What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?
By Christopher Ketcham | Counterpunch | March 1, 2007
- Who Were the Israelis Living Next to Mohammed Atta?
- What was in the Van on the New Jersey Shore?
- How did Two Hijackers Land on Watch List Weeks Before 9/11?
- Who Shut Down Fox News’ Carl Cameron?
On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, an FBI bulletin known as a BOLO – “be on lookout” – was issued with regard to three suspicious men who that morning were seen leaving the New Jersey waterfront minutes after the first plane hit World Trade Center 1. Law enforcement officers across the New York-New Jersey area were warned in the radio dispatch to watch for a “vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack”:
White, 2000 Chevrolet van… with ‘Urban Moving Systems’ sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center… Three individuals with van were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent explosion. FBI Newark Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold for prints and detain individuals.
At 3:56 p.m., twenty-five minutes after the issuance of the FBI BOLO, officers with the East Rutherford Police Department stopped the commercial moving van through a trace on the plates. According to the police report, Officer Scott DeCarlo and Sgt. Dennis Rivelli approached the stopped van, demanding that the driver exit the vehicle. The driver, 23-year-old Sivan Kurzberg, refused and “was asked several more times [but] appeared to be fumbling with a black leather fanny pouch type of bag”. With guns drawn, the police then “physically removed” Kurzberg, while four other men – two more men had apparently joined the group since the morning – were also removed from the van, handcuffed, placed on the grass median and read their Miranda rights. They had not been told the reasons for their arrest. Yet, according to DeCarlo’s report, “this officer was told without question by the driver [Sivan Kurzberg], ‘We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.’” Another of the five Israelis, again without prompting, told Officer DeCarlo – falsely – that “we were on the West Side Highway in New York City during the incident”.
From inside the vehicle the officers, who were quickly joined by agents from the FBI, retrieved multiple passports and $4,700 in cash stuffed in a sock. According to New Jersey’s Bergen Record, which on September 12 reported the arrest of the five Israelis, an investigator high up in the Bergen County law enforcement hierarchy stated that officers had also discovered in the vehicle “maps of the city … with certain places highlighted. It looked like they’re hooked in with this”, the source told the Record, referring to the 9/11 attacks. “It looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park.”
The five men were indeed Israeli citizens. They claimed to be in the country working as movers for Urban Moving Systems Inc., which maintained a warehouse and office in Weehawken, New Jersey. They were held for 71 days in a federal detention center in Brooklyn, New York, during which time they were repeatedly interrogated by FBI and CIA counterterrorism teams, who referred to the men as the “high-fivers” for their celebratory behavior on the New Jersey waterfront. Some were placed in solitary confinement for at least forty days; some were given as many as seven liedetector tests. One of the Israelis, Paul Kurzberg, brother of Sivan, refused to take a lie-detector test for ten weeks. Then he failed it.
Meanwhile, two days after the men were picked up, the owner of Urban Moving Systems, Dominik Suter, a 31- year-old Israeli national, abandoned his business and fled the United States for Israel. Suter’s departure was abrupt, leaving behind coffee cups, sandwiches, cell phones and computers strewn on office tables and thousands of dollars of goods in storage. Suter was later placed on the same FBI suspect list as 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and other hijackers and suspected al-Qaeda sympathizers, suggesting that U.S. authorities felt Suter may have known something about the attacks. The suspicion, as the investigation unfolded, was that the men working for Urban Moving Systems were spies. Who exactly was handling them, and who or what they were targeting, was as yet uncertain.
It was New York’s venerable Jewish weekly The Forward that broke this story in the spring of 2002, after months of footwork. The Forward reported that the FBI had finally concluded that at least two of the men were agents working for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, and that Urban Moving Systems, the ostensible employer of the five Israelis, was a front operation. Two former CIA officers confirmed this to me, noting that movers’ vans are a common intelligence cover. The Forward also noted that the Israeli government itself admitted that the men were spies. A “former high-ranking American intelligence official”, who said he was “regularly briefed on the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials”, told reporter Marc Perelman that after American authorities confronted Jerusalem at the end of 2001, the Israeli government “acknowledged the operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington”. Today, Perelman stands by his reporting. I asked him if his sources in the Mossad denied the story. “Nobody stopped talking to me”, he said. In June 2002, ABC News’ 20/20 followed up with its own investigation into the matter, coming to the same conclusion as The Forward. Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of operations for counterterrorism with the CIA, told 20/20 that some of the names of the five men appeared as hits in searches of an FBI national intelligence database. Cannistraro told me that the question that most troubled FBI agents in the weeks and months after 9/11 was whether the Israelis had arrived at the site of their “celebration” with foreknowledge of the attack to come. From the beginning, “the FBI investigation operated on the premise that the Israelis had foreknowledge”, according to Cannistraro. A second former CIA counterterrorism officer who closely followed the case, but who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me that investigators were pursuing two theories. “One story was that [the Israelis] appeared at Liberty State Park very quickly after the first plane hit. The other was that they were at the park location already”. Either way, investigators wanted to know exactly what the men were expecting when they got there.
Before such issues had been fully explored, however, the investigation was shut down. Following what ABC News reported were “high-level negotiations between Israeli and U.S. government officials”, a settlement was reached in the case of the five Urban Moving Systems suspects. Intense political pressure apparently had been brought to bear. The reputable Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported that by the last week of October 2001,some six weeks after the men had been detained, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and two unidentified “prominent New York congressmen” were lobbying heavily for their release. According to a source at ABC News close to the 20/20 report, high-profile criminal lawyer Alan Dershowitz also stepped in as a negotiator on behalf of the men to smooth out differences with the U.S. government. (Dershowitz declined to comment for this article.) And so, at the end of November 2001, for reasons that only noted they had been working in the country illegally as movers, in violation of their visas, the men were flown home to Israel.
Today, the crucial questions raised by this matter remain unanswered. There is sufficient reason – from news reports, statements by former intelligence officials, an array of circumstantial evidence, and the reported acknowledgment by the Israeli government – to believe that in the months before 9/11, Israel was running an active spy network inside the United States, with Muslim extremists as the target. Given Israel’s concerns about Islamic terrorism as well as its long history of spying on U.S. soil, this does not come entirely as a shock. What’s incendiary is the idea – supported, though not proven, by several pieces of evidence – that the Israelis did learn something about 9/11 in advance but failed to share all of what they knew with American officials. The questions are disturbing enough to warrant a Congressional investigation.
Yet none of this information found its way into Congress’s joint committee report on the attacks, and it was not even tangentially referenced in the nearly 600 pages of the 9/11 Commission’s final report. Nor would a single major media outlet track the revelations of The Forward and ABC News to investigate further. “There weren’t even stories saying it was bullshit”, says The Forward’s Perelman. “Honestly, I was surprised”. Instead, the story disappeared into the welter of anti-Israel 9/11 conspiracy theories.
It’s no small boon to the U.S. government that the story of 9/11-related Israeli espionage has been thus relegated: the story doesn’t fit in the clean lines of the official narrative of the attacks. It brings up concerns not only about Israel’s obligation not to spy inside the borders of the United States, its major benefactor, but about its possible failure to have provided the U.S. adequate warning of an impending devastating attack on American soil.
Furthermore, the available evidence undermines the carefully cultivated image of sanctity that defines the U.S.- Israel relationship. These are all factors that help explain the story’s disappearance – and they are compelling reasons to revisit it now.
Torpedoing the FBI Probe
All five future hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which rammed the Pentagon, maintained addresses or were active within a six-mile radius of towns associated with the Israelis employed at Urban Moving Systems. Hudson and Bergen counties, the areas where the Israelis were allegedly conducting surveillance, were a central staging ground for the hijackers of Flight 77 and their fellow al-Qaeda operatives. Mohammed Atta maintained a mail-drop address and visited friends in northern New Jersey; his contacts there included Hani Hanjour, the suicide pilot for Flight 77, and Majed Moqed, one of the strongmen who backed Hanjour in the seizing of the plane. Could the Israelis, with or without knowledge of the terrorists’ plans, have been tracking the men who were soon to hijack Flight 77?
In public statements, both the Israeli government and the FBI have denied that the Urban Moving Systems men were involved in an intelligence operation in the United States. “No evidence recovered suggested any of these Israelis had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attack, and these Israelis are not suspected of working for Mossad”, FBI spokesman Jim Margolin told me. (The Israeli embassy did not respond to questions for this article.)
According to the source at ABC News, FBI investigators chafed at the denials from their higher-ups. “There is a lot of frustration inside the bureau about this case”, the source told me. “They feel the higher echelons torpedoed the investigation into the Israeli New Jersey cell. Leads were not fully investigated.” Among those lost leads was the figure of Dominik Suter, whom the U.S. authorities apparently never attempted to contact.
Intelligence expert and author James Bamford told me there was similar frustration within the CIA: “People I’ve talked to at the CIA were outraged at what was going on. They thought it was outrageous that there hadn’t been a real investigation, that the facts were hanging out there without any conclusion.”
However, what was “absolutely certain”, according to Vincent Cannistraro, was that the five Israelis formed part of a surveillance network in the New York – New Jersey area. The network’s purpose was to track radical Islamic extremists and/or supporters of militant Palestinian groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The former CIA counterterrorism officer who spoke anonymously told me that FBI investigators determined that the suspect Israelis were serving as Arabic speaking linguists “running technical operations” in northern New Jersey’s extensive Muslim communities.
The former CIA officer said the operations included taps on telephones, placement of microphones in rooms and mobile surveillance. The source at ABC News agreed: “Our conclusion was that they were Arab linguists involved in monitoring operations, i.e., electronic surveillance. People at FBI concur with this”. The ABC News source added, “What we heard was that the Israelis may have picked up chatter that something was going to happen on the morning of 9/11”. The former CIA counterterrorism officer told me: “There was no question but that [the order to close down the investigation] came from the White House. It was immediately assumed at CIA headquarters that this basically was going to be a cover-up so that the Israelis would not be implicated in any way in 9/11. Bear in mind that this was a political issue, not a law enforcement or intelligence issue. If somebody says we don’t want the Israelis implicated in this – we know that they’ve been spying the hell out of us, we know that they possibly had information in advance of the attacks, but this would be a political nightmare to deal with.”
Israel’s “Art Student Spies”
There is a second piece of evidence that suggests Israeli operatives were spying on al-Qaeda in the United States. It is writ in the peculiar tale of the Israeli “art students”, detailed by this reporter for Salon.com in 2002, following the leaking of an internal memo circulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Office of Security Programs. The June 2001 memo, issued three months before the 9/11 attacks, reported that more than 120 young Israeli citizens, posing as art students and peddling cheap paintings, had been repeatedly – and seemingly inexplicably – attempting to penetrate DEA offices and other law enforcement and Defense Department offices across the country. The DEA report stated that the Israelis may have been engaged in “an organized intelligence gathering activity”, but to what end, U.S. investigators, in June 2001, could not determine. The memo briefly floated the possibility that the Israelis were engaged in trafficking the drug ecstasy. According to the memo, “the most activity [was] reported in the state of Florida” during the first half of 2001, where the town of Hollywood appeared to be “a central point for these individuals with several having addresses in this area”.
In retrospect, the fact that a large number of “art students” operated out of Hollywood is intriguing, to say the least. During 2001, the city, just north of Miami, was a hotbed of al-Qaeda activity and served as one of the chief staging grounds for the hijacking of the World Trade Center planes and the Pennsylvania plane; it was home to fifteen of the nineteen future hijackers, nine in Hollywood and six in the surrounding area. Among the 120 suspected Israeli spies posing as art students, more than thirty lived in the Hollywood area, ten in Hollywood proper. As noted in the DEA report, many of these young men and women had training as intelligence and electronic intercept officers in the Israeli military – training and experience far beyond the compulsory service mandated by Israeli law. Their “traveling in the U.S. selling art seem[ed] not to fit their background”, according to the DEA report.
One “art student” was a former Israeli military intelligence officer named Hanan Serfaty, who rented two Hollywood apartments close to the mail drop and apartment of Mohammed Atta and four other hijackers. Serfaty was moving large amounts of cash: he carried bank slips showing more than $100,000 deposited from December 2000 through the first quarter of 2001; other bank slips showed withdrawals for about $80,000 during the same period. Serfaty’s apartments, serving as crash pads for at least two other “art students”, were located at 4220 Sheridan Street and 701 South 21st Avenue. Lead hijacker Mohammed Atta’s mail drop was at 3389 Sheridan Street – approximately 2,700 feet from Serfaty’s Sheridan Street apartment. Both Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, the suicide pilot on United Airlines Flight 175, which smashed into World Trade Center 2, lived in a rented apartment at 1818 Jackson Street, some 1,800 feet from Serfaty’s South 21st Avenue apartment.
In fact, an improbable series of coincidences emerges from a close reading of the 2001 DEA memo, the 9/11 Commission’s staff statements and final report, FBI and Justice Department watch lists, hijacker timelines compiled by major media and statements by local, state and federal law enforcement personnel. In at least six urban centers, suspected Israeli spies and 9/11 hijackers and/or al-Qaeda–connected suspects lived and operated near one another, in some cases less than half a mile apart, for various periods during 2000–01 in the run-up to the attacks. In addition to northern New Jersey and Hollywood, Florida, these centers included Arlington and Fredericksburg, Virginia; Atlanta; Oklahoma City; Los Angeles; and San Diego.
Israeli “art students” also lived close to terror suspects in and around Dallas, Texas. A 25-year-old “art student” named Michael Calmanovic, arrested and questioned by Texas-based DEA officers in April 2001, maintained a mail drop at 3575 North Beltline Road, less than a thousand feet from the 4045 North Beltline Road apartment of Ahmed Khalefa, an FBI terror suspect. Dallas and its environs, especially the town of Richardson, Texas, throbbed with “art student” activity. Richardson is notable as the home of the Holy Land Foundation, an Islamic charity designated as a terrorist funder by the European Union and U.S. government in December 2001. Sources in 2002 told The Forward, in a report unrelated to the question of the “art students”, that “Israeli intelligence played a key role in helping the Bush administration to crack down on Islamic charities suspected of funneling money to terrorist groups, most notably the Richardson, Texas-based Holy Land Foundation, last December [2001]”. It’s plausible that the intelligence prompting the shutdown of the Holy Land Foundation came from “art student” spies in the Richardson area.
Others among the “art students” had specific backgrounds in electronic surveillance or military intelligence, or were associated with Israeli wiretapping and surveillance firms, which prompted further concerns among U.S. investigators. DEA agents described Michael Calmanovic, for example, as “a recently discharged electronic intercept operator for the Israeli military”. Lior Baram, questioned near Hollywood, Fla., in January 2001, said he had served two years in Israeli intelligence “working with classified information”. Hanan Serfaty, who maintained the Hollywood apartments near Atta and his cohorts, served in the Israeli military between the ages of 18 and 21. Serfaty refused to disclose his activities between the ages of 21 and 24, including his activities since arriving in the U.S.A. in 2000. The French daily Le Monde meanwhile reported that six “art students” were apparently using cell phones that had been purchased by a former Israeli vice consul in the U.S.A.
Suspected Israeli spy Tomer Ben Dor, questioned at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport in May 2001, worked for the Israeli wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping company NICE Systems Ltd. (NICE Systems’ American subsidiary, NICE Systems Inc., is located in Rutherford, New Jersey, not far from the East Rutherford site where the five Israeli “movers” were arrested on the afternoon of September 11.) Ben Dor carried in his luggage a print-out of a computer file that referred to “DEA Groups”. How he acquired information about so-called “DEA Groups” – via, for example, his own employment with an Israeli wiretapping company – was never determined, according to DEA documents.
“Art student” Michal Gal, arrested by DEA investigators in Irving, Texas, in the spring of 2001, was released on a $10,000 cash bond posted by Ophir Baer, an employee of the Israeli telecommunications software company Amdocs Inc., which provides phone-billing technology to clients that include some of the largest phone companies in the United States as well as U.S. government agencies. Amdocs, whose executive board has been heavily stocked with retired and current members of the Israeli government and military, has been investigated at least twice in the last decade by U.S. authorities on charges of espionage-related leaks of data that the company assured was secure. (The company strenuously denies any wrong-doing.)
