Re: *** A special CELEBRATION in ISRAEL for 3000 dead goyim on 911 at the Mossad Central HeadQuarters , lots of Russian girls ***

[thermate2]

You forgot to add that:
President Moshe Katsa, the highest priest of zionism and from Iran
will be there to personally lead the orgy.

On Mar 7, 2:30 pm, stj...@rock.com wrote:
> A SPE CIAL ... cele bray shen in ... Iz ray el for the 3000 dead goyim
> on 911
>
> 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-Qaeda­connected
> suspects lived and operated near one another, in some cases less than
> half a mile apart, for various periods during 2000­01 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 exposé 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 exposé 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 Schröm 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