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The secret story of Mossad and the World Trade Center

attack
Told for the first time — the story of Mossad's advance knowledge about
the 9-11 attack and how the US Army reported that Mossad "has
capability to target US forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act."

The Clinton-Bush cover story is coming rapidly unraveled....more to come

in this breaking story.

The unresolved role of Mossad in 9-11

In the hours following the World Trade Center attack, millions of American Jews were
shocked and deeply hurt at accusations spreading around the world like wildfire that Israel
had been behind the attack, and had even warned thousands of Jews working in the Twin
Towers not to go to work that morning.

The rumors were not restricted to wild-eyed terrorist sympathizers overflowing with
anti-Jewish hatred. Sheikh Muhammed Al-Gamei-a was, until shortly after the attacks the
US representative of Egypt's Al-Azhar University in New York City — westernized, educated,
seemingly rational.

He had also served as Imam of the Islamic Cultural Center and mosque in New York, but he
fled America after the attacks, claiming Muslim life in America had become unbearable
because of the "Zionist plot."

"I personally have suffered; my home was attacked, and my daughters were harassed."

He said he confronted a mob attacking his home and told them what they were doing was
uncivilized and also a two-fold crime in itself: they were letting the true criminals go free and
attacking the innocent.

"It became very clear to me that they knew very well that the Jews were behind these ugly
acts (9-11) while we, the Arabs, were innocent ... "

"All the signs indicate that the Jews had the most to gain from an explosion like that. They
are the only ones capable of planning such acts."

"First of all, it was found that the automatic pilot was neutralized a few minutes before the
flight. ... Second, the black boxes were found to contain no information. ... Third, America has
the most powerful intelligence apparatuses, the FBI and the CIA. ... How did the
[perpetrators] manage to infiltrate America without their knowledge?"

"Fourth, Jews control decision-making in the airports and in the sensitive centers in the White
House and the Pentagon. Fifth, to date America has presented no proof incriminating
Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda."

Further, repeating the wildfire rumor, he claimed 4,000 Jews had skipped work at the Twin
Towers that morning.

Even James Zogby, chairman of the Arab American Institute, shook his head in sadness and
denounced it as a cruel and bizarre hoax.

Gamei-a insists that police "arrested a group of Jews rejoicing in the street at the time of the
incident.

This news item was hushed up immediately after it was broadcast. ... The Jews who control
the media acted to hush it up. ... If it became known to the American people, they would have
done to the Jews what Hitler did." (NewsMax.com — "A Muddled Muslim Mind" by Reed
Irvine, chairman of Accuracy in Media, 18 October 2001)
What the Israeli government knew about 9-11

While it is obviously a cruelty to blame Jews as a whole, it is a fair question to ask if Israeli
intelligence might have known in advance and, further, if Mossad (the Israeli intelligence
agency) might have had a hand in advancing the act to deflect criticism against Israeli
actions in Palestine.

One can't deny that it would have strengthened their hand in dealing with their own terrorism
problems.

Pravda, carrying the story a bit further but with some ambiguity, carried an article written by
Bill White, which claimed: "When asked what he thought about the September 11 attacks on
the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, an Israeli minister told the press that "this is very
good."

That day, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon renewed his attacks on Palestinian territories,
killing nearly a dozen Palestinians.

Another Israeli government official gloated to the press that it appeared America no longer
cared if Israel shot Palestinians dead in the streets.

In the US, Israel's domestic lobby almost celebrated the attacks — in fact, five Israeli
nationalists were arrested in New York after the FBI found them dancing in the streets — and
public support for US aid to Israel jumped from ... around 40% to nearly 55% in a CNN
opinion poll." (Pravda, "From Supporting Israel to Opposing 'Hate'" by Bill White — 4
October 2001)

First, one has to consider the source and the agenda of that source. Pravda has long been
the official mouthpiece of Soviet propaganda. The "Israeli minister" who made the statement
"this is very good" is conveniently unnamed.

In fact, the quote may be accurate, but the story doesn't explain just what the minister
meant. One can see where it would be "very good" to the Israeli position regarding
Palestinian terrorist acts if it took some of the pressure off Israeli responses.

Note also the use of the word "gloated" — obviously an emotional hot button, the kind of
editorializing one finds so much of in our own press, such as the New York Times.

The only individual identified is Ariel Sharon and, yes, he did take advantage of the attack to
go after those in his own back yard he considered "terrorists", even though the Arab world
considers them "freedom fighters."

Even the story about the five arrested Israelis could be true, though this author has been
unable to track down any confirmation. As for the CNN poll, it probably was true.

What one needs to be aware of when reading or viewing any news story is the subtlety of
"hot button words," the use of certain adjectives to create an emotional image that may or
may not be true.

The very thought of some Jew "gloating" over thousands of innocent dead Americans is
bound to awaken a rage in the average American listener.

A common psy-op ("psychological operations") tactic is to mix information with disinformation

in the hopes the whole story will be swallowed, hook, line and sinker.

There are numerous examples of that throughout this book, where US officials have told
partial-lies, partial truths and complete lies to advance covert political agendas the informed
public would never support.

But the US certainly has no monopoly on the tried and tested propaganda ploy.

On the other hand, the shrill cry of "anti-Semitism" has been used and over-used to stifle
legitimate criticism and to strike fear in the hearts of those who disagree with Israeli policies
but are not anti-Semitic.

Israeli apologists have used the tactic for so long and with such over-kill that it is bound to
lose its effectiveness.

Its misuse does not serve genuine Israeli interests; too often Israelis demand that their
policies and their actions, no matter how barbaric, be accepted because of who they are, not
on the basis of what they are doing.
It makes Israel an international bully, no matter how small a nation it may be.

It is akin to discussing whether a color is blue or green. If an Israeli says it is blue, he must
be right because he is a Jew and even if it's bright red, he's right and you are anti-Semitic to
even think otherwise. The result is cruel and long-lasting to all Jews, and yet it is to some
extent self-inflicted.

That said — at the risk of being falsely branded an anti-Semite myself, can one logically and
rationally, based on fact, even discuss the possibility of an Israeli role in 9-11?

Israeli role in 9-11?

Just days after the WTC attack, on September 20, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu did not exactly play the role of statesman when he demanded of the US
Congress that America must wage war not just on Afghanistan, but must also attack all of
Israel's enemies, real and perceived, including Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

He was clearly capitalizing on American heartbreak to further his own self-interest and that of
Israel's.

Israeli apologists in the Bush government immediately fell all over themselves in disgusting
agreement.

Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz demanded an attack on Iraq.

Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle wanted us to start bombing Egypt.

It was reminiscent of the screams of one of the Columbine high school killers: "Kill 'em
all!!!!"

It was a cynical ploy on Netanyahu's part, but intelligence reports since then indicate he may
get his way yet.

DoD warns about Mossad 'targeting US', framing Arabs

In 2001, even though the Bush administration said there were no active plans to put
American peacekeepers between Palestinians and Israelis, there were contingency plans for
such an action.

Indeed, the Department of Defense would have been negligent not to have had such
contingency plans that could be quickly activated if needed.

That 68-page contingency plan, calling for the introduction of three heavily-armed US
brigades, was prepared by the Army's School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), an elite
training ground and military think tank at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

That report, obtained by the Washington Times, contains some eye-opening assessments
about Israel — assessments overlooked in the more "newsworthy" angle of "20,000 US
troops suggested for West Bank."

The study was compiled by 60 officers (all second-year SAMS students) called the "Jedi
Knights."

The goal of the study was to set out what could be accomplished in the first 30 days of US
involvement.

In the past, SAMS has done studies for the Joint Chiefs and Army chief of staff, and helped
plan the allied ground attack against Iraq.

That report calls the Israeli armed forces a "500-pound gorilla in Israel. Well armed and
trained. Operates in both Gaza [and the West Bank]. Known to disregard international law
to accomplish mission. Very unlikely to fire on American forces."

Speaking more specifically of Mossad, the report continues: "Wildcard. Ruthless and
cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act."
Source: The Washington Times, "Army study suggests U.S. force of 20,000" by Rowan
Scarborough, 5 April 2002)

The Odigo Warning: Israeli employees get e-mail warnings of 9-11

On October 3, 2001, Online Newsbytes published a report that "officials at instant-messaging

firm Odigo confirmed that two employees received text messages warning of an attack on the
World Trade Center two hours before terrorists crashed planes into the New York
landmarks."

This was confirmed by Alex Diamindis, vice president of sales and marketing, who said that
workers in the company's research and development and international sales office in Israel
did in fact receive such a warning from another Odigo user about two hours before the first
attack.

"Diamandis said the sender of the instant message was not personally known to the Odigo
employees."

Although both the FBI and Israeli law enforcement agencies said they were "looking into the
matter," it dropped entirely off the radar screen and not another word has been heard since.
(NewsMax.com — "Instant Messages Warned of Attacks" — 3 Oct. 2001)

More ominous is the military assessment above that Israel has the capability and the
willingness to do such a thing.

US awareness of that fact is considered a vital military factor in US strategic planning, and
carries more weight than the angry words of a young student or the vague rumors floating
around a mosque, or even the more concrete and confirmed e-mails to Israeli workers at
Odigo.

One doesn't have to go too far back into recent history to discover very real Israeli attacks on
US military ships.

Sharon's screaming match with Shimon Peres

On October 4, 2001, a report aired on Col Yisrael radio of a screaming match between Ariel
Sharon and Foreign Minister (and former Prime Minister) Shimon Peres over the perceived
decline of Israeli world status.

"Don't worry about American pressure on Israel," Sharon reportedly yelled at Peres. "We,
the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it."

Peres wasn't sure how long that would prove to be true.

Heavy Jewish influence on the Clinton administration, as on most others, is far out of
proportion to American Jewish population.

Most of the world denounces US bias toward Israel, no matter how violent or abhorrent her
actions.

That has proven even more true in the recent escalation of West Bank violence.

Mossad alert — warning or play?

There is no doubt that Mossad did have pretty detailed knowledge of a forthcoming attack on
the US.

The London Telegraph reported on Sept. 17 that Mossad officials actually flew to Washington
in August to try to personally plead with the CIA and FBI to deal with a cell of 200 terrorists
planning a major operation — but both agencies refused to listen.

The Mossad officials specifically warned that "large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible
targets on the American mainland were imminent."