According to the former CIA counterterrorism officer with knowledge of investigations into 9/11-related Israeli espionage, when law enforcement officials examined the “art students” phenomenon, they came to the tentative conclusion that “the Israelis likely had a huge spy operation in the U.S. and that they had succeeded in identifying a number of the hijackers”. The German daily Die Zeit reached the same conclusion in 2002, reporting that “Mossad agents in the U.S. were in all probability surveilling at least four of the 19 hijackers”.
The Fox News Channel also reported that U.S. investigators suspected that Israelis were spying on Muslim militants in the United States. “There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks, but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it”, Fox correspondent Carl Cameron reported in a December 2001 series that was the first major exposé of allegations of 9/11-related Israeli espionage. “A highly placed investigator said there are ‘tie-ins’. But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, ‘evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.’”
One element of the allegations has never been clearly understood: if the “art students” were indeed spies targeting Muslim extremists that included al-Qaeda, why would they also be surveilling DEA agents in such a compromising manner? Why, in other words, would foreign spies bumble into federal offices by the scores and risk exposing their operation? An explanation is that a number of the art students were, in fact, young Israelis engaged in a mere art scam and unknowingly provided cover for real spies. Investigative journalist John Sugg, who as senior editor for the Creative Loafing newspaper chain reported on the “art students” in 2002, told me that investigators he spoke to within FBI felt the “art student” ring functioned as a wide-ranging cover that was counterintuitive in its obviousness. DEA investigators, for example, uncovered evidence connecting the Israeli “art students” to known ecstasy trafficking operations in New York and Florida. This was, according to Sugg, planted information. “The explanation was that when our FBI guys started getting interested in these folks [the art students] – when they got too close to what the real purpose was – the Israelis threw in an ecstasy angle”, Sugg told me. “The argument being that if our guys thought the Israelis were involved in a smuggling ring, then they wouldn’t see the real purpose of the operation”. Sugg, who is writing a book that explores the tale of the “art students”, told me that several sources within the FBI, and at least one source formerly with Israeli intelligence, suggested that “the bumbling aspect of the art student thing was intentional.”
When I reported on the matter for Salon.com in 2002, a veteran U.S. intelligence operative with experience subcontracting both for the CIA and the NSA suggested a similar possibility. “It was a noisy operation”, the veteran intelligence operative said. The operative referred me to the film Victor, Victoria. “It was about a woman playing a man playing a woman. Perhaps you should think about this from that aspect and ask yourself if you wanted to have something that was in your face, that didn’t make sense, that couldn’t possibly be them”. The intelligence operative added, “Think of it this way: how could the experts think this could actually be something of any value? Wouldn’t they dismiss what they were seeing?”
U.S. and Israeli officials, dismissing charges of espionage as an “urban myth”, have publicly claimed that the Israeli “art students” were guilty only of working on U.S. soil without proper credentials. The stern denials issued by the Justice Department were widely publicized in the Washington Post and elsewhere, and the endnote from officialdom and in establishment media by the spring of 2002 was that the “art students” had been rounded up and deported simply because of harmless visa violations. The FBI, for its part, refused to confirm or deny the “art students” espionage story. “Regarding FBI investigations into Israeli art students”, spokesman Jim Margolin told me, “the FBI cannot comment on any of those investigations.” As with the New Jersey Israelis, the investigation into the Israeli “art students” appears to have been halted by orders from on high. The veteran CIA/NSA intelligence operative told me in 2002 that there was “a great press to discredit the story, discredit the connections, prevent [investigators] from going any further. People were told to stand down. You name the agency, they were told to stand down”. The operative added, “People who were perceived to be gumshoes on [this matter] suddenly found themselves hammered from all different directions. The interest from the middle bureaucracy was not that there had been a security breach but that someone had bothered to investigate the breach. That was where the terror was”.
Choking Off the Press Coverage
There was similar pressure brought against the media venues that ventured to report out the allegations of 9/11- related Israeli espionage. A former ABC News employee high up in the network newsroom told me that when ABC News ran its June 2002 exposé on the celebratory New Jersey Israelis, “Enormous pressure was brought to bear by pro-Israeli organizations” – and this pressure began months before the piece was even close to airing. The source said that ABC News colleagues wondered, “how they [the pro-Israel organizations] found out we were doing the story. Pro-Israeli people were calling the president of ABC News. Barbara Walters was getting bombarded by calls. The story was a hard sell but ABC News came through – the management insulated [reporters] from the pressure”.
The experience of Carl Cameron, chief Washington correspondent at Fox News Channel and the first mainstream U.S. reporter to present the allegations of Israeli surveillance of the 9/11 hijackers, was perhaps more typical, both in its particulars and aftermath. The attack against Cameron and Fox News was spearheaded by a pro-Israel lobby group called the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), which operated in tandem with the two most highly visible powerhouse Israel lobbyists, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (itself currently embroiled in a spy scandal connected to the Defense Department and Israeli Embassy). “CAMERA peppered the shit out of us”, Carl Cameron told me in 2002, referring to an e-mail bombardment that eventually crashed the Fox News.com servers. Cameron himself received 700 pages of almost identical e-mail messages from hundreds of citizens (though he suspected these were spam identities). CAMERA spokesman Alex Safian later told me that Cameron’s upbringing in Iran, where his father traveled as an archeologist, had rendered the reporter “very sympathetic to the Arab side”. Safian added, “I think Cameron, personally, has a thing about Israel” – coded language implying that Cameron was an anti-Semite. Cameron was outraged at the accusation.
According to a source at Fox News Channel, the president of the ADL, Abraham Foxman, telephoned executives at Fox News’ parent, News Corp., to demand a sit-down in the wake of the Cameron reportage. The source said that Foxman told the News Corp. executives, “Look, you guys have generally been pretty fair to Israel. What are you doing putting this stuff out there? You’re killing us”. The Fox News source continued, “As good old boys will do over coffee in Manhattan, it was like, well, what can we do about this? Finally, Fox News said, ‘Stop the e-mailing. Stop slamming us. Stop being in our face, and we’ll stop being in your face – by way of taking our story down off the web. We will not retract it; we will not disavow it; we stand by it. But we will at least take it off the web.’” Following this meeting, within four days of the posting of Cameron’s series on Fox News.com, the transcripts disappeared, replaced by the message, “This story no longer exists”.
What Did Mossad Know and Tell the U.S.?
Whether or not Israeli spies had detailed foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, the Israeli authorities knew enough to warn the U.S. government in the summer of 2001 that an attack was on the horizon. The British Sunday Telegraph reported on September 16, 2001, that two senior agents with the Mossad were dispatched to Washington in August 2001 “to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many as 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation”. The Telegraph quoted a “senior Israeli security official” as saying the Mossad experts had “no specific information about what was being planned”. Still, the official told the Telegraph, the Mossad contacts had “linked the plot to Osama bin Laden”. Likewise, Die Zeit correspondent Oliver Schröm reported that on August 23, 2001, the Mossad “handed its American counterpart a list of names of terrorists who were staying in the U.S. and were presumably planning to launch an attack in the foreseeable future”. Fox News’ Carl Cameron, in May 2002, also reported warnings by Israel: “Based on its own intelligence, the Israeli government provided ‘general’ information to the United States in the second week of August that an al-Qaeda attack was imminent”. The U.S. government later claimed these warnings were not specific enough to allow any mitigating action to be taken. Mossad expert Gordon Thomas, author of Gideon’s Spies, says German intelligence sources told him that as late as August 2001 Israeli spies in the United States had made surveillance contacts with “known supporters of bin Laden in the U.S.A. It was those surveillance contacts that later raised the question: how much prior knowledge did Mossad have and at what stage?”
According to Die Zeit, the Mossad did provide the U.S. government with the names of suspected terrorists Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who would eventually hijack the Pentagon plane. It is worth noting that Mihdhar and Hazmi were among the hijackers who operated in close proximity to Israeli “art students” in Hollywood, Florida, and to the Urban Moving Systems Israelis in northern New Jersey. Moreover, Hazmi and at least three “art students” visited Oklahoma City on almost the same dates, from April 1 through April 4, 2001. On August 24, 2001, a day after the Mossad’s briefing, Mihdhar and Hazmi were placed by the CIA on a terrorist watch list; additionally, it was only after the Mossad warning, as reported by Die Zeit, that the CIA, on August 27, informed the FBI of the presence of the two terrorists. But by then the cell was already in hiding, preparing for attack.
The CIA, along with the 9/11 Commission in its adoption of the CIA story, claims that Mihdhar and Hazmi were placed on the watch list solely due to the agency’s own efforts, with no help from Mossad. Their explanation of how the pair came to be placed on the watch list, however, is far from credible and may have served as a cover story to obscure the Mossad briefing [See accompanying story on page 8 – “The Kuala Lumpur Deceit”]. This brings up the possibility that the CIA may have known about the existence of the alleged Israeli agents and their mission, but sought, naturally, to keep it quiet. A second, more troubling scenario, is that the CIA may have subcontracted to Mossad, given that the agency was both prohibited by law from conducting intelligence operations on U.S. soil, and lacked a pool of competent Arabic-fluent field officers. In such a scenario, the CIA would either have worked actively with the Israelis or quietly abetted an independent operation on U.S. soil. In his 9/11 investigative book, The Looming Tower, author Lawrence Wright notes that FBI counterterrorism agents, infuriated at the CIA’s failure to fully share information about Mihdhar and Hazmi, speculated that “the agency was shielding Mihdhar and Hazmi because it hoped to recruit them”. The two al-Qaeda men, Wright notes, “must have seemed like attractive opportunities; however, once they entered the United States they were the province of the FBI…” Wright further observes that the CIA’s reticence to share its information was due to a fear “that prosecutions resulting from specific intelligence might compromise its relationship with foreign services”
When in the spring of 2002 the scenario of CIA’s domestic subcontracting to foreign intelligence was posed to the veteran CIA/NSA intelligence operative, with whom I spoke extensively, the operative didn’t reject it out of hand. The operative noted that in recent years the CIA’s human intelligence assets, known as “humint” – spooks on the ground who conduct surveillances, make contacts, and infiltrate the enemy – had been “eviscerated” in favor of the NSA’s far less perilous “sigint”, or signals intelligence program, the remote interception of electronic communications. As a result, “U.S. intelligence finds itself going back to sources that you may not necessarily like to go back to, but are required to”, the veteran intelligence operative said. “We don’t like the fact, but our humint structures are gone. Israeli intel’s humint is as strong as ever. If you have an intel gap, those gaps are not closed overnight. It takes years and years of diligent work, a high degree of security, talented and dedicated people, willing management and a steady hand. It is not a fun business, and it’s certainly not one without its dangers. If you lose that capability, well… organizations find themselves having to make a pact with the devil. The problem [in U.S. intel] is very great”.
If such an understanding did exist between CIA and Mossad with regard to al-Qaeda’s U.S. operatives, the complicity would explain a number of oddities: it would explain the CIA’s nearly incoherent, and perhaps purposely deceptive, reconstruction of events as to how Mihdhar and Hazmi joined the watch list; it might even explain the apparent brazenness of the Israeli New Jersey cell celebrating on the morning of 9/11 (protected under the CIA wing, they were free to behave as they pleased). It would also explain the assertion in one of the leading Israeli dailies, Yedioth Ahronoth, that in the months prior to 9/11, when the Israeli “art students” were being identified and rounded up, the CIA “actively promoted their expulsion”. The implication in the Yedioth Ahronoth article was that the CIA was simply being careless, not trying to spirit the Israelis safely out of the country. At this point we cannot be certain.
Israeli spying against the U.S. is of course hotly denied by both governments. In 2002, responding to my own questions about the “art students”, Israeli embassy spokesman Mark Regev issued a blanket denial. “Israel does not spy on the United States”, Regev told me. The pronouncements from officialdom are strictly pro forma, as it is no secret that spying by Israel on the United States has been wide-ranging and unabashed. A 1996 General Accounting Office report, for example, found that Israel “conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any U.S. ally”. More recently, a former intelligence official told the Los Angeles Times in 2004 that “[t]here is a huge, aggressive, ongoing set of Israeli activities directed against the United States”. It is also routine that Israeli spying is ignored or downplayed by the U.S. government (the case of convicted spy Jonathan Pollard, sentenced to life in prison in 1986, is a dramatic exception). According to the American Prospect, over the last 20 years at least six sealed indictments have been issued against individuals allegedly spying “on Israel’s behalf”, but the cases were resolved “through diplomatic and intelligence channels” rather than a public airing in the courts. Career Justice Department and intelligence officials who track Israeli espionage told the Prospect of “long-standing frustration among investigators and prosecutors who feel that cases that could have been made successfully against Israeli spies were never brought to trial, or that the investigations were shut down prematurely”.
The Questions That Await Answers
Remarkably, the Urban Moving Systems Israelis, when interrogated by the FBI, explained their motives for “celebration” on the New Jersey waterfront – a celebration that consisted of cheering, smiling, shooting film with still and video cameras and, according to the FBI, “high-fiving” – in the Machiavellian light of geopolitics. “Their explanation of why they were happy”, FBI spokesman Margolin told me, “was that the United States would now have to commit itself to fighting [Middle East] terrorism, that Americans would have an understanding and empathy for Israel’s circumstances, and that the attacks were ultimately a good thing for Israel”. When reporters on the morning of 9/11 asked former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the effect the attacks would have on IsraeliAmerican relations, he responded with a similar gut analysis: “It’s very good”, he remarked. Then he amended the statement: “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy [for Israel from Americans]”.
What is perhaps most damning is that the Israelis’ celebration on the New Jersey waterfront occurred in the first sixteen minutes after the initial crash, when no one was aware this was a terrorist attack. In other words, from the time the first plane hit the north tower, at 8:46 a.m., to the time the second plane hit the south tower, at 9:02 a.m., the overwhelming assumption of news outlets and government officials was that the plane’s impact was simply a terrible accident. It was only after the second plane hit that suspicions were aroused. Yet if the men were cheering for political reasons, as they reportedly told the FBI, they obviously believed they were witnessing a terrorist act, and not an accident.
After returning safely to Israel in the late autumn of 2001, three of the five New Jersey Israelis spoke on a national talk show that winter. Oded Ellner, who on the afternoon of September 11 had, like his compatriots, protested to arresting officer Sgt. Dennis Rivelli that “we’re Israeli”, admitted to the interviewer: “We are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event”. By his own admission, then, Ellner stood on the New Jersey waterfront documenting with film and video a terrorist act before anyone knew it was a terrorist act.
One obvious question among many comes to mind: If these men were trained as professional spies, why did they exhibit such outright oafishness at the moment of truth on the waterfront? The ABC network source close to the 20/20 report noted one of the more disturbing explanations proffered by counterintelligence investigators at the FBI: “The Israelis felt that in some way their intelligence had worked out – i.e., they were celebrating their own acumen and ability as intelligence agents”.
The questions abound: Did the Urban Moving Systems Israelis, ready to “document the event”, arrive at the waterfront before the first plane came in from the north? And if they arrived right after, why did they believe it was a terrorist attack? What about the strange tale of the “art students”? Could they have been mere hustlers, as they claimed, who ended up repeatedly crossing paths with federal agents and living next door to most of the 9/11 hijackers by coincidence? Did the Israeli authorities find out more about the impending attacks than they shared with their U.S. counterparts? Or did the Israeli spies on the ground only intercept vague chatter that, in their view, did not warrant breaking cover to share the information? On the other hand, did the U.S. government receive more advance information about the attacks from Israeli authorities than it is willing to admit? What about the 9/11 Commission’s eliding of reported Israeli warnings that may have led to the watchlisting of Mihdhar and Hazmi? Were the Israeli warnings purposely washed from the historical record? Did the CIA know more about pre-9/11 Israeli spying than it has admitted?
The unfortunate fact is that the truth may never be uncovered, not by officialdom, and certainly not by a passive press. James Bamford, who in a coup of reporting during the 1980s revealed the inner workings of the NSA in The Puzzle Palace, points to the “key problem”: “The Israelis were all sent out of the country”, he says. “There’s no nexus left. The FBI just can’t go knocking on doors in Israel. They need to work with the State Department. They need letters rogatory, where you ask a government of a foreign country to get answers from citizens in that country”. The Israeli government will not likely comply.
