From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv

The tale of 9/11 will just not go away, largely because it is clear to
anyone who reads the lengthy 9/11 Commission Report that many issues
that should have been subject to inquiry were ignored for what would
appear to be political reasons. The George W. Bush Administration
quite obviously did not want to assume any blame for what had happened
and that bias also extended to providing cover for U.S. oallies,o most particularly Saudi Arabia and Israel. Those who have sought the truth
about 9/11 have been persistent in their attempts to find out
information that was suppressed but they have been blocked repeatedly
in spite of numerous FOIA requests.

Now, eighteen years after the event, there has been something like a breakthrough, penetrating the wall of silence erected by the
government. FBI reports on the possible Israeli role in 9/11 were
released on May 7th and they serve to support speculation by myself
and other former intelligence officers that Israel, at a minimum, had
detailed prior knowledge of what was to take place. More than that,
Israeli intelligence officers working in the United States might well
have enabled certain aspects of the conspiracy.

To recount some of what is already known and suspected, one should
first examine the 2016 release of a heavily edited and redacted 28
pages long annex to the 9/11 Commission Report that explored the Saudi
Arabian role in the terrorist attack . The section concluded that the
Saudi government may have played a direct role in 9/11 by assisting
two of the hijackers, including a dry run exercise intended to learn
how to get into a planeAs cockpit. There was also considerable
evidence suggesting that wealthy Saudis and even members of the Royal
Family had been supporting and funding al-Qaeda.

But far exceeding the Saudi role is the involvement of the Israeli
intelligence service Mossad, which was not subject to any serious
inquiry or investigation by U.S. intelligence or police agencies.
Israel, in spite of obvious involvement in 9/11, was not included in
the 9/11 Commission Report despite the existence of an enormous
Israeli intelligence operation freely working in the United States
that was known to the FBI. Some of those Mossad officers were notably
filmed celebrating as the Twin Towers were burning and collapsing.

In the year 2001 Israel was running a massive spying operation through
a number of cover companies in New Jersey, Florida and also on the
west coast that served as spying mechanisms for Mossad officers. The
effort was supported by the Mossad Station in Washington D.C. and
included a large number of volunteers, the so-called oart studentso
who traveled around the U.S. selling various products at malls and
outdoor markets. The FBI was aware of the numerous Israeli students
who were routinely overstaying their visas and some in the Bureau
certainly believed that they were assisting their countryAs
intelligence service in some way, but it proved difficult to actually
link the students to undercover operations, so they were regarded as a
minor nuisance and were normally left to the tender mercies of the
inspectors at the Bureau of Customs and Immigration.

American law enforcement was also painfully aware that the Israelis
were running more sophisticated intelligence operations inside the
United States, many of which were focused on WashingtonAs military
capabilities and intentions. Some specialized intelligence units
concentrated on obtaining military and dual use technology. It was
also known that Israeli spies had penetrated the phone systems of the
U.S. government, to include those at the White House.

In its annual classified counterespionage review, the FBI invariably
places Israel at the top for ofriendlyo countries that spy on the U.S.
In fact, the pre-9/11 Bureau did its best to stay on top of the
problem, but it rarely received any political support from the Justice Department and White House if an espionage case involved Israelis. By
one estimate, more than 100 such cases were not prosecuted for
political reasons. Any Israeli caught in flagrante would most often be
quietly deported and most Americans who were helping Israel were let
off with a slap on the wrist.

But the hands-off attitude towards Israel shifted dramatically when,
on September 11, 2001, a New Jersey housewife saw something from the
window of her apartment building, which overlooked the World Trade
Center. She watched as the buildings burned and crumbled but also
noted something strange. Three young men were kneeling on the roof of
a white transit van parked by the waterAs edge, making a movie in
which they featured themselves high fiving and laughing in front of
the catastrophic scene unfolding behind them. The woman wrote down the
license plate number of the van and called the police, who responded
quickly and soon both the local force and the FBI began looking for
the vehicle, which was subsequently seen by other witnesses in various locations along the New Jersey waterfront, its occupants ocelebrating
and filming.o

The license plate number revealed that the van belonged to a New
Jersey registered company called Urban Moving Systems. At 4 p.m. the
vehicle was spotted and pulled over. Five men between the ages of 22
and 27 years old emerged and were detained at gunpoint and handcuffed.
They were all Israelis. One of them had $4,700 in cash hidden in his
sock and another had two foreign passports. Bomb sniffing dogs reacted
to the smell of explosives in the van, which had very little actual
moving equipment inside.

According to the initial police report, the driver identified as Sivan Kurzberg, stated oWe are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your
problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.o The four
other passengers were SivanAs brother Paul, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner
and Omer Marmari. The men were detained at the Bergen County jail in
New Jersey before being transferred the FBIAs Foreign
Counterintelligence Section, which handles allegations of spying.