While offering no specific target information, they pointed to Iraq and Osama bin Laden.

A US official told the Telegraph that it was "quite credible" that the CIA did not heed the
Mossad warning.

"It has a history of being over-cautious about Israeli information."

But he added that "if this is true, then the refusal to take it seriously will mean heads will roll."

But of course they didn't. CIA "over-caution" stems from the Mossad too often crying wolf in
order to get the US to do its dirty work for them.

It would seem self-defeating for Mossad to tell the CIA in advance about such an attack if
Mossad was itself involved, but Mossad could have been playing an extremely clever card,
knowing its warning would be ignored, and thus covering its own butt by issuing the warning
anyway.
Sometimes the best way to keep a secret is to "hide" it right out in the open, where no one
would think to look.

There is always the possibility the CIA and Mossad may have even worked together to
smooth the way for the New York attack, without having a direct hand in it.

After all, the CIA supplied the explosives used in the first World Trade Center bombing in
1993.

That is confirmed by sworn court testimony from the CIA itself; its agents "didn't really believe
the terrorist cell it had infiltrated would actually use the explosives."

But they did, and so the CIA has to share the blame for 1,000 injuries and six deaths.

Arab charges of Mossad-CIA plot

Lebanon's Druze leader Walid Jumblatt is bitterly anti-Syrian, but he believes both the CIA
and Mossad worked together to remove any roadblocks the bin Laden group might have
encountered.

In fact, he goes further and says he believes both agencies were more actively involved than
just "smoothing the way."

"There are a number of questions on the authors of the attacks in America," he said.

"I think they (the attacks) were a great coup carried out by the secret services.

The CIA and the Mossad could be behind (the attacks) to provoke a new war and impoverish
and occupy the Middle East."

He believes bin Laden is an "American agent," a belief that can be pretty well backed up by a
mountain of evidence covering several years, as presented in this book.

"Who is bin Laden who has become the number one (enemy) of western civilizations?

He is an invention of the American secret services who chose to fight against the Soviets in
Afghanistan with US backing," said Jumblatt, who had close ties to the Soviet Union until its
collapse in 1991.

"It's an enormous scandal," he was quoted as saying in the Sydney (Australia) Morning
Herald Sept. 16, 2001, "because in 1994, the CIA pointed the finger at bin Laden as a very
dangerous man. It is also surprising that a great state which has a military budget of $US
350 billion was not able to thwart these attacks."

"One should find out whether the American (secret) services are implicated in starting a
merciless war between America and the racist West against Arabs and the Muslims."

He expressed concern that the "war on terrorism" could develop into "a huge massacre of
Palestinians."

And so it has, but there has also been a "huge massacre" of innocent Israeli civilians by
Palestinian suicide bombers, some of them no more than 16-year-old girls.

"Under the pretext of fighting bin Laden, the Zionists may commit a huge massacre in
Palestine to push through an exodus of its Arab residents and give the green light to Sharon
to carry out a huge massacre."

The events of the first quarter of 2002 indicate he could well be correct.

He gave the interview in the Shouf mountains southeast of Beirut, where he was presiding
over a local ceremony.

During that ceremony he called on the audience to observe one minute of silence in memory
of "the innocent (people) killed in the World Trade Center" and also in memory of the "Arabs
killed in Palestine, in south Lebanon, in Syria, Jordan and Iraq in the war against Israel."

In March and April of 2002, Ariel Sharon expanded his columns of tanks and his aerial
firepower back into Lebanon itself, threatening to engulf the whole area in nuclear war.

While one must remember Jumblatt's affinity for the Soviet Union and the distinct possibility
he is simply parroting the Russian line, he has nonetheless made some very valid points.

Things are not always as they seem.

While it's been fashionable in recent years, especially during the Clinton years, to blame "the
extreme right wing conspiracy" for everything wrong in America, and to specifically blame
"racist militia movements" and "right-wing talk radio" for our ills, few Americans are aware
that the largest and one of the most violence-prone militias in America is Jewish — the
Jewish Defense League, which Mossad has used quite often.

We are afraid to even discuss it for fear of being called "anti-Semitic."

Even the "respected" Anti-Defamation League has engaged in illegal and wholesale spying
on American citizens who have done nothing wrong whatsoever — except dare to listen to
those who disagree with militant Jewish policies.

The Jewish Defense League bombing plot

Islamists are not the only "extremist terror groups" in the United States.

One of the oldest is the Jewish Defense League (JDL), which has a troubled history as the
nation's largest — and one of its most violent — militias, yet few Americans would ever think
"Jewish" when they hear the word "militia."

It has been labeled a "terrorist organization" by the FBI since the 1970s.

Late on the night of Dec. 11, 2001, Irv Ruben, 56, and Earl Krugel, 59, were kicked back in
Krugel's Los Angeles home waiting for the final component of bombs (explosive powder) that
would be used to blow up a Los Angeles (Culver City) mosque (King Fahg Mosque) and the
office of Arab-American Congressman Darrell Issa, a Republican and the grandson of
Lebanese immigrants.

Rubin is chairman of the JDL.

Just minutes later, as their informant delivered the material, federal agents moved in and
arrested the two, along with several weapons and bomb components.

The plot was hatched because Arabs "need a wakeup call," Krugel allegedly said at one
point.

The original target was to be the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles, but for some
unknown reason was changed just the weekend before.

The JDL was originally formed to mount armed response to anti-Semitic acts in New York,
and gained notoriety for several bombings and arsons aimed at Soviet targets in retaliation
for Soviet mistreatment of Russian Jews.

Kahane left the JDL in the 1980s, sparking a bitter power struggle, and was assassinated in
New York in 1990.

El Sayyid Nosair, a 36-year-old Egyptian-born Muslim was convicted for the murder.

Rubin, by his own count, has been arrested more than 40 times and, in 1980 was acquitted
of soliciting the murder of US Nazis after he held a press conference offering $500 to anyone
who killed or maimed a member of the American Nazi Party.

With slogans such "For every Jew a .22" and "Keep Jews alive with a .45", he views America
as strongly anti-Semitic and insists that only the spilling of Gentile lood can protect American
Jews.

In 1985, an Arab-American activist, Alex Odeh, was assassinated by bomb.

While Irvin denied the killing, he said Odeh "got what he deserved."

At one point, according to ABC News (March 19, 2002), JDL member Baruch Goldstein shot
and killed 29 Muslims in a Hebron mosque and wounded 125, but the JDL refused to
repudiate his actions.

"We feel that Goldstein took a preventative measure against yet another Arab attack on
Jews. We understand his motivation, his grief and his actions," claims the JDL web site.
"And we are not ashamed to say that Goldstein was a charter member of the Jewish Defense
League."

The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University in San
Bernardino classified it as a hate group, as does the Southern Poverty Law Center (itself
somewhat suspect for several reasons) and the Anti-Defamation League.
In May 1999, the FBI closed a 31-month investigation into reported death threats the JDL
made against rappers Tupac Shakur and Eric "Easy-E" Wright, unable to corroborate
evidence provided independently by two different FBI informants.

The investigation was launched just weeks after Shakur's murder in September 1996.

The informants described a JDL "extortion racket of various rap music stars via death
threats."

Wright died of AIDS in March 1995. (Associated Press — Dec. 12, 2001; ABCNews.com —
March 19, 2002; and The Smoking Gun web site).

The Anti-Defamation spy scandal

Yet even the Anti-Defamation League, which condemns the JDL, has secrets of its own to
hide.

In December 1992, the story broke that the ADL was engaged in a massive spying operation
on American citizens, targeting critics of Israeli and South African policy so that Mossad and
South African hit squads could eliminate them.

While claiming to be the nation's leading defender against prejudice and bigotry, the ADL
followed people whose "crime" was to attend public meetings at which Israel was criticized.

San Francisco cop Tom Gerard (who had tutored the El Salvadoran death squads on the fine
arts of torture) teamed up with a South African spy, Tom Bullock, and sneaked around the
parking lots where meetings were held, copying down license plate numbers, which Gerard
then ran through police department computers to reveal names and addresses.

It was part of an operation that targeted more than 12,000 individuals and 600 organizations
in northern California alone.

ADL's spin doctors managed to keep the story from receiving major national news coverage.

Police retrieved ten boxes of files from the ADL's San Francisco office and, when 19
pro-Palestinians sued in 1993, the ADL managed to keep the case dragging on for years by
refusing to allow potentially embarrassing depositions taken by the plaintiff's lawyer
(ex-Congressman Paul "Pete" McCloskey) to be made public.

Through manipulation of the judges, the ADL managed to beat back a Court of Appeals
decision forcing those files to be released.

The manipulated court said the ADL was within its rights as "a journalist organization" to
keep their files secret.

What triggered the police raid was a tip from the FBI, whose office had been broken into and
files stolen on the Nation of Islam.

Gerard was accused of the theft and arrested. On his computer, they found files on more
than 7,000 individuals on anyone Gerard felt was "pinko."

In his locker they found a black executioner's hood, several photos of dark-skinned men who
had been bound and blindfolded, CIA manuals, secret documents on interrogation
techniques — stamped "secret" and referring to El Salvador, and various false passports and
IDs bearing Gerard's photo.

The FBI discovered the operation had been ongoing since 1954 and had spied on 12,000
individuals, 77 Arab-American groups, 29 anti-apartheid groups, more than 600 "pinko"
groups, 20 Bay Area labor unions, 612 right-wing organizations and 27 skinhead groups. SF
police inspector Ron Roth said 75% of their contents was non-public information illegally
obtained directly from government agencies.

That information was being covertly turned over to Israel and South Africa to be used for
"neutralization" purposes.

Bullock admitted he was being paid by both the ADL and South African intelligence.

Just ten days before he was assassinated in South Africa upon his return home, Chris Hani,
widely regarded as the successor to the African National Congress' Nelson Mandela, had
visited California, where he had come under Bullock's surveillance.

Bullock turned the information over to the ADL and South African intelligence and Hani was
promptly murdered.

The ADL's defense was that, like South African intelligence, it was fighting a "terrorist" and
"communist" organization.

At the time, Israel was furnishing arms to the apartheid government to help keep it in power.

SF District Attorney Arlo Smith made 700 pages of documents available to public for copying
costs implicating the ADL in a nationwide spy operation based out of New York and run by
Irwin Saull, since deceased, who was the ADL's "spymaster."