So any investigation “is now that much more complicated”, says Bamford. He recalls a story he produced for ABC News concerning two murder suspects – U.S. citizens – who fled to Israel and fought extradition for ten years. “The Israelis did nothing about it until I went to Israel, knocking on doors, and finally found the two suspects. I think it’d be a great idea to go over and knock on their doors”, says Bamford.
The suspects are gone. The trail is cold. Yet many of the key facts and promising leads sit freely on the web, in the archives, safe in the news-morgues at 20/20 and The Forward and Die Zeit. An investigator close to the matter says it reminds him of the Antonioni film “Blow-Up”, a movie about a photographer who discovers the evidence of a covered-up murder hidden before his very eyes in the frame of an enlarged photograph. It’s a mystery that no one appears eager to solve.
Christopher Ketcham is a freelance journalist who has written for Harper’s and Salon. Many of his writings, including his groundbreaking story on the Israeli art students, can be read on his website: christopherketcham.com, as can the Shea memo.
September 8, 2021 Posted by aletho | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular | 9/11, CIA, FBI, Israel, United States | 4 Comments
Iran’s Ahmadinejad Reveals Why Iran Doesn’t Need Nukes, Says World Should Know Truth About 9/11
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 24.06.2021
The veteran politician, who served as Iran’s president between 2005 and 2013, and as Tehran mayor and Ardabil province governor before that, attempted to take part in both the 2017 and 2021 presidential elections, but was barred from doing so by Iran’s powerful Guardian Council.
The world needs to know the truth about the 9/11 terror attacks, and Iran doesn’t need to pursue nuclear weapons because they cannot protect even superpowers from collapse, former President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said.
“Deciphering the events of 11 September, 2001 will be the key to an understanding of all political events and processes in the sphere of global security over the past 70 years, and this will pave the way for us all to a better world,” Ahmadinejad said, speaking to Russian media in a broad ranging interview published on Thursday.
“When the terrorist attack took place, I announced to the United Nations the need to create a consolidated investigative group to establish all the circumstances of the incident and to find the culprit, and said that the Americans themselves were investigating this incident, holding court themselves, deciding everything themselves and fighting wars in other countries on this basis, not allowing anyone to comment on what is happening,” the former president recalled.
“I remember at this time the United States was very angry with me. But all I said was that there was a need for an international investigation, so that the whole world could know who carried out these attacks, and what connections [the attackers] could have to US intelligence and the American security apparatus to be able to break through all defensive barriers and destroy two towers in the very heart of the American nation,” Ahmadinejad added.
According to the politician, the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, mounted in the aftermath of 9/11, were an attempt to change the situation in the world and the Middle East in Washington’s favour, and to hide “deep economic and social problems” plaguing the United States. Time has shown that neither war was a success, Ahmadinejad said, with both wars continuing to claim lives and forcing people to flee as their countries, while the states’ infrastructure collapses and their future remains uncertain.
No Need for Nukes
Commenting on Iran’s commitment not to pursue nuclear weapons, and recent attempts by the Biden administration to return to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement, Ahmadinejad said the Democratic president has failed to make any substantive changes to his predecessor’s policies, but that this was because US foreign policy is not controlled by presidents – who are only a small part of the decision-making process.
As for nuclear weapons, Ahmadinejad suggested that “today, nuclear weapons have no practical application, so all the costs of their creation are superfluous. I in principle consider the production and accumulation of weapons an inhuman act and am categorically opposed to it. If world powers reject hegemony and are not looking for disagreements and wars, why start an arms race? Why should the wealth of nations be spent on the production of weapons intended only for murder and not for prosperity?”
“In my first meeting with Mr. Putin at the UN in 2005, I asked him if nuclear weapons could have prevented the collapse of the Soviet Union. These weapons were highly developed, yes, but they did not stop the collapse of the USSR. Because weapons, in principle cannot improve human relations. Today, the capitalist world order led by America is in decline. Can American atomic bombs stop the collapse of US global hegemony? I don’t think there is a single wise person in the world who would say yes,” the Iranian politician added.
World Needs Fundamental Changes
Ahmadinejad expressed certainty that the current world order is unsustainable and is in need of “fundamental changes.”
“Over the past 100 years, it has spawned hundreds of wars, assassinations, arms races, broad class divisions, poverty and social constraints for nations. I believe that we must all join hands and build a new world – a world in which all people will be free and respected –and where justice is central. And I believe that the noble people of Russia can play a very important role in this process,” he stressed.
Candidacy Rejected
Ahmadinejad was barred from running in Iran’s presidential elections twice in a row, first in 2017 and then in the June 2021 vote, which was handily won by Chief Justice Ebrahim Raisi, a conservative with close ties to the clergy and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Ahmadinejad did not contest the decision to bar him, made by the Guardian Council – Iran’s powerful constitutional watchdog of six high-ranking Shiite clerics appointed by Khamenei and six lawyers chosen by parliament from nominations by the judiciary.
In the West, Ahmadinejad is best remembered for his war of words with the Bush administration over the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as his 2006 statement that Israel [sic] (the “Zionist regime” ) must “vanish from the page of history,” often misquoted as “wiped off the map,” which sparked outrage in Tel Aviv and conservatives in Washington. Also in 2006, CNN famously misquoted his statement that Iran has a “right to nuclear energy” as Iran’s “right to nuclear weapons,” with that scandal prompting Iran to boot the US cable news network’s journalists out of the country.
In 2007, Ahmadinejad stirred up anger among liberals during a trip to New York when he told students at Columbia University that gays and lesbians “don’t exist” in Iran.
Since completing his term as president in 2013, Ahmadinejad has occasionally popped up in the news cycle, especially while quoting the lyrics of well-known American rap artists, who he apparently vibes to, to make a political point. Last year, the politician’s use of the late Tupac Shakur’s “Pull the trigger kill a N**** he’s a hero” to refer to the death of Minnesota black man George Floyd got him in trouble online.
In his home country, Ahmadinejad is better known for his ascetic lifestyle, populist economic policies, campaigns against corruption, and programmes to improve Iran’s self-sufficiency in a range of areas, including defence. During his time in office, he advocated for a compromise between Western-style capitalism and socialism. Under him, Tehran was also able to form a strategic alliance with Venezuela – with that partnership remaining strong to this day.
June 24, 2021 Posted by aletho | Deception, Economics, False Flag Terrorism, Militarism | 9/11, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Middle East, United States | 1 Comment
9/11 Cover Up Director Appointed To Chair Covid Cover Up Group
Corbett • 04/23/2021
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Welcome to New World Next Week – the video series from Corbett Report and Media Monarchy that covers some of the most important developments in open source intelligence news. This week:
Watch on Archive / BitChute / Minds / Odysee / YouTube or Download the mp4
Story #1: Philip Zelikow, Former Exec. Dir. Of 9/11 Commission, To Chair Covid Commission
https://news.virginia.edu/content/qa-philip-zelikow-911-commission-leader-take-stock-covid-lessons
“Zelikow” Search On Corbett Report
https://www.corbettreport.com/?s=Zelikow
“Zelikow” Search On Media Monarchy
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Story #2: $74,000 NYPD Robot Dog Hits Streets Of Manhattan
https://www.fox5ny.com/news/74000-nypd-robot-dog-hits-streets-of-manhattan
Video: NYPD Robot Dog Hits Streets Of Manhattan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4hQ87u6S40
Robot Dog Enforces Social Distancing In Singapore Park (May 11, 2020)
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-52619568
Self-Disinfecting Grocery Delivery Robots Hit The Streets Of Singapore
Robotic Dog To Guide The Blind And Visually Impaired
https://theindependent.sg/robotic-dog-to-guide-the-blind-and-visually-impaired/
Giant, Armed Robots Loom Over Streets Of Rebel-Controlled Donetsk As Ukraine Tensions Rise
https://www.the-sun.com/news/2704419/armed-robots-loom-streets-rebel-controlled-donetsk/
Media Monarchy’s Trend Prediction For 2021: Scamdemic Paves The Way For Smart Gridification
https://mediamonarchy.com/nwnw432-video/
Story #3: Company Sells Sex Robot “Clones” Of Dead Partners Using 3D-Modeling
Dont Date Robots!
This Sex Doll Rants About How Despicable The Human Race Is
https://nypost.com/2021/04/20/this-sex-doll-rants-about-how-despicable-the-human-race-is/
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April 24, 2021 Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular, Video | 9/11, 9/11 Commission, Covid-19, United States | 2 Comments
The Big Whopper on Afghanistan
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | April 15, 2021
In December 2019, the Washington Post published an article detailing many of the lies that U.S. officials have issued throughout their entire war on Afghanistan. The article was based on “a confidential trove of government documents.”
Perhaps the biggest whopper though was the one emitted by President George W. Bush and that is now being repeated by President Biden — that the reason that Bush launched his war on Afghanistan was because the Taliban regime had knowingly “harbored” Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
That was a lie, a flagrant lie. Neither Bush nor any other U.S. official ever provided even a scintilla of evidence that the Taliban regime was somehow complicit in the 9/11 attacks.
The real reason that Bush launched his war was over the concept of extradition. Bush demanded that the Taliban regime deliver bin Laden into the custody of U.S. officials. However, Afghanistan and the U.S. did not have an extradition treaty. Therefore, the Afghan government was under no legal obligation to accede to Bush’s demand.
Nonetheless, the Taliban regime announced its willingness to deliver bin Laden to a neutral third party nation for trial. That’s because it feared, with some justification, that bin Laden would end up in the clutches of the U.S. national-security establishment, where he would be subjected to torture, indefinite detention, assassination, extra-judicial execution, or a kangaroo military tribunal.
The only condition that the Taliban imposed for doing this was that the U.S. provide evidence of bin Laden’s guilt, much as it would be required to do in a regular extradition proceeding.
Bush declined to do that. He made it clear that his extradition demand for bin Laden was unconditional. Afghanistan needed to comply with his extradition demand or else be invaded and regime-changed.
If U.S. officials had had evidence that the Taliban regime was complicit in the 9/11 attacks, does anyone think for a moment that they would have been jacking around with an extradition demand? Not on your life. They would have gone on the attack immediately. Moreover, it is clear that if the Taliban had complied with Bush’s unconditional extradition demand, there never would have been a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, which means that Afghanistan wasn’t guilty of anything except failing to accede to Bush’s extradition demand.
Thus, today, when Biden says that the decades-long war on Afghanistan has ensured that Afghanistan will never again serve as a “haven” for anti-American terrorists, he is being disingenuous because there was never any evidence that the Taliban regime was complicit in the 9/11 attacks in the first place.
April 16, 2021 Posted by aletho | False Flag Terrorism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular | 9/11, Afghanistan, United States | 3 Comments
Media Pseudo-Debates and the Silence of Leftist Critics
The Incompetent, Negligent, Mishandling, Miscalculating Elite Blunderers
By Edward J Curtin | March 19, 2021
You’ve heard of them, no doubt, the U.S. rulers who can’t rule too well and are always getting surprised by events or fed bad advice by their underlings. Their “mistakes” are always well intentioned. They stumble into wars through faulty intelligence. They drop the ball because of bureaucratic mix-ups. They miscalculate the perfidy of the elites whom allegedly they oppose while ushering them into the national coffers out of necessity since they are too big to fail. They never see the storm coming, even as they create it. Their incompetence is the retort to all those nut cases who conjure up conspiracy theories to explain their actions or lack thereof. They are innocent. Always innocent.
They and their media mouthpieces offer Americans, who are most eager to accept, what Lutheran pastor and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed at age thirty-nine by Hitler, called cheap grace: “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance…”
These incompetents are, in the immortal words of the New York newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, “The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight.”
Except they could and can.
They’ve actually shot a lot of people, here and abroad. It’s one of their specialties. But they mean well. They screw up sometimes, but they mean well. They care, even while they kill millions with their guns and bombs. But they have their followers.
As another dissident thirty-nine-year-old pastor, executed by the American state, Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
Mainstream Media Pseudo-Debates
The U.S. rulers have their defenders. Most are corporate mainstream journalists whose jobs are to defend the ruling elites of both political parties. They will criticize across the political divides depending on their organizations’ political leanings at the moment. But they will never attack the fundamentals of the oligarchic war system since they are part of it. Their jobs depend on it. So CNN and The New York Times will obsessively attack Trump while Fox News will do the same to Obama or Biden. This is a game.
These days such massive media conglomerates are seemingly starkly divided and basically serve as adjuncts of one political party or the other. They are essentially political propagandists for either the Democrats or the Republicans and have abandoned any pretense to be anything else. They speak to their respective audiences in self-enclosed vacuums. They promote the divide that runs down the middle of the USA, a divide they helped to create.
Some have argued that this radical division of the media turf is because of economic and business factors; that the media organizations and their “journalists” have seen this strategy as the path to greater profits. There is probably some truth in this. But it is a small part.
For all sides of the corporate media serve the same overarching political function: to divide and conquer the population; to set the so-called left against right; middle America against the east and west coasts; white against black; working class against middle-class; men against women; husbands against wives, etc. To keep people, who in reality should be allies, fighting with each other. It is a classic strategy of divide-and-conquer that is carried out by the mainstream media pursuant to their unstated mandate. It is not an accident and has been conducted with a vengeance in recent years.
And crucially, it is anchored in the false premise of the myth of left vs. right with a reasonable center somewhere between. Such a center has never existed. While left and right might once have been useful categories, they have long since outlived their usefulness. They now just serve to engender pseudo-debates.
Pseudo-debates are not new but they are highly effective. They are debates based on false premises. In this case, the premise is that the massive corporate media conglomerates are not part of the same system of control and containment of the population, but are genuine opponents in the battle for truth and democracy. Accept this premise and you have entered into endless debates leading nowhere. It is a classic method of intelligence agencies to sow uncertainty and confusion and to have people following Alice down the rabbit hole, tumbling and tumbling into an endless void as they argue continually about nothing.[1]
Dr. E. Martin Schotz has brilliantly explicated this trick in the case of the assassination of President Kennedy (“Certainly no honest person could ever accept the ‘single bullet theory’.”) where people are still debating a false mystery almost sixty years after the fact. He writes:
The lie is that there is a mystery to debate. And so we have pseudo-debates. Debates about meaningless disputes, based on assumptions which are obviously false… Perhaps many people think that engaging in pseudo-debate is a benign activity. That it simply means that people are debating something that is irrelevant. This is not the case. I say this because every debate rests on a premise to which the debaters must agree, or there is no debate. In the case of pseudo-debate the premise is a lie. So in the pseudo-debate we have the parties to the debate agreeing to purvey a lie to the public. And it is all the more malignant because it is subtle. The unsuspecting person who is witness to the pseudo-debate does not understand that he is being passed a lie. He is not even aware that he is being passed a premise. It is so subtle that the premise just passes into the person as if it were reality. This premise—that there is uncertainly to be resolved—seems so benign. It is as easy as drinking a glass of treated water. But the fact remains that there is no mystery except in the minds of those who are willing to drink this premise. The premise is a lie, and a society which agrees to drink such a lie ceases to perceive reality. This is what we mean by mass denial.[2]
The entire corporate media ideological spectrum operates under the umbrella of oligarchic control, something that is not new, just more egregious with every passing day. More in your face. The corporate media serve as the mouthpieces for those oligarchs, but they try to convince their separate audiences that this isn’t so. They give people enemies – false ones. Objects to hate.
But just like symptoms are not the disease, they give people a focus upon which to rivet their attention while the disease goes unattended. As with a drug addict, the taking of drugs is not the fundamental problem, although it becomes one and might kill you. The problem is why one takes drugs; what is it that is one feels needs to be tranquilized and silenced. Or, as the writer William Saroyan once flippantly said regarding the claim that smoking causes cancer: “You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke, not from the smoking itself.”
The corporate mainstream media are the drug that serves to hide the core truth of an oligarchic cancerous warfare state drunk on power and using propaganda to play both sides. Everyone has become pawns in their game.
