Pentagon Attack on 911

[Armenian]

Re: Pentagon Attack on 911

A very interesting development.

[British MI6] Document: Pakistan [ISI] agency backs al-Qaida

A leaked document accuses Pakistan's intelligence agency of indirectly supporting terrorist groups including al-Qaida and calls on Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf to disband the agency. Musharraf, who is scheduled to meet British Prime Minister Tony Blair later Thursday, told the British Broadcasting Corp. that he rejected the assessment and would raise the matter with his counterpart.

"ISI is a disciplined force, breaking the back of al-Qaida," Musharraf told the broadcaster, claiming his intelligence service had secured the arrests of 680 suspected terrorists. The BBC on Wednesday declined to identify the author of the document but said the person was linked to MI6, the British secret intelligence service. The broadcaster's "Newsnight" television program said it had been passed a copy of the document, which it said was collated as part of a private British review of efforts across the world to combat terrorism.

The BBC quoted the document as saying that Pakistan was coming under "closer and closer" international scrutiny because of the intelligence agency's support for the country's hard-line opposition Islamic coalition Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal, also called MMA. Britain's Ministry of Defense said the document was part of academic research and did not represent the views of either the ministry or Blair's government. "To represent it as such is deeply irresponsible and the author is furious that his notes have been willfully misrepresented in this manner," said a defense ministry spokeswoman, on customary condition of anonymity.

"Indeed, he suspects that they have been released to the BBC precisely in the hope that they would cause damage to our relations with Pakistan." Musharraf traveled to London after talks Wednesday in Washington with President Bush and Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Musharraf said he and Karzai decided to increase cooperation in fighting terrorism, including developing better intelligence coordination and interaction. "The meeting that I held with President Bush and Hamid Karzai last night was very good," Musharraf said in comments aired live on Pakistani TV. "It was decided that we should have a common strategy. We have to fight terrorism. We have to defeat it, defeat it jointly."

It was a stark departure from the recent criticisms he and Karzai have lobbed at one another in recent days. Karzai has accused Pakistan of not doing enough to curb Islamic schools that produce militants, while Musharraf said the Afghan leader was ignoring large sectors of his war-ravaged country's population.

Right up to Wednesday night's White House dinner, they also have pointed fingers at one another over Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders. Each says bin Laden isn't hiding in his country and suggests the other might do more to help find him. Tensions were still apparent in Washington. Following the dinner, Karzai and Musharraf attended a news conference where they both shook Bush's hand but didn't shake each other's.

The BBC also reported Wednesday that British military commanders were overruled by politicians in a request to withdraw troops from Iraq to strengthen force numbers in Afghanistan. It said the document suggested military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan were heading toward an "as yet unspecified and uncertain result." It painted a bleak picture of military and counterterrorism work, similar to a U.S. intelligence assessment — parts of which were declassified Tuesday — that warned of a growing terrorist threat and concluded Iraq has become a "cause celebre" for jihadists.

British troops are being "held hostage in Iraq following the failure of the deal being attempted by the COS (Chief of Staff) to extricate UK Armed Forces from Iraq on the basis of doing Afghanistan," the BBC quoted the document as saying. It said senior commanders had hoped to focus resources on the NATO-led mission to secure governance in southern Afghanistan, where British, Canadian and U.S. troops have met fierce resistance, the BBC said.

The BBC said the document reinforced claims that military intervention in Iraq had served to encourage extremism, a notion repeatedly rejected by Blair. "Iraq has served to radicalize an already disillusioned youth and al-Qaida has given them the will, intent, purpose and ideology to act," the BBC quoted the document as saying.