Oddly, Smith then dropped charges in 1994 saying it would be too "expensive and
time-consuming."

Two years later, in 1996, the ADL was hit with another spying lawsuit. It, too, was quietly
resolved on favorable terms to the ADL and the case was swept under the rug. All it cost
the ADL was a $25,000 check and the promise "not to do it again."

Former Congressman McClockey was himself a victim of ADL attacks and his wife, Helen,
was one of the plaintiffs.

Inexplicably, the number of plaintiffs shrank when two veteran journalists, Colin Edwards and
George Green, suddenly showed up dead.

McClockey was able to get the case revived on the basis of new evidence and the case was
scheduled for hearing in March 2002 — but all news of it has vanished from the American
press, amid reports of a huge cash settlement to hush the matter up once and for all.

It was clearly a classic example of how US government and local police agencies get around
the law by "sub-contracting" out surveillance work they themselves are prohibited by law from
conducting.

The ADL, which claims federal non-profit status as an "education organization", was
desperate to avoid a public trial in which far broader illegal activities would be exposed.

Those in the press who covered the case at all revealed only the tip of the iceberg.
(CounterPunch — "The ADL Snoops: Were the Spies 'Journalists'?" and "The ADL Spying
Case Is Over, But the Struggle Continues" — 25 February 2002)

The FBI has, without a scintilla of evidence, blamed the post-9-11 anthrax attacks on
"domestic right-wing extremists" (Washington Post — "FBI and CIA Suspect Domestic
Extremists; Officials Doubt Any Links to bin Laden" — by Bob Woodward and Dan Eggen, 27
Oct. 2001) while hiding evidence that points to a much more direct involvement by a party or
parties deep within the catacombs of government itself.

While it may be "politically correct" to smear a whole class of people so long as they're
"right-wing," that does not make it ethically right, any more than to paint all Jews with a broad
brush of blame.

Have we learned nothing since the Third Reich and the infamous Reichstag hoax?

The 125 phony Israeli 'art students' and the 9-11 hijackers

The case for CIA or Mossad involvement is only circumstantial, and it seems to implicate US
agencies more than Israeli.

The extent of Israel's relentless espionage assault against the US cannot be denied.

Remember Jonathan Pollard (1986)?

Nor can the extent of Israel's double-dealing in which it sells secret and sensitive US
technology to China.

While the activities of the JDL and ADL cannot be specifically linked to the terror of 9-11,
there is another case — also hushed up — which is.

"In January 2001, the DEA's security office began a dossier on 125 youthful Israeli visitors,
after a few showed up at DEA offices selling landscapes and abstract paintings." (AP —
"Gov't tracks Israeli art students" by Connie Cass)

In March, 2001, the National Counterintelligence Center (NCIC) warned in a report that "in
the past six weeks, employees in federal office buildings have reported suspicious activities
concerning individuals representing themselves as foreign students selling artwork."
The report noted concern that they were acting suspiciously and might even be Islamic
fundamentalists posing as Israelis. In fact, they were Israelis.

In April 2001, months before the World Trade Center attack, a large group of 125 Jewish "art
students" apparently knew about the planned al-Qaeda attack and were following the
hijackers around the country, according to a 61-page DEA federal task force report.

These "students" gained access to sensitive federal office buildings and even the homes of
government employees.

A draft report from the DEA characterized the operation as possible espionage, saying it
"may well be an organized intelligence-gathering activity."

These "art students" were arrested in cities throughout the US from Arkansas to California to
Texas to Florida, amid US intelligence warnings about "suspicious activities" by people
posing as Israeli "art students" and "attempting to bypass facility security and enter federal
buildings."

The classified DEA report said a majority of the "students" questioned acknowledged having
served in military intelligence, electronic signals interception or explosive ordinance units of
Israel (emphasis added).

One person was the son of a two-star Israeli general, one had served in a Patriot missile unit,
and another had been a bodyguard to the head of the Israeli army.

The report noted that all of the women were "very attractive," an asset useful in intelligence
and blackmail operations.

The group was made up of 20 cells of between four and eight members each, ages 22-30.

"Each cell was under the control of a local chief, who planned and dovetailed operations [with
the other cells].

The team in Irving, Texas, for example, "answered to Michael Calmanovic, who was arrested
last April 4, while the Hollywood, Florida cell was run by Hanan Serfaty.

The Miami operation was run by Legum Yochai.

"In addition the "art students" cultivated contacts with Israeli information technology
companies based in the US and serving as regular suppliers to various U.S. federal
agencies, such as Amdocs, Nice or Retalix. For instance, Marine Glikman, an Israeli
intelligence officer, was a programmer at Retalix Raanana."

DEA officials were shocked and angered to discover that the group had targeted Tinker Air
Force Base in Oklahoma City (home to AWACs surveillance planes and where many of the
Stealth B-1 bombers are repaired).

Also, one female "art student" had gained entrance to the home of an Environmental
Protection Agency worker "to sell paintings" and then returned later to photograph the home.

Alarmed, the agency documented "sales calls" to the DEA offices as well as agents' homes
in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans, Miami and other cities.

The "students" claimed to be selling paintings ranging in price from $50 to $200; others
claimed they were simply showing the works to promote Israeli art.

Their activities "might well be an organized intelligence-gathering activity," the classified

report notes, listing mostly people selling overpriced paintings door to door.

"That these people are now traveling in the U.S. selling art seems not to fit their background,"
the report said.

One cell leader, according to an AP report, described buying the paintings for $8 to $10 in
Florida, then reselling them for $50 or more.

Some of the art came from Universal Art Inc. in Sunrise, Fla. Repeated calls to the company
were not answered. Was it an Israeli front?

More shocking, a dozen members of this mysterious team, including the surveillance leader,
had been based in Hollywood, Florida between January and June of 2001, near where some
of the 9-11 hijackers had been living.
The report outlined that another dozen people had been arrested "suspected of being tasked
with the logistics of preparing the September 11 attacks."

In a rather convoluted bit of "newspeak" reminiscent of Bill Clinton's definition of the word
"is," the Bush administration at first covered up the story for nearly a year, then sent out a
flurry of government officials to deny the report, and then — when that failed — said the
report couldn't be true because no Israeli has been charged with spying in the incident.

That is true. They were quickly and quietly deported with no charges being filed.

No one would have ever known until an unhappy DEA agent leaked the report, apparently to
French intelligence.

French intelligence then alerted an online French intelligence web site

(www.intelligenceonline.com) and provided direct Internet access to the DEA report sitting on
government computers.

The site announced in February that it had "exclusive access" to a US Justice Department
report that showed "a huge Israeli spy ring operating in the United States was rolled up by
the Justice Department's counter-espionage service" last year.

Bill Carter, an FBI spokesman, said "The issue of an Israeli spying network is not an issue.

No Israeli has been charged with espionage by the FBI or the Justice Department in this
matter."

True, but disassembling.

A group of Israeli students, he said, "allegedly were involved in activity outside of their visas
and they were removed from the US based on that fact."

He then repeated that none of them had been charged with espionage.

Justice Department spokeswoman Susan Dryden went further, saying "This seems to be an
urban myth that has been circulating for months. The department has no information at this
time to substantiate these widespread rumors about Israeli art students involved in
espionage."

The FBI (which as documented elsewhere was ordered to back off the bin Laden
investigation long before 9-11) and the CIA (who employed bin Laden) claimed a
"disgruntled" DEA employee was simply upset because the FBI and CIA didn't agree with his
report, and leaked a memo he himself wrote.

Another FBI spokesman told Reuters the story was "simply not true", while Israeli Foreign
Ministry spokeswoman Yaffa Ben-Ari said it was "nonsense."

Yet another Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Irit Stopper, confirmed that "a few" Israelis
posing as art students had been expelled from the US for not having work permits.

Yet Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman Russell Bergeron must not have
been fully clued in on the proper response.

He confirmed that "several dozen" Israelis "in their twenties" had been arrested and deported
in the first nine months (up to September) of 2001 for being employed without proper INS
work papers.

He refused to tell just how many "students" were arrested.

Another law enforcement agent said some were investigated for possible fraud charges.

A little-noticed AP report March 9, 2002 revealed that, according to the classified report,
several of the Israelis — like the accused Muslim hijackers — had never bothered to enroll in
the art colleges they claimed to attend in Israel.

Several of those questioned said they were students from the Bezalel Academy of Art and
Design, but a spokeswoman for the Israeli school, Pnina Calpen, said no one named in the
report had been a student there going back at least ten years.

"These were routine, normal cases," Bergeron said. "I have no knowledge of any
espionage-related issues with these people."

Well, what about terrorism-related charges?

Faced with more detailed revelations from France, DEA spokeswoman Rogene Waite
confirmed the 61-page DEA document as genuine, according to Tampa Bay Online and AP
(5 Mar. 2002).

Another FBI spokesman, on the condition of anonymity, repeated the statement that no
espionage charges had been filed against anyone.

He was asked, "But was there espionage activity?"

He would only repeat his original statement, and refused to answer that specific question.

Another Justice Department official, also asking not to be identified, said they had been
aware of "some alleged linkage" between the group and "alleged" espionage activities since
early 2001, with arrests in Dallas, Chicago, San Diego and south Florida.

The DEA report shows the "students" were active in several states, including Tennessee.
Justice Department spokesman Bryan Sierra said no one in the Justice Department had
"been concerned" about any alleged espionage.

Deputy US Attorney General Larry Thompson refused to even discuss the matter at all.

Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL — see story above)
shrugged it off, saying "It's become almost a tradition that once you finish [[Israeli] military
service you take a world tour, and then you face life for real."

Clearly, the Bush administration was caught off guard by the revelations and in its haste to
bring in the spin-doctors, many conflicting accounts were given to the news media.

What was not revealed was that in March 2001, the US Office of the National
Counterintelligence Executive, a federal agency, sent out a public warning urging employees
to report any contacts with people describing themselves as Israeli art students.

"These individuals have been described as aggressive," the warning said. "They attempt to
engage employees in conversation rather than giving a sales pitch."

The group's activities encompassed far more states than the administration would admit.

The task force carrying out the original investigation, it has been learned, included not just
DEA investigators but those from the INS, the FBI and the US Air Force investigation unit,
due to the broad national scope of the Israeli operation.