A recent example serves to illustrate a method in their madness There is a new, ongoing Spotify podcast – “Renegades: Born in the USA” – featuring Barack Obama and the singer Bruce Springsteen in conversation. Two rebels – it’s of course ridiculous – but there it is. Two super rich celebrities stroking each other’s egos in an upper class setting. One a singer, who rose to prominence out of nowhere as the voice of the small-town beleaguered working class; the other, a mixed-race politician who rose to prominence out of nowhere from a family background redolent of the CIA. Two icons of popular and political culture crossing over with a smooth patina of mixed-arts bullshit telling listeners they we need to return to the good old days when political centrism served the great American ideal that they both share. People are supposed to take this conversation between “buddies” seriously, as the two sit mask-less with their feet seemingly touching at a time when people are told to wear masks and avoid close contact with those outside their households. As Bruce strums his guitar, any half-way sentient person would realize he was being played, even while the meaning of the song was so twisted that he was enjoying it.
Left-wing Gatekeepers
Then, if we switch from the mainstream corporate media to alternative voices, especially prominent ones on the left, we notice something even stranger.
I think most readers would agree that the two seismic events of the last twenty years are the current COVID- 19 issue and the September 11, 2001 attacks. The latter, not only because of all the victims that died that day, but for how it led to so much death and destruction around the world, the endless war on terror, the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc., the ensuing loss of basic liberties and privacy via the Patriot Act, etc. The former for obvious current reasons of death and further loss of basic liberties under the lockdowns as governments throughout the world institute unprecedented measures of control, etc. Clearly these two events stand out over the decades. They bookend twenty years of massive U.S. war crimes, the growth of the national security complex, an obscene increase in wealth for the wealthiest, and the loss of privacy and civil liberties for all.
And as everyone knows, September 11th and COVID-19 have resulted in great controversies and much debate because of their serious implications and the obvious questions about the official story lines raised by many respectable writers and researchers of varying political perspectives. At the very least, one would expect that leftist/liberal critics of the so-called Deep State and the machinations of the elite’s wars and propaganda would have engaged in these discussions about these two seminal events or written analytic articles about them.
But for a core group of prominent left/liberal critics, these two subjects have been avoided like they are of no importance. No debates, no discussions, no analyses – simply silence, as if they didn’t happen and there was nothing to discuss. Cases closed: the government has spoken. Let us move on to more important matters.
But that is wrong. For example, in about a dozen closely reasoned books of his own and with other international researchers, David Ray Griffin has raised innumerable questions that show that the official September 11 story is full of holes. Canadian writer Graeme MacQueen has written a devastating exposé of the linked anthrax attacks that followed September 11, showing clearly that they were a U.S. government operation. I myself have raised significant questions about what I call the linguistic mind-control associated with the attacks in “Why I Don’t Speak of 9/11 Anymore.” The dissident literature is enormous.
A few of Griffin’s points are illustrative of the many anomalies in the official account. There are so many, and not just from Griffin but from other researchers, that I will mention just a few about the building collapses, what Griffin calls “miracles of science.” The contradictions about the hijackers are also voluminous.
Here are a few such scientific miracles:
The Twin Towers and WTC 7 were the only steel-framed high-rise buildings ever to come down without explosives or incendiaries. The Twin Towers, each of which had 287 steel columns, were brought down solely by a combination of airplane strikes and jet-fuel fires. WTC 7 was not even hit by a plane, so it was the first steel-framed high-rise to be brought down solely by ordinary building fires. These World Trade Center buildings also came down in free fall – the Twin Towers in virtual free fall, WTC 7 in absolute free fall – for over two seconds. Although the collapses of the of the WTC buildings were not aided by explosives, the collapses imitated the kinds of implosions that can be induced only by demolition companies. In the case of WTC 7, the structure came down symmetrically (straight down, with an almost perfectly horizontal roofline), which meant that all 82 of the steel support columns had to fall simultaneously, although the building’s fires had a very asymmetrical pattern. The South Tower’s upper 30-floor block changed its angular momentum in midair. This 30-floor block then disintegrated in midair.
I could go on and on with examples. The simple point is that there are so many absurdities in the official story that to ignore them is an act of intellectual and moral betrayal. Anyone who has closely studied the government’s 9/11 Commission Report knows it is highly fictional.
The same is true for dissenting voices on the COVID-19 issue. Three publications in particular have published an enormous amount of well-reasoned critiques of the official version of the COVID-19 narrative: Global Research, Off-Guardian, and Children’s Health Defense. All present many articles by serious writers who raise innumerable questions and make irrefutable points about this matter.
And again, the point is not simple agreement with the dissenters’ arguments, but the need to engage their critiques. Here too the silence is resounding, for it says “we buy the official account.”
Consider these few:
The man who invented the test used to determine the so-called COVID positive test results, the Nobel Prize winning chemist, Kary Mullis, has said that the test cannot do that, it is not a diagnostic test, and therefore all the test results are meaningless. Additionally, there is serious doubt that the virus called SARS-CoV-2 causes a disease called COVID 19 since there is no evidence that the virus has ever been isolated. Assuming for argument’s sake, however, that the PCR test can detect a specific virus, even Anthony Fauci himself, and the World Health Organization (one hour after Biden was sworn into office), have both said that the PCR test in order to have any accuracy must be performed at cycles below 35 thresholds while for a year those tests have been done at thresholds much higher, resulting in vast numbers of false positives. Cycle thresholds are the level at which the PCR test is said to detect a sample of the COVID-19 virus.
Furthermore, eminent voices such as Michel Chossudovsky and Peter Koenig at Global Research, Robert Kennedy, Jr. at Children’s Health Defense, and Catte Black and Kit Knightly at Off-Guardian have for a long time been vociferously objecting to the official narrative with a vast amount of additional analyses involving the consequences of the wide-spread lockdowns. Such dissidents have had to fight against an organized campaign of censorship that should raise the alarm for anyone who cares about truth.
For leftists who remain silent on these fundamental issues, I can assure them that these critiques of the official explanations of September 11, 2001 and COVID-19 are not right-wing conspiracies but are the work of leftists digging deep for truth.
It is therefore more than odd that certain left/liberal writers completely avoid these issues. One must assume, therefore, that they accept the official explanations for these events, just as this coterie of leftist/liberal critics dismiss the voluminous and detailed critiques of the Warren Commission and the assassination of President Kennedy. From their silence one can assume that these matters are of no importance because the authorities have given us the truth.
One such deceased left-wing writer, who can stand in for the group of living writers I allude to, was the well-known and often brilliant journalist Alexander Cockburn, the founder of Counterpunch Magazine. In Cockburn’s case, however, and to his credit even though he had no idea what he was talking about regarding September 11, 2001 and the JFK assassination, he did not remain silent but expressed his bile in ways he thought piercing but which made him appear quite ignorant. Cockburn had a sharp tongue and liked to ridicule anyone who disagreed with him. He excoriated all who questioned the JFK assassination or September 11 as “conspiracy nuts,” “lunatics” involved with “kookery.”
Echoing the CIA’s conspiracy meme, his name calling was offensive and his ignorance of these matters extraordinary. But he was a star leftist, an untouchable. Few wished to criticize him. He started with the assumption that government stupidity, incompetence, and screw-ups allow these terrible events to happen, and then without a shred of evidence, concluded that is why they happened. All evidence and logic to the contrary, he derisively dismissed as the work of fools. Only Cockburn and a government that admits mistakes were made were right. His arguments on these matters were pseudo-debates based on a premises he conjured out of thin air.
He was a master incompetent of the incompetence theory, one that many prominent leftists follow today, such as a recent passing comment by one of them on the COVID-19 matter as a mishandling by the ruling elite. The implicit assumption being that the basic government and mainstream media tale is correct and all would be far better if the Trump administration hadn’t screwed up. Nothing further is forthcoming or necessary. Let us proceed on the assumption that the official account is true and that the government’s inept response is the problem. Failure of leadership. Government negligence. Incompetence.
And anyone who even harbors a suspicion that there may be more to the story is engaging in conspiratorial thinking. Of course this is the same response given to those who for twenty years have researched and questioned the government’s account of September 11, 2001. The 9/11 omission story. The fictional account that will dominate the news as the twentieth anniversary approaches this September. Will any of those liberal/leftists who have remained silent all these years let it pass as truth? I suspect so but hope not.
The Need for Dialogue
So we have pseudo debates on one hand and silence on the other when what is required is not self-censorship but open critical dialogue on these fundamental matters. “There comes a time when silence is betrayal,” said Martin Luther King from the pulpit of Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 when he condemned the Vietnam War and broke his own silence in opposition to many of his advisers. A year later to the day, like JFK, he was murdered by the warfare state he condemned. Like Senator Robert Kennedy two months later. They were killed by very competent people.
Dr. Martin E. Schotz wrote twenty-six years ago in History Will Not Absolve US that those he had in mind for their defense of the Warren Commission were “such individuals as Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, the editors of The Nation magazine, and, if everyone remembers, I.F. Stone as well. I think the positions of these individuals are very important because in their surprising (to us) dishonesty and willingness to cooperate with the warfare state in covering up the crime, there is obviously something to be learned.”
Yes, there is. It is time for all people of good will to stop finding excuses for the ruling elites, whether through incompetence theories or the silent refusal to publicly engage the government and its critics on the most important issues of our time – September 11, 2001 and COVID-19. Those Schotz names above are heroes for many on the liberal/left today who follow in their stead. It’s as though they have found it necessary to mimic their teachers’ lessons. Better logic would have them analyzing the premises of September 11 and COVID-19. Start with the basics. Be explicit. Tell us why you are silent.
It’s time to graduate from this school of denial.
[1] https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/HWNAU/letterToVJS.html#partIa
[2] https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/FalseMystery/COPA1998EMS.html#s2
March 19, 2021 Posted by aletho | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular | 9/11, Covid-19 | Leave a comment
9/11 and WTC Building 7: “Good Science” vs “Bad Science” and Propaganda: A Review of “Seven”
Dr Piers Robinson | OffGuardian | January 2, 2021
Among the many controversies surrounding the events of 9/11 one of the most prominent has been the question of how, many hours after the collapse of the Twin Towers, the 47-storey WTC7 building suffered a total collapse, all in a matter of seconds.
The persistence of this controversy is hardly surprising. WTC 7 was not hit by an airplane, it had suffered from only a few isolated office fires whilst multiple sources on the day were foretelling the collapse of the building, even though in history no steel-framed skyscraper had ever been brought down by fire alone.
Questions were hardly mitigated by the remarkable length of time it took NIST (the National Institute for Standards in Technology) to publish their investigation of the collapse nor their eye-brow raising conclusion.
And prior to this the 9/11 Commission Report had entirely ignored WTC 7.
The belated NIST investigation concluded that isolated office fires had caused thermal expansion leading to the failure of a single column and then, extraordinarily, an immediate cascading collapse of all columns in the building.
This then brought the building down symmetrically, in a manner consistent with controlled demolition, in under 12 seconds.
To many this did not appear to be a particularly persuasive analysis, and certainly not for the grouping of engineers and architects (AE 9/11) who had been questioning for some time the initiation and behaviour of the building collapses on 9/11.
Indeed, so dissatisfied were the architects and engineers that they funded an independent scientific study in order to rigorously evaluate NIST’s ‘completely new’ theory of thermal expansion and progressive collapse.
Seven tells the story of this scientific study, focusing upon its lead researcher, Professor Leroy Hulsey from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who spent four years examining the WTC 7 collapse along with two engineering PhD students Feng Xiao and Zhili Quan.
The film is beautifully produced and directed by Dylan Avery, narrated by the well-known and much-loved actor Ed Asner, and is underpinned by a powerful music score by Johan Back Monell. It was produced by Richard Gage, Ted Walters and Kelly David from AE9/11.
Interviews with Professor Hulsey are skillfully interwoven with expert testimony from Roland Angle (civil engineer), Kamal Obeid (structural engineer), Scott Grainger (fire protection officer) and Tony Szamboti (mechanical engineer).
The integrity and expertise of these experts is juxtaposed with embarrassing silences from news anchors when members of the US public phone in to ask about Building 7 and the sheepish Shyam Sunder, lead investigator for the NIST study. At one point in the film, having introduced the matter of the corroded steel, retrieved by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) and reported by the New York Times as ‘perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation’, Sunder is heard awkwardly attempting to explain away its significance:
Er, there is, there is reference often made to a piece of steel from Building 7. There was no evidence that any of the residue in that steel, in that piece of steel, er had any, er, relationship to, er, an an, undue er fire event in the building … or any other kind of incendiary, incendiary device in the building.
The extreme temperatures needed to have corroded or melted the steel were many times higher than those identified by NIST as having occurred due to the isolated office fires. As with so many other aspects of the NIST investigation, evidence that did not fit a preordained conclusion was simply ignored. Scientific method and rigour was thrown to the wind.
Hulsey’s integrity and rigour stands in sharp contrast to NIST’s disgraceful and un-scientific conduct.
Seven carefully describes how Hulsey’s team systematically unpicked the flawed claims advanced by NIST, including demonstrably inaccurate calculations relating to their explanation that thermal expansion worked to move a girder off its seat, and implausible claims that the resulting failure of a single column (out of a total of 50 odd) could ever lead to a global collapse of the entire building at free fall speed.
Using two separate computer programs, Hulsey’s team explored how the building would have behaved according to NIST’s explanation and found that the NIST account was wrong.
When confronted with issues relating to their study, NIST simply responded with evasions and secrecy: they have refused to release their key data whilst specific errors identified in their study received curt responses signed off, not by an engineer, but by a NIST public relations staffer. Hulsey’s study, conversely, and all of its data and calculations, has been fully open to expert and public scrutiny.
After one year of public consultation (2019-2020), almost no substantive issues were identified and his reported was officially published by Alaska Fairbanks University. The Hulsey study conclusions are delivered with devastating effect. The final report states:
… the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.
This conclusion is based primarily upon the finding that the simultaneous failure of all core columns over 8 stories followed 1.3 seconds later by the simultaneous failure of all exterior columns over 8 stories produces almost exactly the behaviour observed in videos of the collapse, whereas no other sequence of failures produced the observed effect
Hulsey is more concise in the film:
All those interior columns came out at once, at once, the exteriors also a few seconds later came out at once, giving you free fall which comes down, straight down.
To its credit, Seven remains focused on the scientific question of why WTC 7 collapsed and, only at the very end, are the broader implications hinted at.
If the building was not brought down by office fires, something else caused it to come down. The events in New York and Washington D.C. on September 11 2001 led directly to a global ‘war on terror’ and multiple wars, with countless lives being destroyed and ruined, and the crumbling of basic civil rights and democracy in the west.
The film closes with Hulsey’s understated but powerful words:
I’m worried, I’m worried about this country right now. We just seem to be doing a lot of yelling and screaming and no hearing. No listening, maybe some hearing but no listening. So are we in a post 9/11? Yes we are. Does that mean just that is a problem? I think it’s bigger than that, I just don’t know where we are right now. It’s a bit troublesome.
Ultimately, Seven calmly and carefully tells a story of good scientists and professionals with integrity battling to establish an important truth through scientific rigour and objectivity. And that truth relates to one of the most important and consequential events of the 21st century whose ramifications are felt ever more powerfully today.
Hulsey’s study is likely to play an important role in some of the legal processes that are currently underway: The Lawyers’ Committee Grand Jury petition and lawsuit against the FBI, the petition to initiate a congressional investigation of the 2001 Anthrax attacks and the Campbell family petition to the UK courts.
But the struggle they have had is testament to how far Western institutions and public spheres have been corrupted in the service of power and become, to all intent and purpose, mediums of propaganda.
At an early stage two students, although keen, elected not to study with Hulsey’s team because of the controversial nature of the research; one prominent University blocked an attempt to discuss Hulsey’s findings; nefarious so-called ‘debunkers’ contacted members of Hulsey’s team and told them not to continue with their work. Hulsey himself speculates that fear of losing lucrative government funding streams has deterred debate among architectural and engineering firms.
