By
Mark Gaffney
On
the morning of September 11, 2001 a Jersey City, N.J. housewife named Maria was
making coffee in her kitchen when she received a phone call from a neighbor who
excitedly told her to look out the window. When Maria looked she was shocked to
see a plume of smoke rising from the World Trade Center about a mile away
across the Hudson River. Quickly Maria grabbed some binoculars and stepped out
onto the balcony of her high-rise apartment, known as the Doric Towers, which
afforded an excellent view of lower Manhattan. Maria did not yet know that a
commercial airliner had plowed into the north tower of the World Trade Center,
but it was obvious that an ugly tragedy was in progress.
As she watched, she noticed
three men in the parking lot below who were behaving strangely. They were
sitting or kneeling on the roof of a white panel truck and, like her, were
watching the stricken World Trade Center. Oddly, however, the three men were
celebrating. They were smiling and laughing, giving high-fives, taking photos,
and one looked to be filming the World Trade Center as it burned. Their
inappropriate behavior made Maria suspicious and, a few minutes later,
when the men drove off in the van, she copied down their license plate number.
When her husband returned home from jury duty, she discussed the matter with
him, then, called the police and reported what she had seen.
At 3:31 p.m., the FBI put out a
“be on the lookout” (BOLO) all points bulletin and, about an hour later, East
Rutherford police officers Scott DeCarlo and Sgt. Dennis Rivelli identified the
white van, then stopped it on Rt. 3, near Giants stadium. The cops approached
and instructed the occupants to exit the vehicle, but the driver refused and
the officers, now with guns drawn, had to physically remove the occupants
(there were now five of them). The men were hand-cuffed, read their rights, and
taken into custody.
All of them were between 22-27
years of age. Their names were Sivan Kurzburg, his brother Paul Kurzburg, Yaron
Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari. The driver [Sivan Kurzburg] reportedly
told officer DeCarlo, “We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems
are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.”i Another
occupant falsely said, “We were on the West Side highway in New York City
during the incident.”
A search of the vehicle turned
up several passports, cameras, rolls of film, a sock stuffed with $4700 in
cash, backpacks, notebooks and, according to the Bergen Record, “maps of the
city with certain places highlighted….It looked like they were hooked in with
this. It looked like they knew what was going to happen.”iiThis
story in the local newspaper was prescient, because the issue of foreknowledge
would preoccupy the subsequent FBI investigation. The question was eventually
answered, though as we will learn, not by the FBI.
The five Israelis claimed to be
tourists temporarily employed by a local moving company, Urban Moving Systems
(UMS), based in Weehawken, N.J. The owner of the business was also an Israeli,
31-year old Dominik Suter whom FBI agents briefly questioned, before Suter fled
to Israel with his family. At that point, the FBI obtained a warrant and
searched the UMS premises. They found evidence of Suter’s hasty departure,
uneaten sandwiches, cell phones and half-full coffee cups, as well as stored
furniture and the belongings of numerous customers who had been left hanging.
FBI agents seized documents and at least fifteen computers.
The FBI placed the five Israelis
in a federal detention center, isolated them from one other, and began to
interrogate them closely. The investigation was driven by numerous
discrepancies in their accounts, and by the men’s strange behavior in the
period before the second plane impact when everyone still assumed that the
first crash was simply a tragic accident. Some of the Israelis were given as
many as seven lie-detector tests in an effort to determine if they had advance
knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. One, Paul Kurzburg, refused for weeks to take a
lie-detection test, then agreed to take it, and promptly failed it.iii
During interrogation, the
Israelis reportedly explained why they were happy that morning. They said it
was because “the United States would now have to commit itself to fighting
[Middle East] terrorism, that Americans would have an understanding and empathy
for Israel’s circumstances, and that the attacks were ultimately a good thing
for Israel.”iv As
we know, Likud-leader Benjamin Netanyahu made a similar comment when asked
about 9/11. “It’s very good,” Netanyahu told the press, then back-tracked,
“Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy for Israel.”v
The FBI investigation took a
serious turn when two of the men turned up in a US national intelligence
database, indicating they were known Mossad agents. Mossad is the Israeli
equivalent of the CIA. Also, two of the men (it is not clear if these were the
same two) were found to be in possession of round-trip airline tickets. The two
had arrived in the US from Tel Aviv via Athens on June 15, 2001, and were
scheduled to return to Israel on September 12, 2001, the day after the attacks.vi Was
the suspicious timing of their planned departure just a coincidence?