However, it was the DEA's in-house security unit, the Office of Security Programs, that
sparked the probe.

Some of the operatives were already well-known in the Israeli intelligence community, for
example: Peer Segalovitz (military registration number 508798) and Aran Ofek (son the
two-star Israeli general).

Last year, on May 16, 2001, the US Air Force Office of Special Investigation sent a letter to
the Justice Department asking for assistance in an "espionage" case against four of the
"students": Yaro Ohana, Ronen Kalfon, Zeev Cohen and Naor Topaz.

One of the striking aspects of the document was its suggestion that the ring had infiltrated
federal justice department buildings, and computer companies also of Israeli origin, which
operate in the U.S. and sell equipment to U.S. government departments.

Intelligence Online has a copy of a memorandum dated March 4, 2002 and signed by Robert
Diegelman, assistant attorney general for administration.

It was addressed to officials in charge of the justice department's information systems.

For security reasons, it called on them to forbid information system access to all non-U.S.
citizens and no longer use foreign-supplied computer and communication gear.

It referred specifically to an initial warning entitled Department of Justice Order 2640.2D

Information Technology Security and sent out on last July 12 which cautioned in vaguer
terms against using information technology sold by foreign firms.

The July 12 warning confirmed that the DEA's report, completed in June 2001, was being
borne in mind at the highest level.

The role played by the DEA in the case takes on a wider dimension because of the fact that
in September, 1997 it purchased $25 million worth of interception equipment from a number
of Israeli companies which were named in the report.

In assigning so many resources to the inquiry (all DEA offices were asked to contribute) the
agency was clearly worried that its own systems might have been compromised.

We've also obtained an internal document from the US Coast Guard, an Intelligence Bulletin
dated Jan. 17, 2002.

Reserved for security bosses in America's biggest companies, the bulletin regularly tracks all
attempts to penetrate protected sites recorded by the US Coast Guard.

The Jan. 17 issue described the case of a man and woman "of Middle East origin" taking
pictures of a refinery.

When questioned they said they were "art students" even though they were able to discuss
technical details concerning refineries.

The Intelligence Bulletin said it had recorded several other cases of suspicious activity in the
past. (Intelligence Online, "Israeli Spy Operation Confirmed, 14 March 2002)

On March 13, a Justice Department official told Intelligence Online that the DEA report had
been handed over to the department's Joint Terrorism Task Force.

The same day, DEA Administrator Asa Hutchison, at a press conference, said simply that he
had passed the document along to "other agencies."

Earlier, on February 28, 2002, Intelligence Online reported that some officials had been
hoping for six months that the case would end up in court, but that "the Bush administration
appeared intent on hushing it up."

So much so that when Fox News aired a four-part series by reporter Carl Cameron, the
administration pressured Fox News to remove the series from its library.

Fox News had originally been alerted by federal investigators who were outraged over the
Bush cover-up.

Cameron had raised their concerns that the Israelis had been more deeply involved with the
9-11 hijackers than the public was being told.

"Indeed, the addresses of Israeli agents mentioned in the report we obtained are very close
to former, known residents of the terrorists," Intelligence Online reported (2 Feb. 2002),
adding "For the moment, however, there's nothing to say that wasn't pure coincidence."

Of the 19 accused hijackers, five of them lived in Hollywood: Mohamed Atta (alleged
ringleader), Waleed M. Alshehri, Wail M. Alshehri, Abdulaziz Alomari and Marwan
Al-Shehhi. Six others lived in nearby Del Ray Beach: Ahmed Alnami, Ahmed Ibrahim A. al
Haznawi, Saeed Alghamdi, Mohand Alshehri, Hamzi Aghamdi and Fayez Rashid Ahmed
Hassan al Qadi Banihammad.

That accounts for 11 of the 19 accused killers.

"In politics, nothing happens by coincidence." — Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Intelligence Online literally caught hell for the story, which briefly spread like wildfire around
the world, receiving coverage in Arab newspapers such as Arabia.com (online news) March
5, 2002, in Haaretz Daily, as well as the Washington Post (March 6), and Tampa Bay Online
(April 8), and Le Monde (France), Associated Press (March 9) and Reuters.

"Indeed, most of the negative comment aimed at discrediting the document [already officially
admitted to be genuine] came from commentators who had never read it," Intelligence Online
noted on March 12.

Why Israeli soldiers don't trust their own government

There is little doubt that Israel has become mired down in its own "Vietnam" in its war against
the Palestinians.

It is a war that seems to drag on forever and one in which an increasing number of Israelis
are refusing to serve.

Even a growing number of Israeli troops are refusing duty in Gaza and the West Bank
("Israelis who won't join the fight" MSNBC, 3 April 2002), creating a "public unity" nightmare
for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, whose government is deeply split and who must work
alongside his old nemesis Shimon Peres, for whom he has no lost love.

It is not incomparable to the growing hatred that existed between US President Lyndon
Johnson and his Vice President Hubert Humphrey, as Humphrey sought to distance himself
from Johnson in a failed effort to win the 1968 election.

Sharon is facing increasing world isolation, even demands that he be tried as a war criminal.

He is facing a rapid deterioration of support at home both from the press and from the Israeli
population.

Israel has gone in a time machine back to the 1960s experienced by the US, with the country
becoming internally polarized and, ironically, weaker than ever to a true external threat.

Although aware of this growing crisis of confidence, I was nonetheless surprised to hear from
Israeli military that many of them are "more afraid of Mossad than of Arafat."

They actually believe they are being targeted by their own government in a desparate
attempt to sway public and world opinion — again, much like Johnson did from the very
beginning of the Vietnam War.

"Do you know the Stern Gang" one asked me. No, I didn't.

"It is an Israeli operation. They bombed Pacha's Disco in June 2001. The government and
the media lied about it, claiming it was done by a Palestinian suicide bomber. It wasn't. I
was there. They blew up the Jerusalem Ben Yhudah Mall the following December. Abu
Nidal — he was Mossad for 17 years. The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade? It is Mossad. Many
of these attacks are carried out by Mossad terrorists, not Arafat — and that is why we refuse
to kill Palestinians. In Vietnam, you had — what you call — friendly fire? Here, too! In
early March, you had 11 Israeli soldiers killed by some crazy old man with an old bolt-action
rifle, so they say. Not so!! It was Mossad. We came under attack from our own
government, just so Sharon can tell the world what bad guys we are fighting. It is not true. I
send you proof."

"Well, what's behind it?" I asked. "What would Sharon want with the damned West Bank
anyway? It's a piece of desert shit!"

"Do you know Operation Pluto?" came the quiet, calm voice — more and more a question in
reply to a question.

"No."

"You Americans don't read your own history very well, do you? We do. We have to
survive. Especially military history. Remember — Operation Pluto. And I give you one
more word — Operation Shekhinah."

I had to get him to spell it. "I can say no more. It would be dangerous for me. Good luck
with your book, you will probably not talk to me again."

"Why?" I asked. "Did I say something wrong?"

"No," he laughed. "I am being sent somewhere, and I may not come back. I may not even
go. I may go to prison instead. That will be my choice. I can't say any more. Goodbye
and good luck."

I looked again at the MSNBC story as I hung up the phone and said a silent prayer for the
friend I had never met face to face.

We had met through music — the blues, actually — through a mutual friend from one of the
former Soviet Republics.

He loved the blues. Now, I thought, he's about to be singing them.

"Why should I go to kill and to be killed — for what?" says Ron, one of about 400 Israeli
soldiers refusing to join the fight in the West Bank and Gaza. "This is a war we have no
chance to win." (MSNBC, ibid)

Lt. Itai Ryb got his call to serve on Friday, March 29. He packed, but for jail, not war.

"This war is not acceptable to me. I can't take part in it. It's occupation, it's illegal; mostly it
harms the well-being of Israel. The sooner we end the occupation, the sooner we're going to
have peace in this country." (MSNBC, ibid)
Will my friend be one of these, I wondered.

I found it very hard to believe, even coming from an Israeli.

And yet, I could not forget the US Army report: "[Mossad] has capability to target U.S.
forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act." (Source: The Washington Times,
"Army study suggests U.S. force of 20,000" by Rowan Scarborough, 5 April 2002)

If they could do it to us, surely they could do it their own or to the Palestinians with ease.

If it is true, then it must be exposed, and it should not be taken as a blanket indictment of the
Jewish people or the Israeli population any more than the US deception of Vietnam should
be grounds for a blanket indictment of millions of Americans who either didn't know what was
going on or, in fact, were strongly opposed.

My God, I wondered as I looked over the photographs and news stories provided me, what
kind of insane reality are we slipping into?

I increasingly was feeling more like a participant, a combatant, not just some researcher safe
within his American home.

The more leads I found, the more they in turned led to, and I began to see that my own quest
was dangerous, though certainly not as deadly as the one my fellow humans were facing in
Israel and Afghanistan.

Female Jewish Bomber Murders 12 in Jerusalem

"Girl in Red" in Bomb Horror Jerusalem, Thursday

Forty minutes after a telephoned warning, the Jerusalem Railway Station was blown up
yesterday.

Agency reports say that at least twelve people are missing, and the station will not be able to
be used for a week.

A young Jewess described as the "Girl in Red" slipped past Arab police, held up the railway
clerk at pistol point, and planted three suitcases, containing bombs, in the waiting room.

Troops and police were rushed to the station to try and locate the bombs and a constable
managed to remove one.

A second exploded in his hands while he was trying to get it out of the building, wrecking the
loading room and the waiting room.

The police constable was killed instantly.

In the meanwhile, the "Girl in Red" leapt into a taxi, which tore off through a hail of fire from
police.

In an attempt to break through the police cordon drawn around the city, the taxi roared
through twisting lanes in the Jewish slum quarters.

It is thought that the taxi must have stopped briefly to let the girl out, because when it was
finally cornered near the walls of the Old City, she was not in it.

The only occupants were three Jews, two of whom were wounded. There was a quantity of
explosives and hand-grenades under the flooring of the taxi.

Police took in charge the bullet riddled, bloodstained taxi, scoured the adjacent Montefiore
quarter, and arrested another Jew who was found wounded in a nearby house.

They also held ten other suspects including a girl dressed in red, who is being questioned in
an attempt to establish the identity of the girl who planted the bombs.