The creation of a spiral of silence, fuelled by a compliant and lazy corporate media all too eager to childishly dismiss any questioning as ‘conspiracism’ or ‘conspiracy theory’, has meant that public discussion and debate has been subdued.
The conduct of NIST, more than anything else, highlights how respected scientific organizations have become corrupted.
These issues could not be more relevant today, in 2021, where we see similar processes at work suffocating open scientific debate regarding COVID-19 and obfuscating the very real political and economic agendas now being pushed through. Indeed, the parallels between 9/11 and COVID-19 are striking. And the processes are also seen with the ongoing OPCW scandal regarding alleged chemical weapon attacks in Syria in which rigorous science has been thwarted by political power.
But, as much as Seven serves to highlight how far the West’s Enlightenment tradition has been eclipsed by corruption and propaganda, it also serves as an example that not all hope is lost. ‘Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority’ and is achieved through the determined efforts of people with integrity and courage.
Academia needs more people like Professor Hulsey and so too does the world, never more so than today.
You can rent and buy Seven on multiple platforms, here.
Dr Piers Robinson is a co-director of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies and convenor of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media. He is an associated researcher with the Working Group on Propaganda and the 9/11 ‘Global War on Terror’. He writes here in a personal capacity.
January 7, 2021 Posted by aletho | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Film Review, Timeless or most popular | 9/11, United States | 2 Comments
David Chandler on ‘Seven’
OffGuardian | January 5, 2021
Widely-respected voice of the 9/11 Truth Movement, strong critic of the official accounts of the 9/11 collapses, David Chandler talks about ‘Seven’, the new documentary released by ae911truth.org, dealing with the recent findings of Dr. Leroy Hulsey of the University of Alaska Fairbanks relating to the likely cause of WTC7’s mysterious and unprecedented collapse.
In my presentation about WTC7 at the Toronto Hearings in 2011 I began with a story about the shortest proof of the Pythagorean Theorem by a 12th century Indian mathematician, Bhaskara. He simply drew a diagram and said, “Behold!”
I pointed out that with regard to WTC7 a detailed analysis was not needed to see the truth that the building underwent demolition. The clearest proof is to point at the building collapsing and say, “Behold!” I went on to show that the building entered actual freefall. I described this work as simply “proving that you are not crazy.”
Leroy Hulsey’s work takes this to another level. Not only can we see by the externally observable motion of the building that it was demolished, Hulsey and his team show that even with a detailed structural analysis of the building components there was no mechanism by which fire and gravity alone could produce the effects we can see on videotape.
Furthermore, Hulsey and his team document numerous places in the NIST analysis where they committed scientific fraud by misrepresenting the actual structure of the building in their computer model. Without these alterations, even the NIST model would not have initiated building collapse.
The Hulsey report was brought about by the incessant demands of the segment of the engineering profession that has been in denial of reality. As such, the real audience of “Seven,” and the Hulsey report itself, is the engineering community. Seven does a good job in communicating the issues as simply as possible, so the scientifically literate layman can follow the argument.
The bottom line is that the best argument for the demolition of WTC7 is a video showing the event, with the simple comment, “Behold!” For those who waver, showing the measurement of freefall will usually cause reluctant eyes to open. For those who have reinforced their biases with layers of “sciency” rationalization, Hulsey’s work blows those rationalizations out of the water. Good job, Leroy!
Everyone needs to watch Seven to see how strong our case really is.
*
You can rent and buy Seven on multiple platforms, here. View the Trailer below:
David S. Chandler has a BS in physics from Harvey Mudd College and an MS in mathematics from California Polytechnic University. He has taught physics, mathematics, and astronomy at the high school and college levels since 1972. He is now retired and living in Denver, Colorado.
Since about 2007 he has been active as a researcher with what he calls the “science wing” of the 9/11 Truth Movement. He is currently the Coordinator of Scientists for 9/11 Truth, and worked for several years with Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.
Destruction of the World Trade Center North Tower and Fundamental Physics. He has written a six-part serial essay posted at Medium.com, titled Free Fall.
David maintains a website in collaboration with several other scientific researchers at http://911speakout.org.
January 6, 2021 Posted by aletho | False Flag Terrorism, Film Review, Timeless or most popular, Video | 9/11 | 2 Comments
Review: Seven, AE911Truth’s new documentary about groundbreaking new study on WTC7
By Kevin Ryan | OffGuardian | December 29, 2020
The new film Seven (trailer above), directed by Dylan Avery, examines the story of the scientific study of World Trade Center building 7 (WTC 7) recently published by the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The study was led by structural engineering professor J. Leroy Hulsey and took nearly five years to complete. It evaluated the possibilities for destruction of WTC 7 using two versions of high-tech computer software that simulated the structural components of the building and the forces that acted upon it on September 11th.
After inputting worst case conditions, and painstakingly eliminating what didn’t happen, Hulsey and his team of engineers came to the following conclusions.
“The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that studied the collapse. The secondary conclusion of our study is that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.”
These peer-reviewed conclusions directly contradict the findings of the U.S. government’s final investigation into WTC 7 as reported by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Seven documents the journey of Professor Hulsey and his team from their introduction to the subject and the related evidence to the final publication of their report in March of this year. It is an interesting story and important for several reasons. First, it shows what an objective group of engineering science professionals will find if they look closely at the destruction of WTC 7. Additionally, it provides a great example of what one concerned citizen can do to make a great difference in shedding light on the truth of the events of September 11, 2001.
The concerned citizen, who was barely mentioned in the film, is John Thiel, a nurse anesthetist from Alaska. In 2010, Thiel began a 3-year process of looking for an engineer to conduct an honest scientific investigation into the destruction of WTC 7. Thiel was not a structural engineer, but he knew that the official reports on the destruction of that building were false and he wanted to do something about it. Ten years later, after contacting 150 engineers, finally finding and gaining Hulsey’s commitment to do it, and persuading Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth to get involved, Thiel’s persistence paid off.
Seven also features comments from some brave engineers who have spoken out in the past about WTC 7. This includes fire protection engineer Scott Grainger, structural engineer Kamal Obeid, civil engineer and AE911Truth board director Roland Angle, and mechanical engineer Tony Szamboti. All these men make powerful statements in the film about NIST’s failures and omission of evidence.
The film reviews much of the evidence and how it was treated by the initial ASCE/FEMA building performance study and by NIST. It discusses circumstantial evidence including the suspicious tenants of WTC 7 (e.g. the CIA, the Secret Service, the DOD, and the SEC) and foreknowledge about the collapse of the building. It reviews the inexplicable “predictions” of WTC 7’s collapse by media giants CNN and BBC, both of which reported the collapse before it actually happened.
However, the strength of the film is in exposing the viewer to scientific facts and evidence as described by credible experts like Hulsey, Angle, Grainger, Obeid, and Szamboti. This includes the samples of steel exhibiting intergranular melting and sulfidation that the New York Times originally called “the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation” but that were ignored in the NIST reports. It includes the fact that no tall building had ever collapse primarily from fire and that the fires in WTC 7 were ordinary and were fed by only 20-minutes of fire load in any given area. The film also highlights concerns about the lack of scientific integrity in NIST’s manipulation of model parameters like the coefficient of expansion of steel and the omission of shear studs on the WTC 7 floor assemblies.
The film is only 45 minutes long and focuses largely on the evidence related to Hulsey’s study. It does not include some facts and evidence about WTC 7 that have been pointed out in the past. For example, it does not detail NIST’s history of failed hypotheses, like the diesel fuel tank hypothesis or the claim that the design of the building contributed to the collapse. It also doesn’t mention that the new WTC 7 was completed in 2006, when NIST was stating it had no idea what happened to the first one.
In the film, Professor Hulsey comes across as very credible and driven by the desire for an objective approach that gives the public an understanding of what happened to WTC 7. His comments about building his study on a clear palate, using pure science, ring true. Avery tells Hulsey’s story simply, without engulfing the viewer in unanswered questions.
Overall, Seven is an excellent presentation for people with a scientific mindset. As John Thiel wrote to me, “Any engineer or scientist with a basic understanding of physics, who does not suffer from cognitive dissonance, should easily be convinced of the truth after watching this video.” I agree.
If people want to help reveal the truth about WTC 7, and therefore about 9/11, they should share this film with every scientist and engineer they know. It is available on multiple streaming platforms, including Amazon Prime, iTunes, Vudu, Google Play, and Microsoft. As a society, our understanding of the crimes of 9/11 continues to be crucial to our understanding of what is going on today.
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Seven is directed by Dylan Avery, released by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, and available to rent and buy from various platforms, here.
December 29, 2020 Posted by aletho | False Flag Terrorism, Film Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | 9/11, WTC-7 | 4 Comments
Interview 1603 – Lawyers’ Committee Anthrax Petition
Corbett • 12/01/2020
Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
David Meiswinkle and Mick Harrison of the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry join James to discuss their petition to Congress for a redress of grievances related to government misconduct in the investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks.
Watch on Archive / BitChute / LBRY / Minds / YouTube or Download the mp4
SHOW NOTES:
Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry
Interview 1383 – Lawyers Petition for 9/11 Grand Jury
Anthrax Petition Executive Summary
Lawyers’ Committee Anthrax Petition
Interview 1212 – From Anthrax to Iraq with Graeme MacQueen
Interview 864 – Dr. Meryl Nass Exposes the Anthrax Cover Up
Exhibit NAS NRC review of FBI anthrax science report 13098
U.S. Germ Warfare Research Pushes Treaty Limits
Episode 383 – COVID-911: From Homeland Security to Biosecurity
Episode 388 – False Flags and the Dawn of Bioterrorism
December 1, 2020 Posted by aletho | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Video | 9/11, United States | Leave a comment
Parallels Between 9/11 and Covid-19
DK1Ryan | September 16, 2020
Presentation for the 9/11 Truth Film Festival.
Thanks to the Northern California 9/11 Truth Alliance.
October 14, 2020 Posted by aletho | False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Video | 9/11, Covid-19 | 1 Comment
Why Aren’t Insurers 9/11 Truthers? – Questions For Corbett
Corbett • 09/08/2020
Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
As we approach the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 false flag, Leonard writes in to ask about the insurers who paid Silverstein and his cohorts over four and a half billion dollars as a result of those attacks. Why did the insurers never investigate the possibility of controlled demolition? Why did they pay out billions of dollars without calling the official 9/11 narrative into question? James investigates.
Watch on Archive / BitChute / LBRY / Minds.com / YouTube or Download the mp4
SHOW NOTES:
9/11 Trillions: Follow the Money
Insurers Agree to Pay Billions at Ground Zero
Shapiro admits Silverstein phoned insurers about demolishing WTC7
Silverstein says WTC7 redesign ready in April of 2000
World Trade Center owner suing airlines for billions for 9/11 attacks
World Trade Center owners’ bid to sue airlines for 9/11 attacks blocked
Airline defendants to pay $95 million in 9/11 settlement
Con Ed and Insurers Sue Port Authority Over 7 World Trade
Con Ed suit against Silverstein and Citigroup at 7 WTC dismissed
Silverstein cleared of blame for 7 World Trade’s fall on 9/11
10 Major Shareholders in Swiss Re (is actually one)
Meet The Billionaire Developer Who Rebuilt The World Trade Center To Heal New York After 9/11
The Bonds of August: Refinancing the Twin Towers on the eve of destruction
Insurers scramble to avoid 9/11-style coronavirus backlash
September 8, 2020 Posted by aletho | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Video | 9/11, United States | 3 Comments
9/11 Suspects (Full Documentary | 2016)
Corbett • 09/04/2020
Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Watch on Archive / BitChute / LBRY / Minds / YouTube
In 2016, The Corbett Report released the 9/11 Suspects series in individual installments. Now, as we approach the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 false flag, The Corbett Report is proud to re-release the documentary as a single upload. This release features updated visuals courtesy of video editor Broc West. Please spread the word about this important information.
CLICK HERE for the audio podcast version of this documentary.
TRANSCRIPT:
9/11 was a crime. This should not be a controversial statement, but given how 9/11 was framed as a terrorist attack or even an “act of war” from the very moment that it occurred, it somehow is. If we lived in a world of truth and justice, 9/11 would have been approached as a crime to be solved rather than an attack to be responded to.
Let’s imagine for a moment that we did live in such a world. If there were some crusading District Attorney who actually wanted to prosecute the crimes of 9/11, how would he begin? Where would he start to unravel a plot so immense, one involving so many layers of obfuscation and the active collusion of some of the most powerful members of the perennial ruling class of America, the deep state?
Like a prosecutor trying to bring down a mafia kingpin, it is unlikely that such an investigation would start by bringing the suspected mastermind of the plot to trial. Such a vast and intricate operation would be picked apart from the outside, starting with people on the periphery of the plot who could be forced to testify under oath and who could provide leads further up the ladder. As more and more of the picture was filled in, the case against the inner clique who ran the operation would begin to strengthen, and, gradually, more and more central figures could be brought to trial
We may not live in a world where such a criminal investigation is taking place, but we are trying the crimes of 9/11 in the court of public opinion. There are still untold millions who think of 9/11 truth as a fringe movement driven by rash speculation and unwarranted leaps of logic. So what if we “prosecuted” some of these peripheral figures—the ones who are demonstrably and provably involved in the events of that day or the cover up of those crimes—in that court of public opinion?
Over the course of The Corbett Report’s existence, I have looked at many figures who no doubt feature more prominently in the 9/11 plot itself from an operational standpoint: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Larry Silverstein, Dov Zakheim, Paul Bremer, Richard Armitage. Today we will look at some of the other suspects in that crime; not ringleaders or masterminds, not even people who were likely to know about the plot ahead of time. But those who helped cover up those crimes for the real perpetrators.
These are the stories of the 9/11 Suspects.
Skip to Rudy Giuliani / Christine Todd Whitman / Philip Zelikow / Robert Baer / Ralph Eberhart / Dancing Israelis
Suspect #1: Rudy Giuliani
After stepping down as mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani tried to launch himself as a national political leader on the back of the single defining event of his career.
In the end he failed miserably, with voters immediately seeing his ploy for what it was: base political pandering.
But what many do not realize is that Giuliani’s case is not just that of another ghoulish politician parading on the corpses of those who died on his watch for his own political gain.
On the day of 9/11, while the remains of the twin towers and WTC7 were still smoldering, one of Mayor Giuliani’s first concerns was clearing away the evidence from the crime scene.
RUDY GIULIANI: We were able to move 120 dump trucks out of the city last night, which will give you a sense of the work that was done overnight.
1st NY RESIDENT: It’s wild out here. They just keep coming look! It doesn’t stop. There’s more, I keep thinking it’s the end but it’s not.
(SOURCE: Donald Trump Commission on TERRORISM NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani = Criminal Destruction of Evidence WTC)
Despite reassurances that the rapid removal of the evidence from Ground Zero was important for “emergency access,” this process went far beyond merely clearing a path for rescue workers. As Erik Lawyer, founder of Firefighters for 9/11 Truth points out, the massive operation to haul away over 1.5 million tons of debris and to sell much of the steel to Chinese firm Baosteel at discount prices was not just an overzealous approach to clearing the area, but was itself a crime.
ERIK LAWYER: 9/11 was the greatest loss of life and property damage in U.S. fire history. This should of been the most protected, preserved, over-tested and thorough investigation of a crime scene in world history. Sadly it was not. What was it? Well, we know from their (NIST) admission the majority of the evidence was destroyed. Like Richard (Gage) said, (in) 22 years of experience I’ve seen a lot of crime scenes, I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.I was out at the site, I saw trucks leaving faster than anywhere I’ve ever seen but I accepted it at the time and for years I accepted it because it was a recovery and rescue operation and that’s normal to have something like going. Again, we’d never seen anything like it but that was expected.
What I didn’t know for years was what was going on behind the scenes was that evidence was being destroyed when it was shipped off. By their own admission, the NIST investigation of Tower 7 had no physical evidence. How do you investigate a crime when you’ve destroyed all the evidence? It doesn’t make sense.
They also admit that they refused to test for explosives or residue of thermite. Now this is what I’m going to go into real quickly is that there are national standards for for an investigation. That’s what all of us are asking fir. An investigation that follows national standards and holds people accountable.
