie-ins" between the
Israelis and September 11; the hint was clearly that they'd gathered
intelligence on the planned attacks but kept it to themselves.
The Fox News source refused to give details, saying: "Evidence linking
these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that
has been gathered. It's classified information." Fox News is not noted for
its condemnation of Israel; it's a ruggedly patriotic news channel owned by
Rupert Murdoch and was President Bush's main cheerleader in the war on
terror and the invasion of Iraq.
Another group of around 140 Israelis were detained prior to September 11,
2001, in the USA as part of a widespread investigation into a suspected
espionage ring run by Israel inside the USA. Government documents refer to
the spy ring as an "organised intelligence-gathering operation" designed to
"penetrate government facilities". Most of those arrested had served in the
Israeli armed forces - but military service is compulsory in Israel.
Nevertheless, a number had an intelligence background.
The first glimmerings of an Israeli spying exercise in the USA came to
light in spring 2001, when the FBI sent a warning to other federal agencies
alerting them to be wary of visitors calling themselves "Israeli art
students" and attempting to bypass security at federal buildings in order
to sell paintings. A Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) report suggested
the Israeli calls "may well be an organised intelligence-gathering
activity". Law enforcement documents say that the Israelis "targeted and
penetrated military bases" as well as the DEA, FBI and dozens of government
facilities, including secret offices and the unlisted private homes of law
enforcement and intelligence personnel.
A number of Israelis questioned by the authorities said they were students
from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, but Pnina Calpen, a spokeswoman for
the Israeli school, did not recognise the names of any Israelis mentioned
as studying there in the past 10 years. A federal report into the so-called
art students said many had served in intelligence and electronic signal
intercept units during their military service.
According to a 61-page report, drafted after an investigation by the DEA
and the US immigration service, the Israelis were organised into cells of
four to six people. The significance of what the Israelis were doing didn't
emerge until after September 11, 2001, when a report by a French
intelligence agency noted "according to the FBI, Arab terrorists and
suspected terror cells lived in Phoenix, Arizona, as well as in Miami and
Hollywood, Florida, from December 2000 to April 2001 in direct proximity to
the Israeli spy cells".
The report contended that Mossad agents were spying on Mohammed Atta and
Marwan al-Shehi, two of leaders of the 9/11 hijack teams. The pair had
settled in Hollywood, Florida, along with three other hijackers, after
leaving Hamburg - where another Mossad team was operating close by.
Hollywood in Florida is a town of just 25,000 souls. The French
intelligence report says the leader of the Mossad cell in Florida rented
apartments "right near the apartment of Atta and al-Shehi". More than a
third of the Israeli "art students" claimed residence in Florida. Two other
Israelis connected to the art ring showed up in Fort Lauderdale. At one
time, eight of the hijackers lived just north of the town.
Put together, the facts do appear to indicate that Israel knew that 9/11,
or at least a large-scale terror attack, was about to take place on
American soil, but did nothing to warn the USA. But that's not quite true.
In August 2001, the Israelis handed over a list of terrorist suspects - on
it were the names of four of the September 11 hijackers. Significantly,
however, the warning said the terrorists were planning an attack "outside
the United States".
The Israeli embassy in Washington has dismissed claims about the spying
ring as "simply untrue". The same denials have been issued repeatedly by
the five Israelis seen high-fiving each other as the World Trade Centre
burned in front of them.
Their lawyer, Ram Horwitz, insisted his clients were not intelligence
officers. Irit Stoffer, the Israeli foreign minister, said the allegations
were "completely untrue". She said the men were arrested because of "visa
violations", adding: "The FBI investigated those cases because of 9/11."
Jim Margolin, an FBI spokesman in New York, implied that the public would
never know the truth, saying: "If we found evidence of unauthorised
intelligence operations that would be classified material." Yet, Israel has
long been known, according to US administration sources, for "conducting
the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any US ally".