Although earlier agency reports mentioned at least 12 missing, the only fatality so far
mentioned in the official version is the police officer.

He was a demolition expert. Reuters in Jerusalem says that police and troops last night
were still searching the debris at the station for further casualties.

After the explosion, an Irgun Zvai Leumi (terrorist) spokesman, broadcasting over the secret
radio "Voice of Fighting Zion", said: "The Jews are at war. Only arms will decide
Palestine's future, not an election."
Final death toll is 12, with 11 injured.

The Female Jewish terrorist has been identified as Sima Fleishhaker-Hoizman (Source: The
Daily New, Perth, Western Australia, 31 October 1946)

Only at the end, did I realize this wasn't an event that had just happened; it had taken place
in 1946 — more than 50 years ago!

How long, I wondered, had such things been going on?

I never considered myself someone who had "just fallen off the turnip truck."

As a journalist, as a political advisor to presidential campaigns, even as someone who had

had his own experiences working with intelligence agencies (or, more properly their
"cutouts"), I thought I was pretty well-informed.

But I realized I had been so busy concentrating on US-focused events that unless they were
linked, I hadn't paid enough attention to foreign deceptions.

Knowing virtually nothing about the specific terrorist attacks my source had mentioned —
except for what I had skimmed over in the press — I read on through the other information,
accompanied by perhaps half a dozen damning photos.

The "suicide bombing" in the Beit Israel district of Jerusalem March 2, 2002 had killed 10 and
wounded 57.

Jerusalem Police Chief Mickey Levy said a suicide bomber with a shrapnel bomb strapped to
his waist had simply walked up to a group of people and blown himself up.

The bomber "got to the center of the neighborhood, approached a group of people (and
detonated) a large explosive on his body," he said.

Initially, the London Independent claimed the bomber was a Mohammed Daragmeh.

BBC, meanwhile, claimed it was a Mohammed al-Chouhani, working for the al-Aqsa Martyers
Brigade, an off-shoot of Arafat's al-Fatah.

The photos clearly showed something entirely different — a car bomb.

The first local press reports, before they were re-written by Jerusalem's mayor, claimed:
"Burial society volunteers picked up body parts amid debris slick with motor oil and blood. A
truck ferried off the charred husk of a car ... Fierce flames from the destroyed car rose into
the night sky off the street where the blast ripped through the Beit Israel district of this city
just as worshippers were emerging from synagogues ... "

"Now do you think an Arab is going to be able to drive a car into this neighborhood on a
Saturday night and park it right next to our synagogue and walk away?" my Israeli friend
asked.

"He'd be shot on sight. He wouldn't have a chance. This neighborhood is one of the most
radical and Orthodox in all of Jerusalem. If you think that, you're living in fantasy! No, my
friend, this is Mossad. This is Ariel Sharon. He is a known man of massacre. What he did
at the Lebanon refugee camp years ago, he is now doing to our own people."

The other information, dated March 3, was taken from the website of Joe Vialls, an author
whose work about a very strange Australian massacre I had recalled reading.

A friend had sent me the book from Australia, insisting I read it.

It claimed "Taking aim from a hilltop, a sniper killed 11 soldiers and civilians at a checkpoint
Sunday in the deadliest of a two-day string of Palestinian attacks that killed 21 Israelis."

"Early Sunday a Palestinian sniper apparently using an old Carbine took pot shots at soldiers
and civilians who were at a roadblock about a mile from the settlement of Ofra northeast of
Ramallah, military sources and eyewitnesses said.

"The gunman who was on a hill overlooking a valley with the roadblock killed three civilians,
two army officers and three soldiers before reinforcements arrived, returned fire and hit the
Carbine."

"Apparently the hills surrounding the valley caused an echo so single shots sounded like
bursts of fire and it was difficult to detect its source. The attacker disappeared." (
 http://geocities.com/joevialls/Rambo.html)

Suddenly, my mind's eye fogged then re-opened in Dallas, Texas, Nov. 22, 1963, where a
"lone gunman" was supposedly firing off more rounds, more accurately than the FBI's best
snipers could ever replicate.

His name was Lee Harvey Oswald.

Perhaps this time, "Oswald" had escaped, evading 120-mm tank shells and more than 1,000
rounds of returning rifle fire.

Or had the Israelis simply stood around in the open, being picked off one by one?

Where were the Cobra gunships with their Hellfire missiles and Gatling cannon, thermal
imagery, IR guidance and all the other luxuries paid for with American tax dollars?

As Vialls notes in his website, Rambo would have been proud: "You can almost hear the
distant voice of Colonel Troutman on the radio. "Come in John Rambo. Come in John.
This is Colonel Troutman. You've done some bad things, John, some very bad things, but
we can sort it out. I've come to take you home to Fort Bragg."

"But they drew first blood, Sir, they drew first blood!" (
http://geocities.com/joevialls/Rambo.html)

I gazed down at the words I had scribbled — Operation Pluto, Shekhinah.

What did it mean?

Through a cyberspace journey that took me to Norway, again to Israel, to Australia and back
to the US, I found just how deeply the tentacles of Big Oil were attached to everything that is
going on around us — and I began to grow even more concerned about my own safety.

© 2002 by Jim Moore, from the book "Big Oil — Big War: The true story of September 11,
2001 and the 'War on Terror'
— Writer's Club Press: San Jose, New York, Lincoln, Shanghai.

To rebel is right, to disobey is a duty, to act is necessary !

September Friday 30th 2005

Video: Israel Is Spying In And On The U.S.? Part 1
[grab it fast before they censor it]

BRIT HUME, HOST: It has been more than 16 years since a civilian working for the
Navy was charged with passing secrets to Israel. Jonathan Pollard pled guilty to
conspiracy to commit espionage and is serving a life sentence. At first, Israeli leaders
claimed Pollard was part of a rogue operation, but later took responsibility for his work.

Now Fox News has learned some U.S. investigators believe that there are Israelis
again very much engaged in spying in and on the U.S., who may have known things
they didn’t tell us before September 11. Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron has
details in the first of a four-part series.

Published: 12/12/01 FOX News. Part 1 of a 4 part series: Part 2- Part 3 - Part 4 These
items have since been removed from the FOX News web site:
Carl Cameron Investigates Part 1 - Israel Is Spying In And On The U.S.?

Author: Carl Cameron

Part I: BRIT HUME, HOST: It has been more than 16 years since a civilian working for
the Navy was charged with passing secrets to Israel. Jonathan Pollard pled guilty to
conspiracy to commit espionage and is serving a life sentence. At first, Israeli leaders
claimed Pollard was part of a rogue operation, but later took responsibility for his work.

Now Fox News has learned some U.S. investigators believe that there are Israelis
again very much engaged in spying in and on the U.S., who may have known things
they didn’t tell us before September 11. Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron has
details in the first of a four-part series.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CARL CAMERON, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Since September 11, more than 60
Israelis have been arrested or detained, either under the new patriot anti-terrorism
law, or for immigration violations. A handful of active Israeli military were among those
detained, according to investigators, who say some of the detainees also failed
polygraph questions when asked about alleged surveillance activities against and in the
United States.

There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9-11 attacks, but
investigators suspect that they Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the
attacks in advance, and not shared it. 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."

Fox News has learned that one group of Israelis, spotted in North Carolina recently, is
suspected of keeping an apartment in California to spy on a group of Arabs who the
United States is also investigating for links to terrorism. Numerous classified
documents obtained by Fox News indicate that even prior to September 11, as many
as 140 other Israelis had been detained or arrested in a secretive and sprawling
investigation into suspected espionage by Israelis in the United States.

Investigators from numerous government agencies are part of a working group that’s
been compiling evidence since the mid ’90s. These documents detail hundreds of
incidents in cities and towns across the country that investigators say, "may well be an
organized intelligence gathering activity."

The first part of the investigation focuses on Israelis who say they are art students
from the University of Jerusalem and Bazala Academy. They repeatedly made contact
with U.S. government personnel, the report says, by saying they wanted to sell cheap
art or handiwork.

Documents say they, "targeted and penetrated military bases." The DEA, FBI and
dozens of government facilities, and even secret offices and unlisted private homes of
law enforcement and intelligence personnel. The majority of those questioned, "stated
they served in military intelligence, electronic surveillance intercept and or explosive
ordinance units."

Another part of the investigation has resulted in the detention and arrests of dozens of
Israelis at American mall kiosks, where they’ve been selling toys called Puzzle Car and
Zoom Copter. Investigators suspect a front.

Shortly after The New York Times and Washington Post reported the Israeli detentions
last months, the carts began vanishing. Zoom Copter’s Web page says, "We are aware
of the situation caused by thousands of mall carts being closed at the last minute. This
in no way reflects the quality of the toy or its salability. The problem lies in the
operators’ business policies."
Why would Israelis spy in and on the U.S.? A general accounting office investigation
referred to Israel as country A and said, "According to a U.S. intelligence agency, the
government of country A conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against
the U.S. of any U.S. ally."

A defense intelligence report said Israel has a voracious appetite for information and
said, "the Israelis are motivated by strong survival instincts which dictate every
possible facet of their political and economical policies. It aggressively collects military
and industrial technology and the U.S. is a high priority target."

The document concludes: "Israel possesses the resources and technical capability to
achieve its collection objectives."

(END VIDEO CLIP)

A spokesman for the Israeli embassy here in Washington issued a denial saying that
any suggestion that Israelis are spying in or on the U.S. is "simply not true." There are
other things to consider. And in the days ahead, we’ll take a look at the U.S. phone
system and law enforcement’s methods for wiretaps. And an investigation that both
have been compromised by our friends overseas.

HUME: Carl, what about this question of advanced knowledge of what was going to
happen on 9-11? How clear are investigators that some Israeli agents may have
known something?

CAMERON: It’s very explosive information, obviously, and there’s a great deal of
evidence that they say they have collected - none of it necessarily conclusive. It’s
more when they put it all together. A bigger question, they say, is how could they not
have know? Almost a direct quote.

HUME: Going into the fact that they were spying on some Arabs, right?

CAMERON: Correct.

HUME: All right, Carl, thanks very much.

Video here: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7545.htm

January 27, 2005

"The Military is Nowhere; the Press is
Nowhere; the Congress is Nowhere..."
We've Been Taken Over By a Cult
By SEYMOUR HERSH

Editors' Note: This is a transcript of remarks by Seymour Hersh at the

Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York.