(SOURCE: Fire Fighter Erik Lawyer Slams NIST And The 9/11 “Investigation“)
Needless to say, an investigation of the 9/11 crime scene following the national investigation standards has never been conducted and never will be as Giuliani oversaw the illegal destruction of the evidence itself.
To add insult to this injury, in 2003 New York City Medical Examiner Charles Hirsch revealed that in the mad scramble to get rid of the crime scene evidence, human remains from the World Trade Center had been left at the Fresh Kills landfill where the debris was sorted and the steel was sold. In 2007 Eric Beck, a senior supervisor of the recycling facility that sifted the debris, admitted that some of those human remains ended up in a mixture that was used to pave roads and fill potholes in New York City.
But as grotesque as such revelations are, they are not the most shocking part of Giuliani’s 9/11 story.
In the late 1990s the Mayor oversaw the creation of a state-of-the-art $13 million emergency command center to coordinate the city’s disaster recovery and response efforts. Located on the 23rd floor of World Trade Center Building 7, just across Vesey Street from the Twin Towers, the center—dubbed by local press at the time as “Giuliani’s bunker”—included reinforced, bulletproof, and bomb-resistant walls, its own air supply and water tank, beds, showers to accommodate 30 people, and three backup generators. It could be used to monitor all of New York’s emergency communications frequencies and was staffed 24 hours a day.
And yet, remarkably, on the morning of 9/11, neither Mayor Giuliani nor any other city personnel or police or fire department officials were in the bunker after the Twin Tower strikes.
BARRY JENNINGS: As I told you guys before it was very, very funny. I was on my way to work and the traffic was excellent, I received a call that a small Cessna had hit the World Trade Center. I was asked to go and man the Office of Emergency Management.
Upon arriving into the OEM EOC, we noticed that everybody was gone. I saw coffee that was on a desk, the smoke was still coming off the coffee. I saw half-eaten sandwiches.
So why wasn’t the Mayor and the city’s emergency personnel in the location that had been purpose built for just such an event? According to Giuliani, they had been told to evacuate because they had been given a warning that the Twin Towers were going to collapse. A warning that was evidently not passed on to any of the emergency personnel that were still working in the buildings.
RUDY GIULIANI: I went down to the scene and we setup headquarters at 75 Barkley Street, which was right there with the Police Commissioner, the Fire Commissioner, the head of Emergency Management and we were operating out of there when we we’re told that the World Trade Center was going to collapse.
And it did collapse before we could actually get out of the building. So we were trapped in the building for 10-15 minutes and finally found an exit, got out, walked North and took a lot of people with us.
(SOURCE: ABC Sept. 11, 2001 12:41 pm – 1:23 pm ABC 7, Washington, D.C.)
Giuliani in his own words has admitted that he was warned that the World Trade Center was going to collapse. This despite the fact that there was no possible way for this to be predicted in the first hour of the unfolding disaster. Even more incredibly, despite being given this warning, no effort was made to pass it on to the police, firefighters and other responders who were still working in and around the buildings.
When, precisely, was this warning given, and by whom? Why, despite acting on this warning himself, did Giuliani make no effort to pass the warning on to others?
Predictably, when confronted with these questions by activists during his 2008 presidential campaign, Giuliani merely smiled and denied that he had ever received such a warning.
SABRINA RIVERO: You reported to Peter Jennings that on 9/11 that you knew that the World Trade Center Towers were going to collapse. No steel structure has ever in history has ever collapsed due to a fire.
How come the people in the building weren’t notified and who else knew about this and how do you sleep at night?
RUDY GIULIANI: Ma’am, I didn’t know that the towers were going to collapse.
TOM FOTI: You reported it Peter Jennings. You indeed said that you were notified that the towers were going to collapse while you were inside. Not sure exactly where you were prior to, but you said it on ABC video with Peter Jennings in an interview, that you were aware that the towers were going to collapse in advance.
We’d like to know who told you the towers were going to collapse in advance, Sir?
We’d also like to know who else you told?
RUDY GIULIANI: Well the fact is that I didn’t realize that the towers would collapse. I never realized that.
(SOURCE: WeAreChange Confronts Giuliani on 9/11 Collapse Lies)
So where was the Mayor on 9/11? On Pier 92, which was already set up as a functional command center due to a full-scale emergency “drill” by FEMA that, by a remarkable coincidence, had been scheduled for the following day.
RUDY GIULIANI: . . . and we selected Pier 92 as our Command Center. The reason Pier 92 was selected as the Command Center was because on the next day, on September 12th, Pier 92 was going to have a drill. It had hundreds of people here from FEMA, from the Federal Government, from the State Emergency Management Office and they were getting ready for a drill for a bio-chemical attack. So that was going to be the place they were going to have the drill, the equipment was already there. So we were able to establish a Command Center there within 3 days that was 2 and a half to 3 times bigger than the Command Center that we had lost at 7 World Trade Center and it was from there that the rest of the search and rescue effort was completed.
(SOURCE: 9/11 Commission Hearings May 19, 2004)
Mayor Giuliani oversaw the illegal destruction of the 9/11 crime scene and is criminally liable for the deaths of hundreds of emergency workers for not passing on prior warnings about the collapses of the Twin Towers.
It is no wonder, then, that the Fire Department of New York so passionately detest Giuliani for his actions in disgracing their fallen brothers and covering up the 9/11 crime.
HAROLD A. SCHAITBERGER: Rudy Giuliani has used the horrible events of September 11th, 2001, to create a carefully crafted persona. But the fact is what Rudy portrays is not a full picture of the decisions made that led, in our view, to the unnecessary deaths of our FDNY members and the attempt to stop the dignified recovery of those lost.
The urban-legend of “America’s Mayor” needs to be balanced by the truth.
So what is the reward for Giuliani’s criminal actions on 9/11? An offer to become the head of the Department of Homeland Security in the event of a Trump presidency, of course.
This is the state of American politics, and this is precisely why a true investigation of what happened on 9/11 never has, and never will, be conducted by the US government itself.
Suspect #2: Christine Todd Whitman
The “dust lady” photo has become one of the iconic images of 9/11. The image of a woman, shocked and disoriented, completely covered in dust from the demolition of the Twin Towers, brings the nearly incomprehensible events of that day down to a human scale.
But of course the “dust lady” was not the only one to feel the effects of the blanket of dust that descended on Manhattan after the towers fell. In the hours, days, and weeks that followed, thousands upon thousands of victims, first responders, emergency personnel, clean up crews, and residents were subjected to the poisonous stew of asbestos, benzene, mercury, lead, cadmium and other particulates from which many are now dying.
CBS REPORTER: Dr. David Prezant, Chief Medical Officer with the New York Fire Department, spent 7 years examining more than 10,000 fire-fighters. Those who were at the World Trade Center site after 9/11 and those who weren’t.
DR. DAVID PERZANT: And we found an increase in all cancers, combined. A 19% increase in cancers compared to the non-exposed World Trade Center group.
(SOURCE: 9/11 first responders and cancer)
ABBY MARTIN: Talk about the most pressing medical issues facing 9/11 first responders right now.
JOHN FEAL: Cancer. In the beginning, in the first few years it was respiratory but now it’s cancers and this is just the first wave of cancers, the blood cancers, the leukemias, the organ cancers but in 5 or 10 more years you’re going to see the asbestos cancers. There will be another wave of cancers and like I tell everybody, this is a generation long issue and a generation long illness.
(SOURCE: 9/11 Cancers Killing First Responders | Think Tank)
KEN GEORGE: Every morning I wake up I gotta take 33 pills within the course of the day. At 47 years old I have lungs of an 80 year old man that would’ve been a smoker. People say you have to forget about 9/11 and I say how could I forget about 9/11 when every morning I gotta take this medication and walk around with an oxygen tank.
(SOURCE: NYC 9/11 Rescuers Experience Lingering Health Problem)
If the brave men and women who had rushed to the World Trade Center in the chaotic days after 9/11 to help with the search and rescue had done so knowing the risks they were facing, that would be one thing. But of course they did not. They had been given false assurances by Christine Todd Whitman, the EPA administrator who assured the public just days into the clean up that the air was safe to breathe.
CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN: We know asbestos was in there, was in those buildings. Lead is in the those buildings. There are the VOC’s [Volatile Organic Compounds], however, the concentrations are such that they don’t pose a heath hazard.
As the weeks and months dragged on, Whitman, the EPA and its officials made statement after statement after statement reaffirming that contaminant levels were “low or non-existent” and that the air quality in Manhattan posed “no public health concern.”
We now know that these reassurances were outright lies. On September 18th, the very same day that Whitman and the EPA were encouraging New Yorkers to return to work, the agency detected sulfur dioxide levels in the air so high that “according to one industrial hygienist, they exceeded the EPA’s standard for a classification of ‘hazardous.’” By that time, first responders were already reporting a range of health problems, including coughing, wheezing, eye irritation and headaches.
The evidence continued to pour in that there were serious health concerns for those in and around Manhattan, but the information was suppressed almost as quickly as it was discovered. When a local lab tested dust samples from near the WTC site and found dangerous concentrations of fiberglass and asbestos, the New York State Department of Health warned local labs that they would lose their licenses if they processed any more “independent sampling.” When US Geological Survey scientists began performing tests on their own dust samples, they were shocked at the “alphabet soup of heavy metals” they found in it. They forwarded this information to the EPA, but the agency continued to assure the public that there was no evidence of long term health risks.
The drama continued to unfold as information poured in about benzene, lead and other environmental toxins. Yet on September 18th the EPA specifically advised the public against wearing respirators outside the World Trade Center restricted area. Then, just two weeks later, the agency distributed respirators to their own staffers at the EPA’s Region 2 building on Broadway Street.
As scientists, industrial hygenists, and even other government officials began to accuse the EPA of covering up the true extent of the problem in New York, the agency continued with its dogged assertion that the air was safe to breathe.
It wasn’t until 2003 that the EPA’s own Inspector General revealed that the White House had been editing the agency’s press releases all along, finding that “the White House Council on Environmental Quality influenced, through the collaboration process, the information that EPA communicated to the public through its early press releases when it convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones.”
When new documents were released to the public in 2011 on the eve of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, it was discovered that this editing was even worse than originally feared.
ANTHONY DePALMA: There were clear warnings. Specifically on Water Street, which for those people in this area know is not far from Wall Street, that showed that the levels of contaminates in the air was too high people to go back. That (warning) was removed which was bad enough and then replaced with a recommendation that people go back to work. They were urged to go back. Even thought the early samples were showing that there were high-levels of contaminates.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And you point out also that in many cases they (EPA) were telling people that is was safe before they had even finished conducting initial tests.
ANTHONY DePALMA: In one email exchange that happens on the 13th (of September), so it’s just a day and a half later, the people in Washington at the White House Council on Environmental Quality are telling the people up here, “Hey, Christine Whitman is coming up. She’s going to talk to reporters because all of the results so far have been so positive.”
Well, all of the results so far showed almost nothing because there were almost no results and yet they were committed to this message of reassurance despite the facts. And that’s not the way it should happen.
(SOURCE: 9/11 Debris Linked to Cancer, Details Emerge on How Officials Downplayed Ground Zero Dangers)
Outraged at the fact that they had been lied to and their lives put at risk, residents and workers in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn sued Whitman and the EPA in 2004. In a 2006 ruling allowing the class action lawsuit to proceed, Judge Deborah A. Batts of Federal District Court in Manhattan excoriated Whitman, finding that her baseless assurances that the air was safe “increased, and may have in fact created, the danger” to people living and working in the area. Ruling that the EPA did, in fact, make “misleading statements of safety” about the air quality, Judge Batts said: “The allegations in this case of Whitman’s reassuring and misleading statements of safety after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks are without question conscience-shocking.”
Batts’ decision was overturned by a panel of judges in 2008, who ruled that misleading the public and contributing to the health problems and deaths of untold Ground Zero workers was not conscience shocking enough to override her immunity from prosecution as a federal agent.
If Whitman has a conscience at all, it is evidently not shocked by any of these accusations. She has not only never conceded guilt or even expressed sorrow for the ongoing sickness and deaths that her action helped bring about, she has repeatedly defended the actions of herself and the EPA in general.
CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN: Statements that EPA officials made after 9/11 were based on the judgement of experienced environmental and health professionals at the EPA, OSHA and the CDC, who had analyzed the test data that 13 different organizations and agencies were collecting in Lower Manhattan.
I do not recall any EPA scientist or experts responsible for viewing this data ever advising me that the test data from Lower Manhattan showed that the air or water proposed long-term health risks for the general public.
Whitman’s lies are not just those of another self-serving politician looking to save their job or stay out of jail. They are the lies of someone who has contributed to the deteriorating health and even the death of thousands of innocent men and women.
For the victims of Christine Todd Whitman, the EPA, the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and all of the other agencies and officers who lied to the public about the health risks in New York, 9/11 is not a single day of horror that occurred a decade and a half ago. It is a slowly unfolding nightmare, one that every day brings them one step closer to their grave.
The “dust lady” is one of the icons of the tragedy of that day. Should it be any surprise, then, that she, too, was ravaged by 9/11 related diseases and ultimately died of cancer last year?
She was not the first person to die from the aftermath of 9/11. And, thanks to Christine Todd Whitman and the liars at the EPA who have consigned untold thousands to a similar fate, she will not be the last.
DAVID MILLER: My name is David Miller. On September 11, 2001, along with hundreds of my fellow troops I went to Ground Zero. No one asked us. No orders were given. We went because our city, our country, our neighbors were under attack and we knew what to do, or at least we thought we did.
On September 13th we marched back in, in groups of twos and threes at first and then dozens until there must of been more than 200 of us. Carrying ropes, ladders, tools of every kind back into the smoke and the poison and rubble were we reached an intersection with hundreds of civilians cheering us on. Our uniforms were torn and soiled, our resolve was simple. To stay and dig as long as we had any hope to save anybody.
I want to tell you about how sick some of these brave men and women have become. I want to tell about how the Mayor refused to accept the fact that not dozens, not hundreds but many thousands of us were contaminated, sickened and poisoned by the most toxic combinations of building materials in the history of disaster relief and that for 5 terrible years he ignored that fact. 5 years of our family members watching us drop dead.
And every time Popular Mechanics calls the people of this movement, nuts, these propagandists—professional liars and tools who can not even by any stretch of the imagination be considered journalists—strike another nail into the coffin of another rescue worker
Suspect #3: Philip Zelikow
It took President Bush an extraordinary 441 days after 9/11 to establish a commission to investigate the events of September 11, 2001. And it was not just the case that Bush was slow in acting; he actively resisted any investigation for as long as he could, taking the extraordinary and unprecedented step of personally asking Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to limit Congress’ investigation into those events.
In the end, the commission was severely underfunded, severely rushed, and, as commission chairman, Thomas Kean, later admitted:
THOMAS KEAN: We think the (9/11) Commission in many ways was set up to fail.
(Source: C-SPAN: Thomas Kean Speaks at the National Press Club – September 11, 2006)
But the most unmistakable sign that Bush was only interested in appointing a cover up commission to “investigate” the largest attack on US soil in modern history was his initial choice for commission chairman.
PRESIDENT BUSH: Today I’m pleased to announce my choice for commission chairman: Dr. Henry Kissinger.
REPORTER: Dr. Kissinger, do you have any concerns about once the commission begins it work and fingers point to valuable allies, say Saudi Arabia for example, what policy implications could this have for the United States particularly at this delicate time?
HENRY KISSINGER: I have been given every assurance by the President that we should go where the facts lead us.
(Source: Henry Kissinger and the 9/11 Commission)
Not even the New York Times could believe that Henry Kissinger, the consummate Washington insider, could pretend to conduct an independent fact-finding investigation into 9/11. “It is tempting to wonder if the choice of Mr. Kissinger is not a clever maneuver by the White House to contain an investigation it long opposed,” The Times editorialized after the announcement.
Kissinger may have been prepared for such polite disagreement with his appointment. But he was not prepared to meet the 9/11 widows whose tireless efforts had forced the creation of the commission in the first place.
