By Philip Giraldi
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.
“allies,” 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 plane’s 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 “art students” 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 country’s 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 Washington’s
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
“friendly” 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 water’s 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
“celebrating and filming.”
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 “We are Israeli. We are
not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the
problem.” The four other passengers were Sivan’s 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 FBI’s Foreign Counterintelligence
Section, which handles allegations of spying.
After the arrest, the FBI obtained a
warrant to search Urban Moving System’s 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 “holocaust survivor,” 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 “intelligence.” 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 “dancing Israelis” and by some, more
disparagingly, as the “dancing Shlomos.”
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 “document the event.” In 2004 the five men sued the United States
government for damages, alleging “that 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.” 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 “terrorists.” 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 “high fiving.” One eyewitness interviewed by the Bureau had
seen the Israelis’ 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 “a good
thing.” He was later quoted as saying somewhat more expansively “We are
benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and
Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.” 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.
This article was originally
published on UNZ Review. Via American Herald Tribune.
Philip M. Giraldi is
a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who
served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the
CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first
Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of
the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that
seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is
consistent with American values and interests.
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