A bout what's going on in terms of the President is that as virtuous as I

feel, you know, at The New Yorker, writing an alternative history more or
less of what's been going on in the last three years, George Bush feels
just as virtuous in what he is doing.

He is absolutely committed — I don't know whether he thinks he's doing

God's will or what his father didn't do, or whether it's some mandate
from — you know, I just don't know, but George Bush thinks this is the
right thing.

He is going to continue doing what he has been doing in Iraq. He's

going to expand it, I think, if he can.

I think that the number of body bags that come back will make no
difference to him. The body bags are rolling in. It makes no difference
to him, because he will see it as a price he has to pay to put America
where he thinks it should be.

So, he's inured in a very strange way to people like me, to the
politicians, most of them who are too cowardly anyway to do much. So,
the day-to-day anxiety that all of us have, and believe me, though he
got 58 million votes, many of the people who voted for him weren't
voting for continued warfare, but I think that's what we're going to have.

It's hard to predict the future. And it's sort of silly to, but the question
is: How do you go to him? How do you get at him? What can you do to
maybe move him off the course that he sees as virtuous and he sees as
absolutely appropriate?

All of us — you have to — I can't begin to exaggerate how frightening

the position is — we're in right now, because most of you don't
understand, because the press has not done a very good job.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, the new bill that was just passed,
provoked by the 9/11 committee actually, is a little bit of a kabuki
dance, I guess is what I want to say, in that what it really does is it
consolidates an awful lot of power in the Pentagon — by statute now.

It gives Rumsfeld the right to do an awful lot of things he has been

wanting to do, and that is basically manhunting and killing them before
they kill us, as Peter said. "They did it to us. We've got to do it to
them." That is the attitude that — at the very top of our government
exists. And so, I'll just tell you a couple of things that drive me nuts.
We can — you know, there's not much more to go on with.

I think there's a way out of it, maybe. I can tell you one thing. Let's all
forget this word "insurgency". It's one of the most misleading words of
all.

Insurgency assumes that we had gone to Iraq and won the war and a
group of disgruntled people began to operate against us and we then
had to do counter-action against them. That would be an insurgency.
We are fighting the people we started the war against. We are fighting
the Ba'athists plus nationalists. We are fighting the very people that
started — they only choose to fight in different time spans than we want
them to, in different places. We took Baghdad easily. It wasn't because
be won. We took Baghdad because they pulled back and let us take it
and decided to fight a war that had been pre-planned that they're very
actively fighting.

The frightening thing about it is, we have no intelligence. Maybe it's —

it's — it is frightening, we have no intelligence about what they're doing.
A year-and-a-half ago, we're up against two and three-man teams. We
estimated the cells operating against us were two and three people, that
we could not penetrate. As of now, we still don't know what's coming
next. There are 10, 15-man groups. They have terrific
communications. Somebody told me, it's — somebody in the system, an
officer — and by the way, the good part of it is, more and more people
are available to somebody like me.

There's a lot of anxiety inside the — you know, our

professional military and our intelligence people.
Many of them respect the Constitution and the Bill
of Rights as much as anybody here, and individual
freedom.

So, they do — there's a tremendous sense of fear.

These are punitive people.

One of the ways — one of the things that you could

say is, the amazing thing is we are been taken over
basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives
have somehow grabbed the government.

Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for
much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but
they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the
press, with the greatest of ease.

It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do have
to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the
Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way.

What they have done is neutralize the C.I.A. because there were people
there inside — the real goal of what Goss has done was not attack the
operational people, but the intelligence people. There were people —
serious senior analysts who disagree with the White House, with Cheney,
basically, that's what I mean by White House, and Rumsfeld on a lot of
issues.

As somebody said, the goal in the last month has been to separate the
apostates from the true believers. That's what's happening. The real
target has been "diminish the agency." I'm writing about all of this
soon, so I don't want to overdo it, but there's been a tremendous sea
change in the government. A concentration of power.

On the other hand, the facts — there are some facts. We can't win this
war. We can do what he's doing. We can bomb them into the stone
ages.

Bombing grown exponentially each month

Here's the other horrifying, sort of spectacular fact that we don't really
appreciate. Since we installed our puppet government, this man, Allawi,
who was a member of the Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long
before he became a critic, and is basically Saddam-lite. Before we
installed him, since we have installed him on June 28, July, August,
September, October, November, every month, one thing happened: the
number of sorties, bombing raids by one plane, and the number of
tonnage dropped has grown exponentially each month.

We are systematically bombing that country. There are no embedded

journalists at Doha, the Air Force base I think we're operating out of. No
embedded journalists at the aircraft carrier, Harry Truman. That's the
aircraft carrier that I think is doing many of the operational fights.
There's no air defense, It's simply a turkey shoot.

They come and hit what they want. We know nothing. We don't ask.
We're not told.

We know nothing about the extent of bombing. So if they're going to

carry out an election and if they're going to succeed, bombing is going to
be key to it, which means that what happened in Fallujah, essentially
Iraq — some of you remember Vietnam — Iraq is being turn into a
"free-fire zone" right in front of us. Hit everything, kill everything.

I have a friend in the Air Force, a Colonel, who had the awful task of
being an urban bombing planner, planning urban bombing, to make
urban bombing be as unobtrusive as possible. I think it was three weeks
ago today, three weeks ago Sunday after Fallujah I called him at home.
I'm one of the people — I don't call people at work. I call them at home,
and he has one of those caller I.D.'s, and he picked up the phone and he
said, "Welcome to Stalingrad."

We know what we're doing. This is deliberate. It's being done. They're
not telling us. They're not talking about it.

We have a President that — and a Secretary of State that, when a

trooper — when a reporter or journalist asked — actually a trooper, a
soldier, asked about lack of equipment, stumbled through an answer and
the President then gets up and says, "Yes, they should all have good
equipment and we're going to do it," as if somehow he wasn't involved in
the process.

Words mean nothing — nothing to George Bush. They are just

utterances. They have no meaning.

Bush can say again and again, "well, we don't do torture." We know
what happened. We know about Abu Ghraib. We know, we see
anecdotally. We all understand in some profound way because so much
has come out in the last few weeks, the I.C.R.C.

The ACLU put out more papers, this is not an isolated incident what's
happened with the seven kids and the horrible photographs, Lynndie
England. That's into the not the issue is. They're fall guys.

Of course, they did wrong. But you know, when we send kids to fight,
one of the things that we do when we send our children to war is the
officers become in loco parentis. That means their job in the military is
to protect these kids, not only from getting bullets and being blown up,
but also there is nothing as stupid as a 20 or 22-year-old kid with a
weapon in a war zone. Protect them from themselves.

The spectacle of these people doing those antics night after night, for
three and a half months only stopped when one of their own soldiers
turned them in tells you all you need to know, how many officers knew.
I can just give you a timeline that will tell you all you need to know. Abu
Ghraib was reported in January of 2004 this year. In May, I and CBS
earlier also wrote an awful lot about what was going on there. At that
point, between January and May, our government did nothing.

Although Rumsfeld later acknowledged that he was briefed by the middle

of January on it and told the President.

In those three-and-a-half months before it became public, was there any

systematic effort to do anything other than to prosecute seven "bad
seeds", enlisted kids, reservists from West Virginia and the unit they
were in, by the way, Military Police. The answer is, Ha! They were
basically a bunch of kids who were taught on traffic control, sent to Iraq,
put in charge of a prison. They knew nothing. It doesn't excuse them
from doing dumb things. But there is another framework. We're not
seeing it. They've gotten away with it.

My son lies in a casket half a world away

So here's the upside of the horrible story, if there is an upside. I can tell
you the upside in a funny way, in an indirect way. It comes from a
Washington Post piece this week. A young boy, a Marine, 25-year-old
from somewhere in Maryland died. There was a funeral in the Post, a
funeral in Washington, and the Post did a little story about it. They
quoted — his name was Hodak. His father was quoted. He had written
to a letter in the local newspaper in Southern Virginia. He had said
about his son, he wrote a letter just describing what it was like after his
son died. He said, "Today everything seems strange. Laundry is getting
done. I walked my dog. I ate breakfast. Somehow I'm still breathing
and my heart is still beating. My son lies in a casket half a world away."

There's going to be — you know, when I did My Lai — I tell this story a
lot. When I did the My Lai story, more than a generation ago, it was 35
years ago, so almost two. When I did My Lai, one of the things that I
discovered was that they had — for some of you, most of you
remember, but basically a group of American soldiers — the analogy is
so much like today.

Then as now, our soldiers don't see enemies in a battlefield, they just
walk on mines or they get shot by snipers, because it's always hidden.
There's inevitable anger and rage and you dehumanize the people.

We have done that with enormous success in Iraq. They're

"rag-heads". They're less than human.

The casualty count — as in Sudan, equally as bad. Staggering numbers

that we're killing. In any case, you know, it's — in this case, these — a
group of soldiers in 1968 went into a village. They had been in Vietnam
for three months and lost about 10% of their people, maybe 10 or 15 to
accidents, killings and bombings, and they ended up — they thought
they would meet the enemy and there were 550 women, children and
old men and they executed them all. It took a day.

They stopped in the middle and they had lunch. One of the kids who
had done a lot of shooting. The Black and Hispanic soldiers, about 40 of
them, there were about 90 men in the unit — the Blacks and Hispanics
shot in the air. They wouldn't shoot into the ditch.

They collected people in three ditches and just began to shoot them.
The Blacks and Hispanics shot up in the air, but the mostly White, lower
middle class, the kids who join the Army Reserve today and National
Guard looking for extra dollars, those kind of kids did the killing.

One of them was a man named Paul Medlow, who did an awful lot of
shooting. The next day, there was a moment — one of the things that
everybody remembered, the kids who were there, one of the mothers at
the bottom of a ditch had taken a child, a boy, about two, and got him
under her stomach in such a way that he wasn't killed. When they were
sitting having the K rations — that's what they called them — MRE's now
— the kid somehow crawled up through the [inaudible] screaming louder
and he began — and Calley, the famous Lieutenant Calley, the Lynndie
England of that tragedy, told Medlow: Kill him, "Plug him," he said.

And Medlow somehow, who had done an awful lot as I say, 200 bullets,
couldn't do it so Calley ran up as everybody watched, with his carbine.
Officers had a smaller weapon, a rifle, and shot him in the back of the
head.