NARRATOR: Several family members approached Kissinger and requested a meeting at his office in New York. Prior to the meeting Kristen Breitweiser conducted a thorough investigation of Kissinger’s potential conflicts of interest.
PATTY CASAZZA: Probably much to the chagrin of some of the people in the room, Lorie (Van Auken) asked some very poignant questions. “Would you have any Saudi-Amercian clients that you would like to tell us about?” and he was very uncomfortable kind of twisting and turning on the couch and then she asked, “whether he had any clients by the name of Bin-Laden?” And he just about fell off his couch.
NEWS REPORTER: Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, stepped down from the position Friday.
MINDY KLEINBERG: We thought the meeting went well.
(Source: 9/11: Press For Truth)
Kissinger was dethroned and the commission went ahead under chairman Thomas Kean and vice chair Lee Hamilton. But while Kissinger’s appointment and resignation received all the attention, the White House was busy slipping another agent into the commission through the back door.
In January of 2003, just weeks after Kissinger stepped down, it was quietly announced that Philip D. Zelikow would take on the role of executive director. As executive director, Zelikow picked “the areas of investigation, the briefing materials, the topics for hearings, the witnesses, and the lines of questioning for witnesses.” In effect, this was the man in charge of running the investigation itself.
So who was Philip Zelikow? The commission’s press release announcing his position described him as “a man of high stature who has distinguished himself as an academician, lawyer, author and public servant.” Although they noted his position at the University of Virginia and his previous role as executive director for the National Commission on Federal Electoral Reform, curiously missing from this brief bio are the multiple conflicts of interest that show how the Bush administration essentially put one of its own in charge of investigating how the Bush administration “failed” on 9/11.
In 1995 he coauthored a book with Bush’s national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice.
He was part of the transition team that helped the Bush administration take over the White House from the Clinton administration.
He was even a member of Bush’s post-9/11 Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
But perhaps most incredibly, Zelikow actually authored the Bush administration’s 2002 “National Security Strategy” that outlined the preemptive war doctrine that would be used against Iraq. This, however, is something that not even 9/11 commissioners Kean or Hamilton themselves knew at the time the commission was formed.
PHILIP SHENON: (Philip) Zelikow was the author of a very important document issued by the White House in September 2002 that really turned military doctrine on it’s head and said that the United States could become involved in preemptive war, preemptive defense. That we could attack a nation that didn’t pose an immediate military threat to this country. And obviously in September of 2002 it sure appeared that that document was being written with one target in mind: Iraq.
Now as I say, the author of the document at the time was anonymous. We didn’t know that Philip Zelikow had written this thing and that becomes known I think widely on this day, if only in the final months of the 9/11 Commission investigation and it appeared to pose yet another conflict of interest for Zelikow.
MICHAEL DUFFY: Just to be clear, the pre-emptive doctrine comes out in September of 2002. The Commission is created formally in . . .
SHENON: December 2002.
DUFFY: . . . and do Kean and Hamilton, when they hire Zelikow, are they aware of his role as the author of the preemptive doctrine?
SHENON: I don’t believe so.
These conflicts of interest were not merely theoretical. After the victims’ family members discovered Zelikow’s links to the Bush administration, he was forced to recuse himself from the proceedings of the commission (which he himself was directing) that had to do with the Bush White House transition or the National Security Council.
Hearing of Zelikow’s appointment, former counter terrorism czar Richard Clarke (who Zelikow helped to demote during the Bush transition), remarked that “The fix is in,” wondering aloud: “Could anyone have a more obvious conflict of interest than Zelikow?”
Key staffers and even one of the commissioners threatened to quit the commission altogether when learning of Zelikow’s history.
When the 9/11 victims’ family members discovered Zelikow’s links, they protested his appointment. But unlike with Kissinger, this time their concerns were dismissed and Zelikow plowed ahead.
As even Zelikow himself admits, his ties to the very figures he was supposedly investigating are a legitimate concern, and any real investigation of the 9/11 cover up would begin with him.
PHILIP ZELIKOW: There’s a whole welter of conspiracy theories about 9/11 floating around the internet, on videocasettes. There’s a whole cottage industry in this, which if you haven’t read much about it then you’re a fortunate person. I get a lot of this. I actually figure very largely in a number of key conspiracy theories. [Laughter]
No, to be fair, I worked with Condi Rice, right? I worked with her in the administration of Bush 41, so I guess I could be read as a plausible henchman executing a cover up. And it’s a legitimate concern, especially if I hadn’t had 81 other staffers keeping their eagle eye on me.
(Source: Road to 9/11 : and where we are today)
Conveniently left out of Zelikow’s story about the “81 staffers” keeping their eye on his decisions is that they were staffers who were hired by him and under his complete control. In fact, Zelikow took over the hiring of the commission staff and even stopped staffers from communicating directly with the commissioners themselves. In the first few months, the 9/11 commissioners themselves rarely even visited the commission because Zelikow denied them their own offices or the ability to hire their own staffers.
The most remarkable example of Zelikow’s dictatorial control came in March 2003, just three months into the commission’s 16-month investigation began. It was at that time, before the commission had even convened a single hearing, that Zelikow, along with long-time associate and commission consultant Ernest May, co-wrote a complete outline of the final report.
DAVID RAY GRIFFIN: Before the staff even had its first meeting, Zelikow had written, along with his former professor, Ernest May, a detailed outline of the commission’s report, complete, as Shenon put it, with chapter headings, sub-headings, and sub-sub-headings. When Kean and Hamilton were later shown this outline they worried that it would be seen as evidence that the report’s outcome had been predetermined, so the three of them decided to keep it a secret from the rest of the staff.
When the staff did finally learn about this outline a year later they were alarmed. Some of them circulated a parody entitled ‘The Warren Commission Report: Preemptive Outline.’ One of its chapter headings read: ‘Single Bullet: We Haven’t Seen the Evidence Yet, But Really, We’re Sure.’ The implication was that the crucial chapter in the Zelikow-May outline could have been ‘Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda: We Haven’t Seen the Evidence Yet, But Really, We’re Sure.’
(Source: The Toronto Hearings on 9/11 Uncut – David Ray Griffin – Day 1)
So what exactly did Zelikow do as executive director?
He allowed information in the commission’s final report derived from illegal CIA torture sessions, despite not having access to the evidence of those sessions themselves (which were later illegally destroyed). This included the testimony of alleged “9/11 mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who was waterboarded 183 times in a single month, whose children were kidnapped by the CIA, who was told that his children were going to be tortured with insects, and who eventually confessed to a whole series of plots, including bombing a bank that didn’t exist at the time he was arrested. More than one quarter of the footnotes in the final commission report source from this torture testimony, and as Zelikow himself admitted, “quite a bit, if not most” of the commission’s information on the 9/11 plot itself came from this testimony.
Zelikow denied interviews and documents to staffers investigating the Saudi connection to the attacks, eventually firing one of them and removing the text of their investigation from the final report.
He personally rewrote a commission staff statement to suggest a systematic link between Al Qaeda and Iraq before 9/11, outraging the authors of the original statement.
He worked behind his own staffer’s back to stop them from serving the Pentagon a subpoena to answer about information NORAD was withholding from the commission.
He sat on a proposal to open a criminal investigation into FAA and military officials who lied to the commission for months, and then forwarded that proposal not to the Justice Department, who could have brought criminal charges, but to the Inspector General, who could not.
And he covered up information on Able Danger, a military intelligence team that had identified several of the alleged 9/11 hijackers in the country before 9/11.
Col. ANTHONY SHAFFER: After the initial disclosure, Dr. Zelikow came to me at the end of the meeting, gave me his card and said: “What you said today is critically important. Very important. Please come see me when you return to Washington, D.C.”
I returned to Washington, D.C., January 2004, call in, they say “We want to see you, stand by.” Nothing happens.
A week goes by. I call again, they say: “We don’t need you to come in. We have all the information on Able Danger we need, thank you anyway.” And that was where it ended.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Alright, so the information that you told Dr. Zelikow in Afghanistan about the CIA interfering with your ability to provide actionable intelligence to the United States government–intelligence that might have helped them find out who caused, 9/11–you were not permitted to testify about it?
Col. ANTHONY SHAFFER: That’s correct.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: OK.
(Source: Judge Napolitano Exposing 9-11 Cover-Up With Col. Anthony Shaffer)
From the initial outline to the final report, Zelikow carefully guided the process, hiring and firing the staff, directing their research efforts, deciding on witnesses, scrubbing information, and shielding his former colleagues in the White House from criticism.
But perhaps more remarkable than the fact that “the fix was in” from the moment he took over the commission and began working on the predictive outline of the final report, is that he had in fact written about 9/11 and its eventual aftermath in 1998, three years before September 11th.
In an article entitled “Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger,” written for the Council on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs in November 1998, Zelikow and co-authors Ashton Carter and John Deutsche ask readers to imagine a catastrophic act of terrorism like the destruction of the World Trade Center.
Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either future terrorist attacks or U.S. counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently.
Zelikow’s amazing prediction becomes somewhat less remarkable when we learn his own self-described expertise in the creation and management of “public myth.” In a separate 1998 article on public myths, Zelikow identifies “generational” myths that are “formed by those pivotal events that become etched in the minds of those who have lived through them,” before noting that the current set of public myths, formed during the New Deal in 1933, are currently fading.
Convenient for Zelikow, then, that the “Pearl Harbor” event that would define the next “generational” myth, known as the “War on Terror,” would arrive just three years later, and that he would be in charge of the commission tasked with creating and managing the public perception of that myth.
Indeed, given his central role in the cover up of 9/11 and deflecting concern away from legitimate 9/11 suspects, any true investigation into the events of September 11th would involve a thorough interrogation of Philip D. Zelikow.
Suspect #4: Robert Baer
A 21 year veteran of the CIA, Robert Baer is billed as “one of America’s most elite intelligence case officers.” Having worked field assignments in Lebanon, Sudan, Morocco, Iraq and other international hotspots, he was praised by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh as “perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East.”
He has written multiple books based on his experiences with the agency. He has worked as a consultant on documentary and television projects. He regularly appears as a commentator on CNN and other news outlets, and he writes a regular column on intelligence matters for Time. George Clooney’s character in Syriana, Bob Barnes, is based on Baer and his experiences with the CIA.
“… and 90% of what’s left is in the Middle East. This is fight to the death.”
“I think we’ve got something that utilizes your … specific skills set.
“His moneys in a lot of dark corners.”
CLOONEY: “I want you to take him from his hotel, drug him, put him in the front of a car and run a truck into him at 50 miles an hour.”
“It’s good to have you back in town, Bob.”
(Source: ‘Syriana’ Trailer)
Robert Baer retired from the CIA in 1997 and received the agency’s Career Intelligence Medal the following year.
In short, he is a serious and well-respected career intelligence official.
All of this makes it particularly stunning that in 2008 he told a team of citizen journalists in Los Angeles that he knew a man who “cashed out” the day before 9/11.
JEREMY ROTHE-KUSHEL: …the last thing I want to leave you with is the National Reconnaissance Office was running a drill of a plane crashing into their building and you know they’re staffed by DoD and CIA…
ROBERT BAER: I know the guy that went into his broker in San Diego and said ‘cash me out, it’s going down tomorrow.’
JEREMY ROTHE-KUSHEL: Really?
ROBERT BAER: Yeah.
STEWART HOWE: That tells us something.
ROBERT BAER: What?
STEWART HOWE: That tells us something.
ROBERT BAER: Well his brother worked at the White House.
Given Robert Baer’s experience and training, it is difficult to comprehend just how significant the information that he just casually admits here really is. We are left with only two possibilities: either Baer is lying, or he has direct knowledge of someone “whose brother worked at the White House” who had foreknowledge of the 9/11 plot. There is no middle ground here.
The man Robert Baer claims to know is at least an accessory before the fact to the crimes of 9/11, if not an actual accomplice or co-conspirator in those crimes. By failing to report this information to the investigative authorities, Baer leaves himself open to being an accessory after the fact to those same crimes.
Title 18 Section 3 of the US Code defines the criteria for an “Accessory After the Fact” to a crime committed against the United States:
Whoever, knowing that an offense against the United States has been committed, receives, relieves, comforts or assists the offender in order to hinder or prevent his apprehension, trial or punishment, is an accessory after the fact.
Given the exceptionally grave nature of this admission and its repercussions, one would suppose that Baer has been questioned by other media and/or the FBI and made to discuss in detail precisely who it was who cashed out and how he knew about the 9/11 plot in advance. But one would be wrong. Since making this stunning admission to the cameras of We Are Change Los Angeles, no one has ever asked Baer for more information about the case.
So what does Robert Baer say about the possibility of a 9/11 inside job?
In 2007, writing about the CIA’s admission that they illegally destroyed the videotaped interrogations of high profile terror suspects, Baer said:
I myself have felt the pull of the conspiracy theorists — who believe that 9/11 was an inside job, somehow pulled off by the U.S. government. For the record, I don’t believe that the World Trade Center was brought down by our own explosives, or that a rocket, rather than an airliner, hit the Pentagon. I spent a career in the CIA trying to orchestrate plots, wasn’t all that good at it, and certainly couldn’t carry off 9/11. Nor could the real pros I had the pleasure to work with.
But just one year before he gave a very different answer to Thomas Hartmann on his radio show.
THOMAS HARTMANN: So are you personally of the opinion, obviously you can’t speak for the CIA or your previous activities with the agency, but are you of the opinion that there was an aspect of “inside job” to 9/11 within the U.S. Government?
ROBERT BAER: There’s that possibility. The evidence points at it.
HARTMANN: And why is not being investigated?
BAER: Why isn’t the WMD story being investigated? Why hasn’t anybody been held accountable for 9/11? I mean, we held people accountable after Pearl Harbor. So why has there been no change of command, why have there been no political repercussions? Why has there not been any sort of exposure on this? It really makes you wonder.
(Source: Robert Baer on 9/11)
So why is Robert Baer hiding the identity of a 9/11 accomplice or co-conspirator? And will the FBI be asking him for details of this story any time soon? Until the American public show some interest in this shocking admission, it is unlikely that anything will happen.
Suspect #5: Gen. Ralph Eberhart
According to the official story of September 11, 2001, four hijacked airliners flew wildly off course over the most sensitive airspace in the United States for 109 minutes without being intercepted by a single fighter jet. As Commander-in-Chief of the North American Aerospace Defense Command on 9/11, General Ralph Eberhart was in charge of the largest failure to defend North American airspace in history.
Rather than accepting blame for his command’s complete lack of response that morning, however, or even expressing regret about what had occurred, General Eberhart instead spent the rest of his career attempting to pin the blame for this failure squarely on the FAA.
GEN. EBERHART: You’ve read a lot over the last two and a half years about what NORAD did and did not do that morning and should have done in the years and months leading up to that attack. Ground truth is that NORAD was charged to support the FAA in the event of a hijacking. Our role was to respond to the request from FAA to get airborne, fly, shadow the hijacked airplane, say whether the hijacked airplane was following the instructions of the air traffic controller, of FAA, and in the terrible situation that that plane crashed, or that airplane exploded in mid-air, document that tragedy.
Although Eberhart’s version of events was cemented into place as the official story of 9/11 propounded by the 9/11 commission, they are in fact self-serving lies.
In Eberhart’s version of events, NORAD is completely subordinate to the FAA. In reality, however, NORAD is specifically tasked with dealing with such events itself, not waiting passively for FAA orders. NORAD’s own regulations for dealing with hijacked jets specifically state that “FAA Authorization for Interceptor Operations is not used for intercept and airborne surveillance of hijacked aircraft within the [continental United States].”
These standard operating procedures were not merely theoretical, or some obscure regulation that would have been unfamiliar to the four-star general in charge of defending American airspace. In the year 2000 alone, NORAD scrambled fighters in response to “unknowns”–pilots who didn’t file or diverted from flight plans or used the wrong frequency–129 times.