Seventeen years ago, Jonathan Pollard, a civilian working for the American
Navy, was jailed for life for passing secrets to Israel. At first, Israel
claimed Pollard was part of a rogue operation, but the government later
took responsibility for his work.
It has always been a long-accepted agreement among allies - such as Britain
and America or America and Israel - that neither country will jail a
"friendly spy" nor shame the allied country for espionage. Chip Berlet, a
senior analyst at Boston's Political Research Associates and an expert in
intelligence, says: "It's a backdoor agreement between allies that says
that if one of your spies gets caught and didn't do too much harm, he goes
home. It goes on all the time. The official reason is always visa
violation."
What we are left with, then, is fact sullied by innuendo. Certainly, it
seems, Israel was spying within the borders of the United States and it is
equally certain that the targets were Islamic extremists probably linked to
September 11. But did Israel know in advance that the Twin Towers would be
hit and the world plunged into a war without end; a war which would give
Israel the power to strike its enemies almost without limit? That's a
conspiracy theory too far, perhaps. But the unpleasant feeling that, in
this age of spin and secrets, we do not know the full and unadulterated
truth won't go away. Maybe we can guess, but it's for the history books to
discover and decide.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright © 2003 smg sunday newspapers ltd. no.176088
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The QUESTION:
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RePorterNoteBook@aol.com | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Nov 03, 2003 4:50 pm Post subject: MOSSAD AND 911 |
| Subj: Mossad and 911
Date: 11/3/03 4:23:20 AM Pacific Standard Time
From: hectorpv@comcast.net
To: hectorpv@comcast.net
Sent from the Internet (Details)
Friends,
Mossad and 911
This piece (from a Scottish newspaper) summarizes some of the information that points toward Israeli prior knowledge of the 9/11 atrocities. Most of this information became public in 2001 but has since sunk into the memory hole. It’s simply taboo. Since simply pointing out the neoconservatives’ leading role in the war on Iraq brings on the lethal charge of "anti-Semitism," even though all of the evidence comes from published sources, it is clear that it would be absolutely verboten to move into more secretive areas. Obviously, the circumstantial evidence of an Israeli connection to 9/11 is strong; in fact, I would say it is obvious. The fact that Israelis, with apparent Mossad connections, managed to take photographs from across the Hudson River of the jet liners hitting the Twin Towers and that Israeli spies (some posing as "art students") lived in close proximity to the 9/11 Islamic terrorists obviously points to some connection. [See my essay on the subject from April 2002, "The Israeli spy ring and September 11," www.thornwalker.com/ditch/towers_5.htm ]
As the following article points out: "But there is more than a little circumstantial evidence to show that Mossad – whose motto is ‘By way of deception, thou shalt do war’ – was spying on Arab extremists in the USA and may have known that September 11 was in the offing, yet decided to withhold vital information from their American counterparts which could have prevented the terror attacks."
Now this article states that Israeli intelligence simply knew about the attacks, not that Israel in any way facilitated such attacks. The intrepid Justin Raimondo made a more reasonable assessment of the information when he wrote: "At the very least, the mechanics of what is obviously a covert operation directed by Israel imply a certain degree of foreknowledge. At worst, the details of this complex and by-no-means completely uncovered spy ring may wind up pointing to active (albeit one-sided) Israeli collusion with the mass murderers of 9/11. While the first conclusion is a virtual certainty, the second is, admittedly, speculation. What's scary is that such theorizing is not without a certain basis in fact." [http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j032202.html ]
There is an old adage that when a crime is committed, the first question to be asked is 'Cui bono? Obviously, Israel has been the big beneficiary from 911.
The neocons began the effort to implement the war on Iraq immediately after 911 took place. Was it simply a case of serendipity? Would Israel allow such an event to take place, if it were aware of it? Would Israel dare to try to facilitate such an event?