The next morning, Medlow stepped on a mine and he had his foot blown
off. He was being medevac'd out. As he was being medevac'd out, he
cursed and everybody remembered, one of the chilling lines, he said,
"God has punished me, and he's going to punish you, too."

They sent me back a murderer

So a year-and-a-half later, I'm doing this story. And I hear about

Medlow. I called his mother up. He lived in New Goshen, Indiana. I
said, "I'm coming to see you. I don't remember where I was, I think it
was Washington State. I flew over there and to get there, you had to go
to — I think Indianapolis and then to Terre Haute, rent a car and drive
down into the Southern Indiana, this little farm.

It was a scene out of Norman Rockwell's. Some of you remember the

Norman Rockwell paintings. It's a chicken farm. The mother is 50, but
she looks 80. Gristled, old. Way old — hard scrabble life, no man
around.

I said I'm here to see your son, and she said, okay. He's in there. He
knows you're coming.

Then she said, one of these great — she said to me, "I gave them a good
boy. And they sent me back a murderer."

So you go on 35 years. I'm doing in The New Yorker, the Abu Ghraib
stories. I think I did three in three weeks. If some of you know about
The New Yorker, that's unbelievable. But in the middle of all of this, I
get a call from a mother in the East coast, Northeast, working class,
lower middle class, very religious, Catholic family. She said, I have to
talk to you.

I go see her. I drive somewhere, fly somewhere, and her story is simply
this. She had a daughter that was in the military police unit that was at
Abu Ghraib. And the whole unit had come back in March, of — The
sequence is: they get there in the fall of 2003. They reported after
doing their games in the January of 2004.

In March she is sent home. Nothing is public yet. The daughter is sent
home. The whole unit is sent home. She comes home a different
person.
She had been married. She was young. She went into the Reserves, I
think it was the Army Reserves to get money, not for college or for —
you know, these — some of these people worked as night clerks in pizza
shops in West Virginia. This not — this is not very sophisticated.

She came back and she left her husband. She just had been married
before. She left her husband, moved out of the house, moved out of the
city, moved out to another home, another apartment in another city and
began working a different job. And moved away from everybody.

Then over — as the spring went on, she would go every weekend, this
daughter, and every weekend she would go to a tattoo shop and get
large black tattoos put on her, over increasingly — over her body, the
back, the arms, the legs, and her mother was frantic. What's going on?

Comes Abu Ghraib, and she reads the stories, and she sees it. And she
says to her daughter, "Were you there?" She goes to the apartment.
The daughter slams the door. The mother then goes — the daughter
had come home — before she had gone to Iraq, the mother had given
her a portable computer. One of the computers that had a DVD in it,
with the idea being that when she was there, she could watch movies,
you know, while she was overseas, sort of a — I hadn't thought about it,
a great idea. Turns out a lot of people do it.

She had given her a portable computer, and when the kid came back she
had returned it, one of the things, and the mother then said I went and
looked at the computer. She knows — she doesn't know about
depression. She doesn't know about Freud. She just said, I was just —
I was just going to clean it up, she said. I had decided to use it again.

She wouldn't say anything more why she went to look at it after Abu
Ghraib. She opened it up, and sure enough there was a file marked
"Iraq". She hit the button. Out came 100 photographs. They were
photographs that became — one of them was published. We published
one, just one in The New Yorker. It was about an Arab.

The dogs did bite the man — pretty hard. A lot of blood.

This is something no mother should see and daughter should see too. It
was the Arab man leaning against bars, the prisoner naked, two dogs,
two shepherds, remember, on each side of him. The New Yorker
published it, a pretty large photograph. What we didn't publish was the
sequence showed the dogs did bite the man — pretty hard. A lot of
blood. So she saw that and she called me, and away we go. There's
another story.

For me, it's just another story, but out of this comes a core of — you
know, we all deal in "macro" in Washington.

On the macro, we're hopeless. We're nowhere. The press is nowhere.

The congress is nowhere. The military is nowhere.

Every four-star General I know is saying, "Who is going to tell them we

have no clothes?" Nobody is going to do it. Everybody is afraid to tell
Rumsfeld anything. That's just the way it is.

It's a system built on fear. It's not lack of integrity, it's more profound
than that. Because there is individual integrity. It's a system that's
completely been taken over — by cultists.

Anyway, what's going to happen, I think, as the casualties mount and

these stories get around, and the mothers see the cost and the fathers
see the cost, as the kids come home.

And the wounded ones come back, and there's wards that you will never
hear about.

That's wards — you know about the terrible catastrophic injuries, but
you don't know about the vegetables.

There's ward after ward of vegetables because the brain injuries are so
enormous.

As you maybe read last week, there was a new study in one of the
medical journals that the number of survivors are greater with
catastrophic injuries because of their better medical treatment and the
better armor they have.

So you get more extreme injuries to extremities.

We're going to learn more and I think you're going to see, it's going to —
it's — I'm trying to be optimistic. We're going to see a bottom swelling
from inside the ranks.

You're beginning to see it. What happened with the soldiers asking
those questions, you may see more of that.

I'm not suggesting we're going to have mutinies, but I'm going to
suggest you're going to see more dissatisfaction being expressed.
Maybe that will do it.

Another salvation may be the economy. It's going to go very bad, folks.
You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy,
you better do it quick.

And the third thing is Europe — Europe is not going to tolerate us much
longer.

The rage there is enormous.

I'm talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could see something

there, collective action against us.

Certainly, nobody — it's going to be an awful lot of dancing on our

graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody stops buying our bonds,
our credit — our — we're spending $2 billion a day to float the debt, and
one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians, everybody is going to
start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars.

We're going to see enormous panic here. But he could get through that.

That will be another year, and the damage he's going to do between
then and now is enormous.

We're going to have some very bad months ahead.

Seymour Hersh's latest book is Chain of Command: The Road to Abu

Ghraib.
 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.

02 November 2003

See the international reaction to this story

 ©2005 newsquest (sunday herald) limited. all rights reserved

Airline stock puts

trenchant quote: "Between August 26 and September 11, 2001, a group of

speculators, identified by the American Securities and Exchange Commission
as Israeli citizens, sold "short" a list of 38 stocks that could reasonably be
expected to fall in value as a result of the pending attacks.

These speculators operated out of the Toronto, Canada and Frankfurt,

Germany, stock exchanges and their profits were specifically stated to be "in
the millions of dollars."

Mossad emblem attempting to co-opt Jewish heritage: "by way

of deception"

SEC SECRET PROBE OF STOCK DEALINGS BEFORE 9/11

Between August 26 and September 11, 2001, a group of speculators, identified by the
American Securities and Exchange Commission as Israeli citizens, sold "short" a list of
38 stocks that could reasonably be expected to fall in value as a result of the pending
attacks.

These speculators operated out of the Toronto, Canada and Frankfurt, Germany, stock
exchanges and their profits were specifically stated to be "in the millions of dollars."

Short selling of stocks involves the opportunity to gain large profits by passing shares to
a friendly third party, then buying them back when the price falls.

Historically, if this precedes a traumatic event, it is an indication of foreknowledge.

It is widely known that the CIA uses the Promis software to routinely monitor stock
trades as a possible warning sign of a terrorist attack or suspicious economic behavior.

A week after the Sept.11 attacks, the London Times reported that the CIA had asked
regulators for the Financial Services Authority in London to investigate the suspicious
sales of millions of shares of stock just prior to the terrorist acts.

It was hoped the business paper trail might lead to the terrorists.

Investigators from numerous government agencies are part of a clandestine but official
effort to resolve the market manipulations.
There has been a great deal of talk about insider trading of American stocks by certain
Israeli groups both in Canada and Germany between August 26 and the Sept.11 attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Lynne Howard, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), stated
that information about who made the trades was available immediately.

"We would have been aware of any unusual activity right away. It would have been
triggered by any unusual volume. There is an automated system called 'blue sheeting,'
or the CBOE Market Surveillance System, that everyone in the business knows about. It
provides information on the trades - the name and even the Social Security number on
an account - and these surveillance systems are set up specifically to look into insider
trading. The system would look at the volume, and then a real person would take over
and review it, going back in time and looking at other unusual activity."

Howard continued, "The system is so smart that even if there is a news event that
triggers a market event it can go back in time, and even the parameters can be
changed depending on what is being looked at. It's a very clever system and it is
instantaneous. Even with the system, though, we have very experienced and savvy
staff in our market-regulations area who are always looking for things that might be
unusual. They're trained to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Even if it's offshore, it
might take a little longer, but all offshore accounts have to go through U.S. member
firms - members of the CBOE - and it is easily and quickly identifiable who made the
trades. The member firm who made the trades has to have identifiable information
about the client under the 'Know Your Customer' regulations (and we share all
information with the Securities and Exchange Commission.)"

Given all of this, at a minimum the CBOE and government regulators who are
conducting the secret investigations have known for some time who made the options
puts on a total of 38 stocks that might reasonably be anticipated to have a sharp drop
in value because of an attack similar to the 9/11 episode.

The silence from the investigating camps could mean several things: Either terrorists
are responsible for the puts on the listed stocks or others besides terrorists had
foreknowledge of the attack and used this knowledge to reap a nice financial harvest
from the tragedy.

Adam Hamilton of Zeal LLC, a North Dakota-based private consulting company that
publishes research on markets worldwide, stated that "I heard that $22 million in profits
was made on these put options..."

Federal investigators are continuing to be so closed-mouthed about these stock trades,

and it is clear that a much wider net has been cast, apparently looking for bigger
international fish involved in dubious financial activity relating to the 9/11 attacks on
the world stock markets.

Just a month after the attacks the SEC sent out a list of stocks to various securities
firms around the world looking for information.

The list includes stocks of American, United, Continental, Northwest, Southwest and US
Airways airlines, as well as Martin, Boeing, Lockheed Martin Corp., AIG, American
Express Corp, American International Group, AMR Corporation, Axa SA, Bank of
America Corp, Bank of New York Corp, Bank One Corp, Cigna Group, CNA Financial,
Carnival Corp, Chubb Group, John Hancock Financial Services, Hercules Inc, L-3
Communications Holdings, Inc., LTV Corporation, Marsh & McLennan Cos. Inc., MetLife,
Progressive Corp., General Motors, Raytheon, W.R. Grace, Royal Caribbean Cruises,
Ltd., Lone Star Technologies, American Express, the Citigroup Inc. ,Royal & Sun
Alliance, Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc., Vornado Reality Trust, Morgan Stanley, Dean
Witter & Co., XL Capital Ltd., and Bear Stearns.