Perhaps even more remarkable, however, is that Eberhart and NORAD offered not one, not two, not three, but four separate timelines of their complete lack of response that morning. The first, offered by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers just two days after the attacks during his confirmation hearings in the Senate, claimed that not a single fighter was scrambled to intercept any of the airliners until after the incident at the Pentagon. One week later, NORAD released a partial timeline that indicated they had in fact received advance notification about three of the planes with as much as 20 minutes warning, more than enough time for the planes to have been intercepted. A third story emerged in May 2003; this time, NORAD was only contacted about Flight 175 at 9:05, 3 minutes after it crashed into the south tower. The official story, found in the 9/11 Commission’s final report, was that NORAD received no advance notice of any of the flights. Eberhart and the military were completely exonerated.
However, Eberhart had testified in October 2001 that NORAD had been notified about Flight 77 at 9:24 AM. The 9/11 Commission determined that this was a lie. Regardless of the truth or untruth of any of these accounts, the simple fact is that, according to the 9/11 Commission itself, Eberhart had lied to Congress, which is in fact a crime. By the 9/11 Commission’s own account, Eberhart should have been tried.
But Eberhart’s lies do not end there.
GEN. EBERHART: Many people will talk about that they knew that there was going to be an attack. They knew that people were going to take over an aircraft and fly it into a building. I can tell you that there was no credible intelligence at that time to go build a defense against that type of attack. Tragically, we were wrong. We were wrong.
(Source: Homeland Defense in the Global War on Terrorism)
Once again, Eberhart’s depiction of events is a self-serving and easily demonstrable lie.
Not only had NORAD envisioned such a scenario, they had been training for it extensively in the years leading up to 9/11. Between October 1998 and September 2001, NORAD had conducted 28 exercise events involving hijackings. At least five of those hijack scenarios involved “a suicide crash into a high-value target.” Furthermore, at least six of the exercises took place completely within American airspace, putting to rest the oft-heard excuse that NORAD wasn’t prepared for threats from within the US.
Another note that would be of interest to prosecutors looking at potential foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks pertains to Eberhart’s dual role as Commander-in-Chief of US Space Command, where he was responsible for setting something called the “Infocon threat level.” Established in March 1999, the Infocon threat level was designed as a measure of the threat to Defense Department computer systems and networks and different levels required different protocols for securing communications and information systems. At 9:09 PM on September 10, 2001, less than 12 hours before the attacks began, Eberhart reduced Infocon to Level 5 , the lowest threat level, making it easier for hackers to compromise Defense Department systems and controls. Eberhart has never been asked about this change in the public record.
There are a laundry list of other questionable actions that Eberhart took on 9/11:
- His failure to implement military control over US airspace.
- His decision to drive from Peterson Air Force Base to NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Control Center at 9:30 AM, right in the middle of the attack, despite knowing this would involve loss of communication for part of the drive, and the fact that it took him 45 minutes to complete the 30 minute trip.
- His decision to ground all fighter jets by ordering them to battle stations instead of ordering them to scramble at 9:49 AM.
- And even NORAD’s inability to turn over basic documentation to government investigators.
The official story of 9/11 is a lie. But Eberhart’s story is a lie within that lie, designed to absolve himself and other members of the US military charged with defending American airspace that morning from the most catastrophic failure in that mission in their history. And not only did Eberhart survive with his career intact, he was praised as a “9/11 hero” and moved into the private sector after leaving NORAD in 2004, as chairman and board member of a number of companies that directly benefited from the post-9/11 police state and the post-9/11 war on terror.
Ralph E. Eberhart remains at large.
Suspect #6: The Dancing Israelis
DAN RATHER: Some evil is just … it can’t be explained.
DAVID LETTERMAN: Are these people happy? Are they joyous now? Are they celebrating? Thank God?
DAN RATHER: Oh absolutely, they’re celebrating. There’s one report, this has not been confirmed but there is several eye[witness] reports that there was a cell, one of these cells across the Hudson River. And they got on the … this is the report and I emphasize that I don’t know this for a fact but there’s several witnesses who say this happened. They got on the roof of a building to look across, they knew what was gonna happen. They were waiting for it to happen and when it happened they celebrated. They jumped for joy.
In the days after 9/11, while Ground Zero continued to smolder, millions heard Dan Rather and various media outlets repeat vague and unconfirmed reports of arrests that took place that day. These rumors held that Middle Eastern men, presumably Arabs, were arrested in explosive-packed vans in various places around the city on September 11th, and that some had even been photographing and celebrating those events. What most do not realize is that those reports were not mere rumors, and we now have thousands of pages of FBI, CIA and DOJ reports documenting those arrests.
MARIA: I grabbed my binoculars and I’m trying to look at the Twin Towers but what caught my attention was down there I see this van parked and I see 3 guys on top of the van. They seemed to be taking a movie and I could see that they were like happy and laughing. They didn’t look shocked to me, you know what I mean? They didn’t look shocked.
(SOURCE: The Five Dancing Israelis – 9/11/2001 – Our Purpose Was To Document The Event)
The men were spotted shortly after 8:46 AM, yet somehow at this early stage, just minutes after the first plane strike on the World Trade Center, they were already positioned in a parking lot in Liberty State Park, taking pictures of the towers and celebrating. They left the scene shortly after being spotted and at 3:31 PM the FBI issued an all points bulletin advising officers in the Greater New York area to be on the lookout for a “White, 2000 Chevrolet van…with ‘Urban Moving Systems’ sign on back.”
At 3:56 PM, the van was spotted traveling eastward on State Route 3 in New Jersey and pulled over by Officer Scott DeCarlo and Sgt. Dennis Rivelli of the East Rutherford police department. Inside they found five men: Sivan Kurzberg and his brother, Paul, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner, and Omar Marmari.
BERNICE STEGERS: A major terrorist man-hunt began and, just 6 hours after the attack, the van was stopped at a roadblock by patrolman Scott De Carlo.
SCOTT De CARLO: We were asked to detain the van and the passengers. They were just removed from the vehicle, patted down for safety precautions and detained.
I think once the FBI arrived, one of them stated that they were on our side or something to that effect.
(SOURCE: The 9/11 Conspiracies – Ch 4)
According to the police report of the incident, Sivan Kurzberg told Officer DeCarlo: “We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.”
Their official story: they were just Israeli tourists working for a moving company who had heard about the first World Trade Center strike and rushed to get a better view of the events.
BERNICE STEGERS: They told interrogators they were working for Urban Moving, a shipping and storage firm run by an Israeli businessman, who often employed Israeli students without work permits. The men say there was an innocent explanation for what was found in the van. and their behavior on 9/11. They were, they say, “simply on a working holiday.”
PAUL KURZBERG: We heard in the news that one of the plane was crashing down the buildings and we thought it was an accident at the beginning. So, we went up to the roof of Urban Moving and we saw the building burning.
YARON SCHMUEL: There is a better view from a building in Jersey that is up a hill, straight-line to the World Trade Center. We decided to go up there, it’s 2-3 minutes from the office, stand over there and take some pictures. Everyone wants pictures like this in his camera.
(SOURCE: The 9/11 Conspiracies – Ch 4)
Although this narrative is still trotted out when the story of the dancing Israelis is raised in the media, it is an easily demonstrable lie.
FBI reports confirm that the men were not taking somber pictures of a horrific event. When their 76 pictures were developed, they revealed the men had indeed been celebrating; smiling, hugging each other, and high-fiving. One of the pictures even featured Sivan Kurzberg holding a lighter up with the burning tower in the background.
And these were no ordinary tourists. Oded Ellner had $4,700 stuffed into his sock. They lied to the police about where they had been that morning. They were carrying plane tickets for immediate departure to different places around the globe. The FBI confirmed that two of the men had ties to Israeli intelligence and came to suspect that they had indeed been on a mission for the Mossad.
And of course, after returning to Israel Ellner claimed on national Israeli TV that they had been sent there “to document the event.”
ODED ELLNER (Translation): And at that point we were taken for another round of questioning. This time related to us allegedly being members of Mossad.
The fact of the matter is, we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event.
(SOURCE: Inside Israel)
Their purpose was to “document the event”? But how could they possibly have known what “event” they were documenting at that point, before the second plane strike when those few who even knew about the situation had assumed it to be an accident or pilot error?
And when did they arrive at the parking lot to “document the event” anyway?
The FBI reports show how the men gave confused and often conflicting accounts of when and how they learned about what was happening and when they arrived at the parking lot. Oded Ellner even said they had arrived their shortly after 8:00 AM, which would have been 45 minutes before the attacks even began [see page 45 here]. This is in line with one of the eyewitnesses that had placed their Urban Moving Systems van at the parking lot at 8:00 AM [see page 33 here]. How could they have been in place and ready to “document the event” unless they knew what was about to happen?
Anyway you cut it, this story is unbelievable. Men with documented connections to Israeli intelligence and working in the United States without appropriate permits were detained after having been caught celebrating the attack on the World Trade Center at a time when no one knew that the WTC strike was an attack. So surely these men are locked behind bars to this day, right? Surely they were transferred to Guantanamo and held without trial for 15 years as part of the “War on Terror,” weren’t they?
No. They were immediately transferred to federal custody, held for 71 days, and then deported back to Israel. The owner of the “Urban Moving Systems” company that had employed them, Dominik Suter, was investigated by the FBI, too. They concluded that “Urban Moving may have been providing cover for an Israeli intelligence operation” and even seized records and computer systems from the company’s offices. When they went back to question him again on September 14th, he had fled back to Israel.
And what about the dancing Israelis’ pictures themselves? The Justice Department destroyed their copies on January 27, 2014.
And these intelligence agents on an intelligence mission who were there to “document the event” of 9/11 before anyone knew 9/11 was taking place? Don’t worry, they were just spying on Arab terrorists.
ELIZABETH VARGAS: And while the FBI or certain sources might believe that in fact they were Israeli intelligence, they don’t believe that the US was a target. That they were actually investigating Muslim groups?
JOHN MILLER: They believe if this was an intelligence operation by Israel, that it was focused on the Islamic groups and charities that raise money for groups that are considered by US Law Enforcement and others terrorist groups. You’ll note that after September 11th, the US moved on many of these groups with indictments, arrests, raids on their headquarters, something that hadn’t happened prior to this.
ELIZABETH VARGAS: These are groups that Israel believe have been funding Hamas and other terrorists organizations?
JOHN MILLER: Groups that are responsible for most of the suicide bombings there.
(SOURCE: ABC News 20/20 preview – June 21, 2002)
But this story is not merely preposterous on its face; even the implications of this story are themselves preposterous. If indeed the “official story” is a ridiculous lie, then are we to believe that these crack Israeli Mossad operatives who were presumably aware of the attack that was about to take place had been sent to photograph the burning tower from a parking lot across the Hudson River? And that these specially trained intelligence professionals on their super secret mission were celebrating, high-fiving and going out of their way to be noticed in performance of their task? This is equally preposterous.
The only other possible conclusion is that these men were serving merely as a distraction. That they were not there to photograph for Israeli intelligence one of the most heavily photographed scenes in the world on that morning, but instead to be noticed and arrested as a way to divert attention from a much bigger and more sinister story.
So if they were meant to distract from a bigger story, what story could that possibly be?
BRIT HUME: 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 US investigators believe that there are Israelis again very much engaged in spying in and on the US. Who may have known things they didn’t tell us before September 11th. Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron has details in the first of a 4 part series.
CARL CAMERON: Since September 11th 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 Unites States.
There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance and not shared it. 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 the evidence that has been gathered. It is classified information.
Asked this week about another sprawling investigation and the detention of 60 Israelis since September 11th, the Bush administration treated the questions like hot potatoes.
ARI FLEISCHER: I would just refer you to the Department of Justice with it. I’m not familiar with the report.
COLIN POWELL: I’m aware that some Israeli citizens have been detained. With respect to why they are being detained and the other aspects of your question, whether it’s because they are in intelligence services or what they were doing, I will defer to the Department of Justice and the FBI to answer that.
CARL CAMERON: Beyond the 60 apprehended or detained and many deported since September 11th, another group of 140 Israeli individuals have been arrested and detained in this year. In what government documents describe as, “An organized intelligence gathering operation designed to “penetrate government facilities.” Most of those individuals said they had served in the Israeli military, which is compulsory there, but they also had, most of them, intelligence expertise and either worked for AMDOCS or other companies in Israel that specialize in wiretapping. Earlier this week the Israeli Embassy here in Washington denied any spying against or in the United States.
[. . .]
BRIT 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?
CARL CAMERON: Well it’s very explosive information obviously and there is 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 big question they say is, “How could they have not have known?” Almost a direct quote, Brit.
The most phenomenal part of this report is not that it was eventually erased from the web by Fox News itself, but that it ever made it to the air at all. In December of 2001, Fox News investigative reporter Carl Cameron filed an explosive 4-part series that went in-depth into an Israeli art student spying ring that had been under investigation before 9/11, extensive Israeli wiretapping of sensitive US government communications, and the 60 Israeli spies that were detained in the wake of the September 11th attacks. Unsurprisingly, the story was quickly dropped and no mainstream journalists dared to continue probing into the matter.
This is the real story of Israeli spies and 9/11; not some vague rumours about some dancing Israelis but an FBI dragnet that swept up the largest foreign spying ring ever caught red-handed on American soil. And although the FBI were convinced that these spies knew about 9/11 in advance, their investigations were stifled and the issue was swept under the rug. Rather than making Israel enemy number one in the war on terror, Israel remains to this day the US’ “most important ally.”
HILLARY CLINTON: And if I’m fortunate enough to be elected President, the United States will re-affirm we have a strong and enduring national interest in Israels security.
(SOURCE: Hillary Clinton AIPAC Full Speech – March, 2016)
DONALD TRUMP: In 2001, weeks after the attacks on New York City and on Washington and frankly the attacks on all of us, attacks that were perpetrated by the Islamic fundamentalists, Mayor Rudy Giuliani visited Israel to show solidarity with terror victims. I sent my plane because I backed the mission for Israel 100%.
But perhaps this is understandable. After all, we all remember how Yasser Arafat gloated about 9/11 and said it was good for Palestinians, right?
Oh wait, that wasn’t Yasser Arafat. It was Benjamin Netanyahu.
AMY GOODMAN: The Israeli newspaper, Maariv, has reported Israels former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly said the September 11th attacks have been good for Israel. Netanyahu said:
“We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.”
(SOURCE: “Sept 11 was good for Israel” – Democracy Now – April 17, 2008)
DONALD TRUMP: My name is Donald Trump and I’m a big fan of Israel. And frankly a strong Prime Minister, is a strong Israel and you truly have a great Prime Minister in Benajim Netanyahu, there’s nobody like him. He’s a winner, he’s highly respected, he’s highly thought of by all.
And people really do have great, great respect for whats happened in Israel.
So vote for Benjamin, terrific guy, terrific leader, great for Israel.
(SOURCE: Donald Trump Endorsement for Prime Minister Netanyahu)
Given that the ultimate consequence of 9/11 was the beginning of a now 15 year long struggle to transform the Middle East, a struggle that the neocons that went on to populate the Bush administration had been openly advocating since the “Clean Break” policy paper in the mid-1990s, it isn’t hard to see how the September 11th attacks were indeed a boon for Israel. But information linking Israeli spies to advance knowledge of 9/11 remains “classified information.”
In a world of true justice, the dancing Israelis and other Israeli spies with insider advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, who openly celebrated those attacks, would be the targets of the “war on terror,” not its beneficiaries.
September 4, 2020 Posted by aletho | False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Video | 9/11 | 1 Comment
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Mossad behind Italian ‘blackmail’ spying scandal
The Cradle | November 1, 2024
An Italian private intelligence firm that allegedly hacked government databases to collect information on thousands of prominent people, including politicians, entrepreneurs, and celebrities, is accused of working for Israeli intelligence and the Vatican, media reported on 30 October.
Police wiretaps leaked to Italian media show that Equalize, which employs former members of Italian intelligence, is accused of breaching the servers of government ministries and the police between 2019 and 2024 to collect information.
Yedioth Ahronoth reported that Equalize allegedly collected numerous classified files that contain sensitive information about prominent Italians to sell to clients – including major companies and law firms seeking information to gain an advantage over competitors, win court cases, or for blackmail and extortion.
Prime Minister Meloni described the alleged scheme as “unacceptable” and “a threat to democracy.” … continue
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