For years stories have circulated that Israeli agents--especially its foreign intelligence agency the Mossad--have infiltrated Arab terrorist networks and have sometimes actually been involved in deceptive terrorist activities intended to appear as the work of Arabs. For example, it has been alleged that the Mossad had thoroughly infiltrated the nefarious terrorist group Abu Nidal and even facilitated some of its terrorist activities for Israel's benefit. [Patrick Seale, Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire (New York: Random House, 1992)]
In the notorious Lavon Affair, Israel's deceptive terrorism was actually acknowledged by the Israeli government. In July 1954 Egypt was plagued by a series of bomb outrages directed mainly against American and British property in Cairo and Alexandria. It was generally assumed that this was the work of Arab nationalists, which had the effect of heightening tensions at a time when Egypt was negotiating with Britain over the evacuation of its military bases in the Suez Canal Zone. Egyptian police were able to capture and identify one of the bombers, which in turn led to the round up of an Israeli spy ring, consisting of Israeli and Egyptian Jews. Israel responded to the spy scandal by declaring it an "anti-Semitic" lie. As the public trial progressed, it was evident that Israel had indeed been behind the bombing. Eventually, the spying was admitted in Israel and Israeli's Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon was brought down by the scandal, although he may have largely been a scapegoat.
The belief that Israel might engage in such deceptive terrorism against the United States was expressed in a 2001 study by the Army's School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS). A poignant reference to this study appeared in a front page article in the Washington Times on September 10, 2001, one day before the horrific attack The article read: "Of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, the SAMS officers say: 'Wildcard. Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target US forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act.'" [http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/2001/washingtontimes091001.html ]
Since significant circumstantial evidence points to a connection with Israel, one might think it would be investigated thoroughly. But, of course, such an investigation is precluded by the "anti-Semitic" taboo. Note that this whole story is much too dangerous for the American media and any investigative reporter to handle. Contrast this with all the publicity given to wild charges about Saddam’s possession of WMD or his connection to al-Qaeda. As a matter of fact, evidence of Israeli malevolence is even too taboo to be investigated thoroughly by organs of the US government—as was the case of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty in 1967, in which in which 35 American sailors were killed, Therefore, it would seem that the fear of being caught would not exist to deter Israel from engaging in actions harmful to the US. The only thing that would possibly restrain Israel would be some love for the United States. But, of course, such "love," did not prevent Israel from attacking the Liberty nor of selling American intelligence secrets obtained from Pollard to the Soviet Union, which endangered (and, in fact, cost) American lives. In short, Israel is willing to take measures destructive of American lives to advance its own interests.
The only major media outlet that gave attention to the Israeli "art student" spying was, ironically, the pro-war Fox News, in articles presented by reporter Carl Cameron. Some telling quotes from Cameron.
"Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information." -- US official quoted in Carl Cameron's Fox News report on the Israeli spyring. [http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/spyring.html ]
"Investigators within the DEA, INS and FBI have all told Fox News that to pursue or even suggest Israeli spying ... is considered career suicide." Carl Cameron, as quoted in The Spies Who Came In From The Art Sale,[http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/2002-03-13/fishwrapper.html]
Fox was under intense pressure from pro-Israeli lobbying groups, such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Orwellian-named Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting, to stop reporting on the issue of Israeli spies. Fox obliged and removed the Cameron reports from its web site. [http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/2002-03-13/fishwrapper.html]
A final intriguing tidbit regarding Israel and 9/11 that might not mean anything, but then . . .
A private security company called ICTS, owned by an Israeli, Ezra Harel, is said to have provided security services to all the airports where the 911 planes were hijacked. Many of its personnel are said to be ex-Shin Bet officers. (Israel’s internal security service.) [http://afrocubaweb.com/news/israelispying.htm ]
.
____________________________
http://ww1.sundayherald.com/37707
Sunday Herald - 02 November 2003
Five Israelis were seen filming as jet liners ploughed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 ...