In March 2002, an un-named
high-ranking US intelligence official told The Forward, a venerable New York
Jewish newspaper, that the FBI concluded at the end of its investigation that
the Israelis arrested in New Jersey had been conducting a Mossad surveillance
mission on September 11, and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems, served
as a front.vii
ABC News conducted its own probe
and reported a similar view on the network’s prime-time show 20/20.viii During
a taped interview with co-hosts Barbara Walter and John Miller, the Israeli
detainees’ attorney, Steve Gordon, made a belated attempt at damage-control.
Gordon said his clients denied the news reports that that they had been celebrating,
or rejoicing, or even horsing around, that morning. But Gordon’s attempt to
spin the story in a more favorable light remained at odds with the evidence
found in the white van, namely, rolls of film plus the film pulled from three
cameras, which when developed by the FBI appeared to confirm exactly what Maria
first told police. The Israelis had taken portrait shots of one another with
the burning World Trade Center in the background, and plainly were in a festive
mood. The FBI never found the alleged videocamera, however.ix
ABC consultant Vince
Cannistraro, who formerly had served as CIA chief of counter-terrorism
operations, later told journalist Christopher Ketcham that “the question that
most troubled FBI agents in the weeks and months after 9/11 was whether the
Israelis had arrived at the site of their ‘celebration’ with foreknowledge of
the attack to come.” According to Cannistraro, “From the beginning, the FBI
investigation operated on the premise that the Israelis had foreknowledge.”x
The
FBI report
Such a conclusion is consistent
with the FBI report on the case, or rather, with the small part of it that was
made public in 2011. Most of the FBI report, some 1280 pages or more in length,
remains classified and will not be released until 2035. But even from the
lesser part that has been declassified, it is evident that the FBI uncovered
some disturbing material linking the Israelis to 9/11, material that was never
reported by the US news media.xi
For instance, the report
mentions that the FBI received information from its Miami office that one of
the 19 alleged 9/11 hijackers had utilized another Israeli-run moving company,
Classic International Movers (CIM), also based in New Jersey. It seems that a
number of Israeli-owned moving companies were operating in the New York area.
Curiously, CMI’s telephone number turned up in one of the notebooks found in
the white van, all of which prompted the FBI to detain and interview four CIM
employees. The four were Israelis and had served in the Israeli military; and
all four had entered the US from various locations in South America.xii Although
the outcome of the expanded investigation cannot be determined from the heavily
censored FBI report, the connection to the 19 hijackers must have alarmed US
intelligence experts. If Mossad agents were shadowing Arab terrorists in the
US, it possibly meant the Israelis had prior actionable intelligence about the
9/11 attacks which they did not share with US officials.
In another case, the FBI
interviewed a former Urban Moving Systems employee who said he had quit Urban
“due to a high amount of anti-American sentiment present among Urban’s
employees.” The former worker stated that, in addition to Israelis, UMS also
employed Russians, Hungarians, and other foreign nationals. But the Israelis
always spoke Hebrew among themselves and held frequent meetings in the company
office, to which “he and the other non-Jewish employees were never invited.”
The man said that “an Israeli employee of Urban had once remarked, ‘Give us
twenty years and we’ll take over your media and destroy your country’.” I
hasten to add, this is straight out of the FBI report. I am not making this up,
nor embellishing.xiii
The same individual also offered
a glimpse into the moving operation that could explain why UMS owner Dominik
Suter fled the country. The former employee called Suter a “crook” and
described how he “would have the delivery teams fill up the trucks with empty
boxes, because he [Suter] would charge the customers by cubic feet. He [Suter]
would also have some employees stay on the trucks when they were weighed so
that he could charge more.”xiv If
this is true, and Suter was engaging in shady business practices, it might
explain why he fled. Suter might have feared exposure and possible prosecution.
The testimony of the plainly
disgruntled individual must be treated with skepticism, yet, one of the Israeli
detainees (I will refer to him as the “5th Israeli”) corroborated some of what
he said. The fifth Israeli told the FBI that most of the foreign nationals
employed at UMS lacked the necessary work-visas, which means that Dominik Suter
made a practice of hiring illegals, and based on the testimony of his own
workers, it’s clear he exploited their illegal status, paying sub-standard
wages under the table, while avoiding payroll taxes. Suter definitely had cause
for concern. Yet, as the reader is about to learn, his flight was also
undoubtedly motivated by a much more serious matter.