Link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060928/...E0BHNlYwN0bWE-

[Armenian]

Re: Pentagon Attack on 911

More on the Pentagon attack on September 11, 2001:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4122141035109108276&q=Pentagon+hit+video&hl=en

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4861362206702794915&q=Pentagon+hit+video&hl=en

[Armenian]

Re: Pentagon Attack on 911

This is cute:

Over 4,000 foreign Qaeda fighters killed in Iraq: chief

Al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq said the terror network has lost more than 4,000 foreign fighters in its insurgency against US-led forces, in an audio-clip posted on the Internet. "We have shed plenty of our own blood in Iraq. More than 4,000 emigrants" have been killed, Abu Hamza al-Muhajer said, referring to foreign militant fighters in the war-torn country. Muhajer has urged his followers to kidnap Westerners in order to swap them with an Egyptian cleric held in the United States, in an audio message posted on the Internet. Link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060928...aedaattacktoll

You see folks, we were all wrong after all, the "Forces of Freedom" are winning indeed. After all the negative press, after all the senseless bloodshed, after all the unanswered questions, after all the doubts - this is wonderful news. We should all continue electing Neocons so that they can continue doing a wonderful job in the "War on Terror"

[aray]

Re: Pentagon Attack on 911

This is cute:



You see folks, we were all wrong after all, the "Forces of Freedom" are winning indeed. After all the negative press, after all the senseless bloodshed, after all the unanswered questions, after all the doubts - this is wonderful news. We should all continue electing Neocons so that they can continue doing a wonderful job in the "War on Terror"

I’m wondering if there was any Al-Qaeda presence in Iraq before so-called “freedom fighters” started the “war on terror”. As far as I know Sadam hated them more than pork.

[karoaper]

Re: Pentagon Attack on 911

I’m wondering if there was any Al-Qaeda presence in Iraq before so-called “freedom fighters” started the “war on terror”. As far as I know Sadam hated them more than pork.

He was definitely more afraid of them than he was of a BLT sandwich, that's for sure.

[Armenian]

Re: Pentagon Attack on 911

I’m wondering if there was any Al-Qaeda presence in Iraq before so-called “freedom fighters” started the “war on terror”. As far as I know Sadam hated them more than pork.

There never was an Islamist presence within Iraq before the invasion. However, there is no "Al-Qaeda" in Iraq today either. The so-called "Al-Qaeda" that we hear about in Iraq and elsewhere are nothing but CIA/ISI/Mossad covert operations, such as the article above that states 4000 Al-Qaeda men have died in Iraq. When you hear statements by "Al-Qaeda," they essentially serve two purposes.

1) Scare the American/Western public - Al-Qaeda threatens death and destruction world wide

2) Show the public that the war on terror is going well - We killed thousands of their fighters, we captured most of their leaders, etc.

[Armenian]

Re: Pentagon Attack on 911

Muslims Suspend Laws of Physics? http://www.public-action.com/911/jmcm/physics_1.html

[Fedayeen]

Re: Pentagon Attack on 911

25 Questions, but more like 25 jokes

http://www.shoutwire.com/viewstory/32391/25_Questions_For_The_9_11_Truth_Movement_

discussion here

http://www.shoutwire.com/comments/32391/25_Questions_For_The_9_11_Truth_Movement_

Another classic propaganda

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1001-24.htm

[Norserunt]

Re: Pentagon Attack on 911

The Master Plan for the World and its effect on Resource Stocks

When you understand how the recent attack on Lebanon fits into the "Grand Plan" for the Middle East, you have an immediate and substantial advantage over other investors in the Energy and Precious Metals sectors.

In order to comprehend what is going on in the Middle East and in the wider world for that matter it is necessary to have a grasp of certain realities. For reasons which we will not go into here, the countries of Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States constitute an "Axis", and they will hereafter be referred to as "The Axis". The elites who control these countries are one and the same, they have identical objectives and move as one. This is not to say, however, that these same elites don't control or partially control many other countries, they do, of course, as they also control many world bodies such as the United Nations, which they have effectively neutered and reduced to a costly talking shop. But their "centre of gravity", their "home turf" is clearly these three countries.

The UK has an interesting geopolitical role to play within the Axis power bloc. One of its main functions is to serve as the Loyal Lieutenant of the United States, and so give much needed credibility to the latter's policies and actions. Thus, when the United States forces invaded Iraq, the addition of forces from sidekick Britain, and token support from a ragbag of relatively minor states such as Australia and Poland trying to curry favor with the Axis, enabled CNN to label the invading force "The Coalition", a term used probably thousands of times in the weeks and months that followed, and which, from a propaganda perspective, sounds a whole lot better than "The US Invasion Force".