Were they part of a massive spy ring which shadowed the 9/11 hijackers and knew that al-Qaeda planned a devastating terrorist attack on the USA? Neil Mackay investigates
THERE was ruin and terror in Manhattan, but, over the Hudson River in New Jersey, a handful of men were dancing. As the World Trade Centre burned and crumpled, the five men celebrated and filmed the worst atrocity ever committed on American soil as it played out before their eyes.
Who do you think they were? Palestinians? Saudis? Iraqis, even? Al-Qaeda, surely? Wrong on all counts. They were Israelis – and at least two of them were Israeli intelligence agents, working for Mossad, the equivalent of MI6 or the CIA.
Their discovery and arrest that morning is a matter of indisputable fact. To those who have investigated just what the Israelis were up to that day, the case raises one dreadful possibility: that Israeli intelligence had been shadowing the al-Qaeda hijackers as they moved from the Middle East through Europe and into America where they trained as pilots and prepared to suicide-bomb the symbolic heart of the United States. And the motive? To bind America in blood and mutual suffering to the Israeli cause.
After the attacks on New York and Washington, the former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was asked what the terrorist strikes would mean for US-Israeli relations. He said: "It’s very good." Then he corrected himself, adding: "Well, it’s not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy [for Israel from Americans]."
If Israel’s closest ally felt the collective pain of mass civilian deaths at the hands of terrorists, then Israel would have an unbreakable bond with the world’s only hyperpower and an effective free hand in dealing with the Palestinian terrorists who had been murdering its innocent civilians as the second intifada dragged on throughout 2001.
It’s not surprising that the New Jersey housewife who first spotted the five Israelis and their white van wants to preserve her anonymity. She’s insisted that she only be identified as Maria. A neighbour in her apartment building had called her just after the first strike on the Twin Towers. Maria grabbed a pair of binoculars and, like millions across the world, she watched the horror of the day unfold.
As she gazed at the burning towers, she noticed a group of men kneeling on the roof of a white van in her parking lot. Here’s her recollection: "They seemed to be taking a movie. They were like happy, you know ... they didn’t look shocked to me. I thought it was strange."
Maria jotted down the van’s registration and called the police. The FBI was alerted and soon there was a statewide all points bulletin put out for the apprehension of the van and its occupants. The cops traced the number, establishing that it belonged to a company called Urban Moving.
Police Chief John Schmidig said: "We got an alert to be on the lookout for a white Chevrolet van with New Jersey registration and writing on the side. Three individuals were seen celebrating in Liberty State Park after the impact. They said three people were jumping up and down."
By 4pm on the afternoon of September 11, the van was spotted near New Jersey’s Giants stadium. A squad car pulled it over and inside were five men in their 20s. They were hustled out of the car with guns levelled at their heads and handcuffed.
In the car was $4700 in cash, a couple of foreign passports and a pair of box cutters – the concealed Stanley Knife-type blades used by the 19 hijackers who’d flown jetliners into the World Trade Centre and Pentagon just hours before. There were also fresh pictures of the men standing with the smouldering wreckage of the Twin Towers in the background. One image showed a hand flicking a lighter in front of the devastated buildings, like a fan at a pop concert. The driver of the van then told the arresting officers: "We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem."
His name was Sivan Kurzberg. The other four passengers were Kurzberg’s brother Paul, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari. The men were dragged off to prison and transferred out of the custody of the FBI’s Criminal Division and into the hands of their Foreign Counterintelligence Section – the bureau’s anti-espionage squad.
A warrant was issued for a search of the Urban Moving premises in Weehawken in New Jersey. Boxes of papers and computers were removed. The FBI questioned the firm’s Israeli owner, Dominik Otto Suter, but when agents returned to re-interview him a few days later, he was gone. An employee of Urban Moving said his co-workers had laughed about the Manhattan attacks the day they happened. "I was in tears," the man said. "These guys were joking and that bothered me. These guys were like, ‘Now America knows what we go through.’"