In the end, despite considerable
evidence to the contrary, the FBI concluded “that the five Israelis most likely
did not possess prior knowledge of the WTC events.”xv On
November 20, 2001, the detainees were served a deportation order for visa
violations, then escorted from a US immigration and naturalization center in
Brooklyn to JFK international airport where they were put on a flight to Tel
Aviv. Once safely back in Israel, three of the men went on a national
television show, and during the interview one, Oded Ellner, told his audience
that “Our purpose was to document the event,”xvi which
of course implies foreknowledge. Ellner’s public admission reduced the FBI
investigation to absurdity. Unfortunately, from there it gets worse, because
the rest of the story is almost too terrible to contemplate. Yet, face it we
must.
The
fifth Israeli
It seems that one of the five
Israeli detainees did not know enough to keep his mouth shut, probably because
he was not a member of the core Mossad group, hence, was not in the loop. This
fifth Israeli was apparently just a guy, a poor shmuck who happened to be in
the wrong place at the wrong time. According to the FBI report, the man broke
down and sobbed repeatedly under interrogation, not what you would expect of a
Mossad operative. The man told the FBI he barely knew the four other Israelis
who were in the van with him at the time of the arrest, and did not even know
their last names. Evidently, this fifth man was one of two
Johnny-come-late-lies who joined the group after the high-fivers left the
parking lot below Maria’s apartment.xvii
This odd man out gave the FBI
the fullest account of any of the detainees. He described in considerable
detail the events of that morning; how he first noticed smoke pouring from the
World Trade Center while en route to work; and how he arrived at UMS late,
between 9:15 - 9:20 a.m., whereupon, he reported to the box packaging area in
the UMS warehouse for some scheduled training. Apparently, the man was still a
novice mover. He further explained that around 11 a.m. one of the other
Israelis came in and announced that “they are taking down the second building,”
at which point everyone in the warehouse hurried up to the roof to watch the
mind-boggling spectacle. The fifth Israeli told the FBI that (and I quote) “at
the time [he, the fifth man] believed that the authorities had purposely
collapsed the building to prevent the additional damage that would be caused by
the building tumbling to its side. It was not until later that night when he
saw a TV news report in jail that he realized that the planes had caused the
buildings’ collapse.” This is verbatim from the FBI report.
Looking back with unblinkered
hindsight, it’s clear that the naive fifth Israeli heard it right the first
time from the other Israeli who knew the truth: that the World Trade Center was
being systematically demolished in plain view of the whole world.
Today, fifteen years after the
fact, we know it was a demolition thanks to the independent research of some
highly motivated scientists, engineers and truth-tellers, who over the years
have gathered an overwhelming amount of evidence, proving beyond a reasonable
doubt that explosives were used.xviii The
basics have been known since at least 2007, when the physicist Steven E. Jones
found explosive residues in samples of World Trade Center dust.xix
Some of the evidence for
explosives was actually compiled on the morning of “the attacks.” Indeed, it
was being gathered at Hoboken, N.J., on the shore of the Hudson, even as the
Israelis celebrated on the roof of the UMS warehouse a mile or more upriver at
Weehawken. When Rick Siegel heard about the tragedy unfolding in lower
Manhattan, he hustled to the Hoboken waterfront, set up his videocamera on a
tripod, and began shooting. Over the next two hours, Siegel diligently filmed
both collapses, but even more importantly, he captured an audio record of the
enormous rumbling explosions that ripped through the towers in the moments
before they fell.xx
Thousands, perhaps tens of
thousands, of shocked local residents who were also watching from the Jersey
shore that morning must have heard the same enormous explosions, as did many
more in lower Manhattan. Yet, not one of these Americans was ever asked to
appear before the official 9/11 investigations and describe what he or she saw
and heard, that morning.
Siegel’s audio-video tape is
almost as shocking on replay as the events of that day. The slightly muffled
but nonetheless unmistakable sounds of huge multiple blasts carried quite well
for more than two miles across the open water of the Hudson River. Siegel’s
audio record is yet more corroborating evidence refuting the fiction that has
pervaded the US media ever since: that plane impacts and fires brought down the
twin towers. No way, we were deceived. The official story about 9/11 is
probably the most monstrous lie ever perpetrated upon the American people.
The Mossad team based in
Weehawken not only had, by its own admission, foreknowledge of the “attacks,”
the testimony in the FBI’s own report, as I have attempted to show, suggests
that the Israelis also knew, that very morning, that the World Trade Center was
being demolished with explosives.