The Times said market regulators in Germany, Japan and the US all had received
information concerning the short selling of insurance, airlines and arms companies
stock, all of which fell sharply in the wake of the attacks.
City of London broker and analyst Richard Crossley noted that someone sold shares in
unusually large quantities beginning three weeks before the assault on the WTC and
Pentagon.

He said he took this as evidence that someone had insider foreknowledge of the
attacks.

"What is more awful than he should aim a stiletto blow at the heart of Western financial
markets?" he added. "But to profit from it? Words fail me."

The US Government also admitted it was investigating short selling, which evinced a
compellingly strong foreknowledge of the coming Arab attack.

There was unusually heavy trading in airline and insurance stocks several days before
Sept.11, which essentially bet on a drop in the worth of the stocks.

It was reported by the Interdisciplinary Center, a counter-terrorism think tank involving

former Israeli intelligence officers, that insiders made nearly $16 million profit by short
selling shares in American and United Airlines, the two airlines that suffered hijacking,
and the investment firm of Morgan Stanley, which occupied 22 floors of the WTC.

Apparently none of the suspicious transactions could be traced to bin Laden because
this news item quietly dropped from sight, leaving many people wondering if it tracked
back to American firms or intelligence agencies.

Most of these transactions were handled primarily by Deutsche Bank-A.B.Brown, a firm

which until 1998 was chaired by A. B."Buzzy" Krongard, who later became executive
director of the CIA.

More serious was an article in the Sept. 28, 2001 edition of the Washington Post stating
that officials with the instant messaging firm of Odigo in New York confirmed that two
employees in Israel received text messages warning of an attack on the WTC two hours
before the planes crashed into the buildings!

The firm's vice president of sales and marketing, Alex Diamandis said it was possible
that the warning was sent to other Odigo members, but they had not received any
reports of such.

The day after, the Jerusalem Post claimed two Israelis died on the hijacked airplanes
and that 4,000 were missing at the WTC.

A week later, a Beirut television station reported that 4,000 Israeli employees of the
WTC were absent the day of the attack.

This information spread across the Internet but was quickly branded a hoax.

On Sept. 19, the Washington Post reported about 113 Israelis were missing at the WTC
and the next day, President Bush noted more than 130 Israelis were victims.

Finally, on Sept. 22, the New York Times stated "There were, in fact, only three Israelis
who had been confirmed as dead: two on the planes and another who had been visiting
the towers on business and who was identified and buried."

Investigators from numerous government agencies are part of a clandestine but official
effort to resolve the market manipulations There has been a great deal of talk about the
insider trading of American stocks by certain Israeli groups both in Canada and
Germany between August 26 and the Sept.11 attacks on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon.

Government investigators have maintained a diplomatic silence about a Department of

Justice (DOJ) probe of possible profiteering by interested parties with advance
knowledge of the attack.
On Sept. 6, 2001, the Thursday before the tragedy, 2,075 put options were made on
United Airlines and on Sept. 10, the day before the attacks, 2,282 put options were
recorded for American Airlines.

Given the prices at the time, this could have yielded speculators between $2 million and
$4 million in profit.

The matter still is under investigation and none of the government investigating bodies
- including the FBI, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and DOJ - are
speaking to reporters about insider trading.

Even so, suspicion of insider trading to profit from the Sept. 11 attacks is not limited to
U.S. regulators.

Investigations were initiated in a number of places including Japan, Germany, the

United Kingdom, France, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Switzerland and Spain.

As in the United States, all are treating these inquiries as if they were state secrets.

Sharon's screaming match with Shimon Peres

On October 4, 2001, a report aired on Col Yisrael radio of a screaming match

between Ariel Sharon and Foreign Minister (and former Prime Minister)
Shimon Peres over the perceived decline of Israeli world status.

"Don't worry about American pressure on Israel," Sharon reportedly yelled

at Peres. "We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know
it."

Peres wasn't sure how long that would prove to be true.

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2002/04/9382.shtml

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/04/315296.shtml

Odigo says workers were warned of attack

Yuval Dror

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.

© Copyright 2003 Haaretz. All rights reserved

CIA knew?

There is no doubt that Mossad did have pretty detailed knowledge of a

forthcoming attack on the US.

The London Telegraph reported on Sept. 17 that Mossad officials actually

flew to Washington in August to try to personally plead with the CIA and FBI
to deal with a cell of 200 terrorists planning a major operation — but both
agencies refused to listen.

The Mossad officials specifically warned that "large-scale terrorist attacks on

highly visible targets on the American mainland were imminent."

While offering no specific target information, they pointed to Iraq and Osama
bin Laden.

A US official told the Telegraph that it was "quite credible" that the CIA did
not heed the Mossad warning. "It has a history of being over-cautious
about Israeli information." But he added that "if this is true, then the
refusal to take it seriously will mean heads will roll."

But of course they didn't.

CIA "over-caution" stems from the Mossad too often crying wolf in order to
get the US to do its dirty work for them.

It would seem self-defeating for Mossad to tell the CIA in advance about
such an attack if Mossad was itself involved, but Mossad could have been
playing an extremely clever card, knowing its warning would be ignored, and
thus covering its own butt by issuing the warning anyway.

Sometimes the best way to keep a secret is to "hide" it right out in the open,
where no one would think to look.
There is always the possibility the CIA and Mossad may have even worked
together to smooth the way for the New York attack, without having a direct
hand in it.

After all, the CIA supplied the explosives used in the first World Trade Center
bombing in 1993.

That is confirmed by sworn court testimony from the CIA itself; its agents
"didn't really believe the terrorist cell it had infiltrated would actually use the
explosives."

But they did, and so the CIA has to share the blame for 1,000 injuries and
six deaths.

Jim Moore, from the book "Big Oil — Big War: The true story of September
11, 2001 and the 'War on Terror'

The Politics of Anti-Semitism

99 US Senators, 350 US House members attend AIPAC May, 2005 meeting

More atrocities — Lest we forget — Ahmed and Asma, story of two children dying

Settlers — Trees — Jayyous — West Bank — Palestine

 Yonatan Shapira, Refusenik and Human Rights Activist — Israel, Palestine Photos

Atrocities files — graphic images

Israel Palestine 2005: Radiation exposure, Divestment, Garbage, Water — 2005

Photos

As Jews we march with the Palestinians and raise their flag!

His Majesty King Abdullah — The American Magazine November 1947

Norman Finkelstein, Professor Marc Saperstein and Middle East Journal

Israel Universities

Arafat, Sharon, Intifada

U.S. to Israel:
— An apocalypse of Evil being created
— 500 'bunker buster' bombs

More on the building of the wall.

US and Israel's use of chemical agents
He was just shooting at children to amuse himself.

The celebration of Jerusalem day, the US missiles that rained onto children in Gaza,
and, a gathering of top articles over the past nine months

Fallujah photos — War — lunacy, bewilderment, panic, fear invading body, death

April 2004

US missiles — US money — and Palestine

Black Budget — secret budgeting and spending of the US government

March 2004

A young Palestinian man hitting an Israeli teargas bomb with his shoes away from
demonstrators.

Israeli occupation soldiers killed two demonstrators and injured more than a hundred of
them during anti-Wall demonstrations in the West Bank.

February 2004

A Palestinian elderly woman screaming in despair, complaining to God, as an Israeli

occupation army bulldozer started to prepare her land for the construction of the
separation wall in the village of Dair Qidees, near the West Bank city of Ramallah.

January 2004

Israeli occupation soldiers guarding bulldozers demolishing Palestinian homes.

A Palestinian man, perhaps who has lived in one of the homes, sits on the ground
watching, his small daughters around him.

December 2003

Palestinian boys cry over the body of their father.

8 Palestinians were killed and 40 were injured,in the Rafah refugee camp in the southern
Gaza Strip.

Many homes were destroyed during a savage Israeli occupation raid on the refugee camp
on Tuesday.

November 2003

A Palestinian family in Jenin, moments before the Israeli occupation forces blew up their
home.
October 2003

Tom Hurndall, the peace activist who was shot by Israeli occupation forces while helping
to shield some Palestinian children, is declared to be brain dead.

Two Palestinian children were among about 100 Palestinian civilians injured in the Israeli
air raids on Gaza Strip, which also resulted in killing 10 civilians.

September 2003

See the home blow up.

Blowing up more Palestinian homes as a collective punishment is a daily Israeli practice

(paid for by US money) to control Palestinians under occupation.

The life and death of Kamala Sawalha

A student leaves her house every night, leaving her two young children at home, spends
the next several hours traveling by taxi and on foot to get to the university in the
neighboring town — just 15 minutes away.

Kamala wanted very badly to study — otherwise, it would be hard to understand the
sacrifice she made for it.

To get up before dawn every morning, to leave the babies with their grandmother, to
spend hours on the road in the heat and cold, even when pregnant, in order to get to the
campus on time; to risk being shot or subjected to endless humiliations around every
turn, and then to travel the whole way back — in a taxi where possible and on foot where
necessary....

“Suddenly we were facing the soldiers,” he recounts. The jeep was parked on the left
side of the road and its right door was open. Kamala let out a long scream. It was the
last sound she would ever make.

At 11:30 A.M., they buried Kamala Sawalha in the town cemetery.

Children trying to commit suicide

Now the landscape itself has changed

More Palestinian mothers are giving birth at home because they dare not risk ride to
hospital.

Punching an arab in the face.

The father went through it and now the son is going through it and no one talks about it
around the dinner table.

Furer is certain that what happened to him is not at all unique.

Here he was — a creative, sensitive graduate of the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts,
who became an animal at the checkpoint, a violent sadist who beat up Palestinians
because they didn’t show him the proper courtesy, who shot out tires of cars because
their owners were playing the radio too loud, who abused a retarded teenage boy lying
handcuffed on the floor of the Jeep, just because he had to take his anger out somehow.
For archive purposes, this article is being stored on www.TheWE.cc website. Globalization Enviro News
‘War Circus’
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