Vince Cannistraro, former chief of operations for counter-terrorism with the CIA, says the red flag went up among investigators when it was discovered that some of the Israelis’ names were found in a search of the national intelligence database. Cannistraro says many in the US intelligence community believed that some of the Israelis were working for Mossad and there was speculation over whether Urban Moving had been "set up or exploited for the purpose of launching an intelligence operation against radical Islamists".
This makes it clear that there was no suggestion whatsoever from within American intelligence that the Israelis were colluding with the 9/11 hijackers – simply that the possibility remains that they knew the attacks were going to happen, but effectively did nothing to help stop them.
After the owner vanished, the offices of Urban Moving looked as if they’d been closed down in a big hurry. Mobile phones were littered about, the office phones were still connected and the property of at least a dozen clients were stacked up in the warehouse. The owner had cleared out his family home in New Jersey and returned to Israel.
Two weeks after their arrest, the Israelis were still in detention, held on immigration charges. Then a judge ruled that they should be deported. But the CIA scuppered the deal and the five remained in custody for another two months. Some went into solitary confinement, all underwent two polygraph tests and at least one underwent up to seven lie detector sessions before they were eventually deported at the end of November 2001. Paul Kurzberg refused to take a lie detector test for 10 weeks, but then failed it. His lawyer said he was reluctant to take the test as he had once worked for Israeli intelligence in another country.
Nevertheless, their lawyer, Ram Horvitz, dismissed the allegations as "stupid and ridiculous". Yet US government sources still maintained that the Israelis were collecting information on the fundraising activities of groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Mark Regev, of the Israeli embassy in Washington, would have none of that and he said the allegations were "simply false". The men themselves claimed they’d read about the World Trade Centre attacks on the internet, couldn’t see it from their office and went to the parking lot for a better view. Their lawyers and the embassy say their ghoulish and sinister celebrations as the Twin Towers blazed and thousands died were due to youthful foolishness.
The respected New York Jewish newspaper, The Forward, reported in March 2002, however, that it had received a briefing on the case of the five Israelis from a US official who was regularly updated by law enforcement agencies. This is what he told The Forward: "The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it." He added that "the conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs", but the men were released because they "did not know anything about 9/11".
Back in Israel, several of the men discussed what happened on an Israeli talk show. One of them made this remarkable comment: "The fact of the matter is we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event." But how can you document an event unless you know it is going to happen?
We are now deep in conspiracy theory territory. But there is more than a little circumstantial evidence to show that Mossad – whose motto is "By way of deception, thou shalt do war" – was spying on Arab extremists in the USA and may have known that September 11 was in the offing, yet decided to withhold vital information from their American counterparts which could have prevented the terror attacks.
Following September 11, 2001, more than 60 Israelis were taken into custody under the Patriot Act and immigration laws. One highly placed investigator told Carl Cameron of Fox News that there were "tie-ins" between the Israelis and September 11; the hint was clearly that they’d gathered intelligence on the planned attacks but kept it to themselves.
The Fox News source refused to give details, saying: "Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information." Fox News is not noted for its condemnation of Israel; it’s a ruggedly patriotic news channel owned by Rupert Murdoch and was President Bush’s main cheerleader in the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq.
Another group of around 140 Israelis were detained prior to September 11, 2001, in the USA as part of a widespread investigation into a suspected espionage ring run by Israel inside the USA. Government documents refer to the spy ring as an "organised intelligence-gathering operation" designed to "penetrate government facilities". Most of those arrested had served in the Israeli armed forces – but military service is compulsory in Israel. Nevertheless, a number had an intelligence background.