Standing
truth on its ear
Oded Ellner’s brazen admission
that “our purpose was to document the incident” may have played well in Israel,
but it raised a number of urgent questions for Americans, questions that still
need answers. First and foremost: how did the FBI come to embarrass itself so
badly? Indeed, how could the FBI have reached a conclusion 180 degrees from the
truth? Especially since its investigation, judging from the portion of the FBI
report that is available, appears to have been on track, at least initially.
I suspect the answer is rather
simple. Although the FBI had all of the necessary resources to do its work, it
was hamstrung by the official story and thus, was unable to pursue leads that
would have led to the truth. The idea of a demolition was so far out of bounds
as to be unthinkable. This no doubt also explains why the FBI declassified the
fifth Israeli’s eyewitness account. The FBI censor evidently failed to
comprehend the significance of the man’s testimony, pointing to the use of
explosives.
But the FBI was also shut down
from above. A source at ABC News told journalist Chris Ketcham that “there is a
lot of frustration inside the bureau about this case. They feel the higher
echelons torpedoed the investigation….Leads were not fully investigated.”xxi
ABC reported that a settlement
was finally reached in the case after “high level negotiations between Israeli
and US government officials.”xxii According
to former CIA counter-terrorism chief Vince Cannistraro, “there is no question
but that [the order to close down the investigation] came from the White House.
It was immediately assumed at CIA headquarters that this basically was going to
be a cover-up so that the Israelis would not be implicated in any way in 9/11.
Bear in mind, this was a political issue, not a law enforcement or intelligence
issue.”xxiii
The travesty I have just
described incriminates then-president G.W. Bush and VP Dick Cheney. We are left
to ponder their obvious treachery, and the following incendiary question: how
did the Mossad team in New Jersey know in real time that the Twin Towers were
being demolished with explosives?
The second updated and expanded
edition of Mark H. Gaffney’s 2012 book Black 9/11 will be released later this
year. Reach Mark for comment at markhgaffney@earthlink.net
Notes:
i This was widely reported by many different sources.
ii Paulo Lima, “Five men detained as suspected conspirators,” Bergen Record, September 12, 2001.
iii ABC News, 20/20 with Barbara Walters and John Miller, June 21, 2002.
iv Christopher Ketcham, “What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?”, Counterpunch, March 7, 2007.
v James Bennet, “DAY OF TERROR: THE ISRAELIS; Spilled Blood Is Seen as Bond That Draws 2 Nations Closer”, New York Times, September 12, 2001, posted at http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/12/us/day-terror-israelis-spilled-blood-seen-bond-that-draws-2-nations-closer.html
vi FBI Report, section one.
vii Marc Perelman, “Discussion of the Dancing Israelis,” Forward, March 15, 2001.
viii ABC News, 20/20 with Barbara Walters and John Miller, June 21, 2002.
ix The matter of the videocamera was never resolved. The FBI never found the video-cam, but neither did it find reason to question the reliability of the witness Maria, who in repeated interviews never changed her story. In fact, Maria gave a very detailed description of what she saw. She described the video-cam as a small handheld unit with a liquid crystal display (LCD) screen. She also recalled that one of the men was holding it up to his face, moving the camera slowly from side to side, or, as she put it, “panning the area.” FBI Report, section one.
x Christopher Ketcham, “What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?”, Counterpunch, March 7, 2007.
xi The declassified FBI Report about the five dancing Israelis may be downloaded at http://kennysideshow.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-dancing-israelis-docs_4.html
xii FBI Report, sections one and five.
xiii FBI Report, sections one and five.
xiv Ibid.
xv FBI Report, section five.
xvi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OyUoGUV7b8
xvii FBI Report, section three.
xviii Check out the papers at the Journal of 9/11 Studies,http://www.journalof911studies.com
Also check out the educational material posted by the Architects and Engineers for 9/11Truth, http://www.ae911truth.org
xix Dr. Steven E. Jones, “Revisiting 9/11/2001 -- Applying the Scientific Method,” Journal of 9/11 Studies, May 2007, posted athttp://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/200704/JonesWTC911SciMethod.pdf
xx Siegel’s video can be purchased at his website http://www.911eyewitness.com
Or, watch it for free at Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ808QZjHxQ
xxi Christopher Ketcham, “What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?”, Counterpunch, March 7, 2007.
xxii ABC News, 20/20 with Barbara Walters and John Miller, June 21, 2002.
xxiii Christopher Ketcham, “What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?”, Counterpunch, March 7, 2007.
No comments:
Post a Comment