After the arrest, the FBI obtained a warrant to search Urban Moving
SystemAs Weehawken, N.J., offices. Papers and computers were seized.
The company owner Dominick Suter, also an Israeli, answered FBI
questions but when a follow-up interview was set up a few days later
it was learned that he had fled the country for Israel, putting both
his business and home up for sale. The office space and warehouse were abandoned. It was later learned that Suter has been associated with at
least fourteen businesses in the United States, mostly in New Jersey
and New York but also in Florida. Suter and his wife Omit Levinson
Suter were the owners of 1 Stop Cleaner located in Wellington Florida
and Dominick was also associated with Basia McDonnell, described as a
Polish oholocaust survivor,o as a business partner in yet another
business called Value Ad. Florida was a main focus for the Israeli
intelligence operation in the U.S. that was directed against Arabs.

The five Israelis were among 140 Israelis arrested after 9/11, most of
whom had military backgrounds, including some who were trained in ointelligence.o The five were held in Brooklyn, initially on charges
relating to visa fraud. FBI interrogators questioned them for more
than two months. Several were held in solitary confinement so they
could not communicate with each other and two of them were given
repeated polygraph exams, which they failed when claiming that they
were nothing more than students working summer jobs. The two men that
the FBI focused on most intensively were believed to be Mossad staff
officers and the other three were volunteers helping with
surveillance.

The Israelis were not exactly cooperative, but the FBI concluded from
documents obtained at their office in Weehawken that they were
targeting Arabs in New York and New Jersey, most particularly in the
Paterson N.J. area, which has the second largest Muslim population in
the U.S. They were particularly interested in local groups possibly
linked to Hamas and Hezbollah as well as in charities that might be
used for fund raising. The FBI also concluded that the Israelis had
actually monitored the activities of at least two of the 9/11
hijackers.

To be sure, working on an intelligence operation does not necessarily
imply participation in either the planning or execution of something
like 9/11, but there are Israeli fingerprints all over the place, with
cover companies and intelligence personnel often intersecting with
locations frequented by the hijackers.

Apart from the interrogations of the five men from Weehawken, the U.S. government has apparently never sought to find out what else the
Israelis might have known or were up to in September 2011. There are a
lot of dots that might well have been connected once upon a time, but
the trail has grown cold. Police records in New Jersey and New York
where the men were held have disappeared and FBI interrogation reports
have been inaccessible. Media coverage of the case also died, though
the five were referred to in the press as the odancing Israeliso and
by some, more disparagingly, as the odancing Shlomos.o

Inevitably, the George W. Bush White House intervened. After 71 days
in detention, the five Israelis were released from prison by Attorney
General John Ashcroft, put on a plane, and deported. Two of the men
later spoke about their unpleasant experience in America on an Israeli
talk show, one explaining that their filming the fall of the Twin
Towers was to odocument the event.o In 2004 the five men sued the
United States government for damages, alleging othat their detention
was illegal and that their civil rights were violated, suffering
racial slurs, physical violence, religious discrimination, rough interrogations, deprivation of sleep, and many other offenses.o They
were represented by Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, who in the previous year
had founded the Shurat HaDin Israel Law Center which seeks to bankrupt
groups that Israel considers to be oterrorists.o Shurat HaDin is
closely tied to the Israeli government.

Now it is just possible that the Urban Moving Israelis were indeed
uninvolved in 9/11 but nevertheless working for Mossad, which the
Israeli government even subsequently admitted, but the new evidence
suggests that the Israelis almost certainly had considerable prior
knowledge and were likely involved in what developed. The new
information reveals that minutes after the first plane struck the
World Trade Center, five Israelis had taken up position in the parking
lot of the Doric Apartment Complex in Union City, New Jersey, where
they took pictures and filmed the attacks while also celebrating the
fall of the towers and ohigh fiving.o One eyewitness interviewed by
the Bureau had seen the IsraelisA van circling the building parking at
8:00 a.m. that day, more than 40 minutes prior to the attack,
indicating prior knowledge of what was about to happen.

The eyewitness testimony is supported by copies of photos taken by the
men that the FBI seized. The photo reproductions were obtained via a
FOIA request made by a private citizen and are of poor quality,
deliberately made so by the FBI to conceal faces and other details.
They constitute only 14 of over seventy photos taken by the Israelis. Nevertheless, they clearly demonstrate that a celebration was going
on. One photo, intriguingly, shows Sivan Kurzberg holding a lit
lighter in front of the Manhattan Skyline on September 10th, one day
before 9/11. It was apparently taken at the Doric Complex on a
reconnoitering visit made on that day and suggests that Kurzberg was
simulating the attack on the towers on the following day.

Why would the Israelis do it? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu described 9/11 initially as oa good thing.o He was later
quoted as saying somewhat more expansively oWe are benefiting from one
thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the
American struggle in Iraq.o To be sure, 9/11 was a gift to Israel and
it is a gift that keeps on giving. America is at war in a number of
Muslim countries and its troops blanket the Middle East, to include a
base in Israel dedicated to the defense of that country. It is all a
result of the Global War on Terror and the GWOT started with 9/11. And
just maybe it was a fire that was ignited by Israel.

https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/israels-role-in-9-11/


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