The first glimmerings of an Israeli spying exercise in the USA came to light in spring 2001, when the FBI sent a warning to other federal agencies alerting them to be wary of visitors calling themselves "Israeli art students" and attempting to bypass security at federal buildings in order to sell paintings. A Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) report suggested the Israeli calls "may well be an organised intelligence-gathering activity". Law enforcement documents say that the Israelis "targeted and penetrated military bases" as well as the DEA, FBI and dozens of government facilities, including secret offices and the unlisted private homes of law enforcement and intelligence personnel.
A number of Israelis questioned by the authorities said they were students from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, but Pnina Calpen, a spokeswoman for the Israeli school, did not recognise the names of any Israelis mentioned as studying there in the past 10 years. A federal report into the so-called art students said many had served in intelligence and electronic signal intercept units during their military service.
According to a 61-page report, drafted after an investigation by the DEA and the US immigration service, the Israelis were organised into cells of four to six people. The significance of what the Israelis were doing didn’t emerge until after September 11, 2001, when a report by a French intelligence agency noted "according to the FBI, Arab terrorists and suspected terror cells lived in Phoenix, Arizona, as well as in Miami and Hollywood, Florida, from December 2000 to April 2001 in direct proximity to the Israeli spy cells".
The report contended that Mossad agents were spying on Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehi, two of leaders of the 9/11 hijack teams. The pair had settled in Hollywood, Florida, along with three other hijackers, after leaving Hamburg – where another Mossad team was operating close by.
Hollywood in Florida is a town of just 25,000 souls. The French intelligence report says the leader of the Mossad cell in Florida rented apartments "right near the apartment of Atta and al-Shehi". More than a third of the Israeli "art students" claimed residence in Florida. Two other Israelis connected to the art ring showed up in Fort Lauderdale. At one time, eight of the hijackers lived just north of the town.
Put together, the facts do appear to indicate that Israel knew that 9/11, or at least a large-scale terror attack, was about to take place on American soil, but did nothing to warn the USA. But that’s not quite true. In August 2001, the Israelis handed over a list of terrorist suspects – on it were the names of four of the September 11 hijackers. Significantly, however, the warning said the terrorists were planning an attack "outside the United States".
The Israeli embassy in Washington has dismissed claims about the spying ring as "simply untrue". The same denials have been issued repeatedly by the five Israelis seen high-fiving each other as the World Trade Centre burned in front of them.
Their lawyer, Ram Horwitz, insisted his clients were not intelligence officers. Irit Stoffer, the Israeli foreign minister, said the allegations were "completely untrue". She said the men were arrested because of "visa violations", adding: "The FBI investigated those cases because of 9/11."
Jim Margolin, an FBI spokesman in New York, implied that the public would never know the truth, saying: "If we found evidence of unauthorised intelligence operations that would be classified material." Yet, Israel has long been known, according to US administration sources, for "conducting the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any US ally". Seventeen years ago, Jonathan Pollard, a civilian working for the American Navy, was jailed for life for passing secrets to Israel. At first, Israel claimed Pollard was part of a rogue operation, but the government later took responsibility for his work.
It has always been a long-accepted agreement among allies – such as Britain and America or America and Israel – that neither country will jail a "friendly spy" nor shame the allied country for espionage. Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at Boston’s Political Research Associates and an expert in intelligence, says: "It’s a backdoor agreement between allies that says that if one of your spies gets caught and didn’t do too much harm, he goes home. It goes on all the time. The official reason is always visa violation."
What we are left with, then, is fact sullied by innuendo. Certainly, it seems, Israel was spying within the borders of the United States and it is equally certain that the targets were Islamic extremists probably linked to September 11. But did Israel know in advance that the Twin Towers would be hit and the world plunged into a war without end; a war which would give Israel the power to strike its enemies almost without limit? That’s a conspiracy theory too far, perhaps. But the unpleasant feeling that, in this age of spin and secrets, we do not know the full and unadulterated truth won’t go away. Maybe we can guess, but it’s for the history books to discover and decide.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | | | PSCM USCGR | | Posted: Mon Nov 03, 2003 5:13 pm Post subject: |
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