[...]

So, what are the prime objectives of the elites within The Axis? One objective is to achieve complete control over their own populations, in a manner that enables them to concentrate as much power and wealth into their own hands as possible. Another objective is the creation of a world government, so that they can exercise control not just over a group of countries, but the whole world. It would appear that these particular elites have not infiltrated and do not control up-and-coming countries such as China, India and Russia, who could conceivably constitute an opposing power bloc, therefore these countries will have to be initially contained before later being forced to kneel before the might of The Axis.

This at least partially explains three things that are otherwise inexplicable - the gargantuan US "defense" budget, which after the end of the cold war should have contracted, not expanded, thus yielding a "peace dividend" for US taxpayers, the astonishing proliferation of US military bases across the Middle East and Central Asia, and finally the rolling takeover of the Middle East. Ordinary voters within the Axis countries clearly would not accept or condone the actions of the elites if they knew the real reasons for them, and might get rebellious, hence the need to invent a story which they can believe in - "The War on Terror", which is a smokescreen of cartoon book simplicity, which is what the masses need, as they are unable to grasp complex concepts.

The term "War on Terror" is itself ludicrous and is clearly a crude slogan designed to appeal to the masses. The attacks on September 11th 2001 served three principal purposes - they enabled the rolling takeover of the Middle East to get underway in earnest, starting with Afghanistan and moving on to Iraq, under cover of The War on Terror, and they enabled the passing of The Patriot Acts, which have turned the Constitution of the United States into nothing more than an interesting historical document. These Acts have created a full blown Police State in waiting. One more major "terrorist" attack and the numerous draconian clauses lying dormant within these Acts can be invoked and a state of Martial Law may be declared at will. "Holding Centers" for dissenters have been under construction across the United States for some time, for the benefit of those whose views do not concur with those of their rulers. The borders can be sealed instantly, unless you fancy strolling over into Mexico, that is. The third main "benefit" is that they allowed more power and wealth to be channeled to the voracious Military-Industrial complex.

The United States is an unusual country in that it does not have a government in the normal sense of the word. This is because many politicians who ostensibly represent the people are primarily answerable to, and therefore controlled by, the big business interests who ultimately determine their fate. These interests are collectively known as the Military-Industrial complex and this power grid is the effective government of the United States. The Defense, Oil and Pharmaceutical lobbies in particular have immense power in Washington. This state of affairs explains why the food supply in the United States is adulterated with genetically modified crops and harmful additives such as Aspartame, and other substances that promote obesity.

[...]

This is the underlying reason for the interrogation and torture of prisoners, and for the recent pulverizing of Lebanon by Axis forces emanating from Israel. The elites within the Axis powers, who, to whatever extent they are religious, are either Christians or Zionists, view Arabs and Muslims in the same way that a gardener regards ants or termites - at best as an irrelevance to be tolerated, perhaps utilized as a source of slave labor, and at worst as a pest to be exterminated. When you understand this point you can readily appreciate why the Axis powers would be quite happy to foment an inter-Arab war, Shiites versus Sunnis, for example, and then stand back and watch with satisfaction as they wipe each other out - as long as they don't damage the oilfields. Not that they have much more respect for citizens in their own countries, who they broadly class into two groups. One is civilians who are farmed for their labor and tax revenue; the working classes of course, but also the broad swath of the middle class, the stewards of the system, who like to think that they are in control of their own lives, but are in reality just operatives for the elites. The other group is military personnel who are the unwitting henchmen that do their dirty work in far flung lands, putting their lives on the line to serve their master's geopolitical ambitions.

Dr Josef Goebbels, the godfather of propaganda, who was head of propaganda in Nazi Germany in the 30‘s, would have thought he had woken up in heaven, had he found himself suddenly transposed to being in charge of the Axis propaganda machine in our times. The greatest mind control machine in the history of the human race, the television set, is to be found in virtually every home in the developed world, sometimes several of them, and the people weren't forced to accept them, they went out and bought them of their own accord. The seductive allure of the screen is much more attractive to most than the effort involved in reading. Nowadays the television is the main source of information for the vast majority of the population - if you can gain control of its throughput you can control the minds of the masses.

In the United States, almost all Newspaper and Television stations are controlled from above by the process of syndication, which means there is in effect no such thing as an independent local press. A pyramidal structure controls editorial policy and any reporter who steps out of line by not adhering to editorial policy will find his chances of promotion blocked, and if he persists, will suddenly find himself with plenty of time for gardening. This is why, although complicity by various elements within the government in the attacks of 11th September 2001 is glaringly obvious, you won't find much serious questioning of the episode in the mainstream press. The plentiful evidence that it was an "inside job", such as Norad, the air defense network, being stood down to allow the attacks to proceed, the sequenced detonations within the Twin Towers that brought them down, the thermite used to melt the steel to guarantee the towers would collapse, the complete collapse of WTC7 many hours later, although it was relatively untouched by debris - this building was used as the command and control center for the entire operation, and was brought down to destroy the evidence, and was also heavily insured by its new owner before it was destroyed, the airline Put option scam, the rapid and systematic destruction of evidence at Ground Zero, all of this is covered in detail on various websites devoted to the truth of what went on at that time. Despite the mainstream media coverup, surveys reveal that 30% of US citizens believe that the government had a hand in the attacks, and this figure is rising all the time.

This must be worrying for the perpetrators, who could face impeachment and a firing squad if the truth became more widely known, and it is a reason that they are thought to be contemplating another "spectacular", to rally the majority behind them and drive opponents and disbelievers into the shadows - and also to invoke the draconian clauses lying in wait in the Patriot Acts, one of which is that if you oppose them you are a terrorist and can simply vanish, never to be heard of again. Many years ago, if the population at large realized that elements within the government had murdered 3,000 of their fellow citizens in this way, they would have marched on Washington, dragged the perpetrators out of their lairs, and strung them up from the nearest lamp posts, but this is not considered possible these days, even if the majority do realize it, because after many years sat on comfy sofas watching the television, people just don't have the stomach for it. That might change, however, if the sofa and TV set suddenly vanish.

In the intervening years since 11th September 2001 there have been various other "terrorist" attacks; the Bali bombing, which killed about 200 people, many of whom were Australian tourists, was intended to ensure Australia's full commitment to The War on Terror, and was a successful operation. The Madrid train bombings backfired (this is not an attempt at humor). The intention was to ensure the re-election of Jose Aznar, an ally of Bush committed to The War on Terror, in the upcoming Spanish general election, and it was assumed that the people would want to re-elect a candidate who was strongly aligned with the US and The War on Terror after the bombings, but instead the electorate blamed Aznar for aligning himself with Bush and thus making them a target, and threw him out. The London bombings, on the other hand were a complete success, as they swept Tony Blair, who had been flagging in the polls, back into power in the election soon after.

Having outlined the general context, we will now return to the central theme of this article, which is how the recent attack on Lebanon fits within the Grand Plan for the Middle East and the implications for the prices of Precious Metals and Oil going forward.

The Axis powers have had big plans for the Middle East for a long time, for the obvious reason that they have coveted control of the immense oil wealth contained within the region, and the power that complete possession of this resource would bestow. These plans predate the September 11th 2001 attacks by many years, although it was these attacks that acted as a catalyst, enabling the Middle East takeover juggernaut to move up swiftly through the gears. With respect to these plans the creation of the state of Israel can almost be described as the creation of an Axis "bridgehead" in the region. After the September 11th attacks, the outraged public were baying for blood, and quickly swallowed the Al Queida/Osama bin Laden story, which gave them a focus for their wrath, and were heartened by the swift invasion of Afghanistan.

[...]

So, how does the attack on Lebanon fit into all this? You may recall that the reason cited for pulverizing Lebanon was that Hezbollah had captured two Israeli soldiers. This was obviously a very poor excuse, but the emboldened Axis elites, who control the syndicated global media, no longer feel the need to make up a convincing excuse for anything. Now for the real reasons. Some of you will recall that, about a year ago, Syrian troops were pressured out of Lebanon. This was a preparatory move, designed to make the premeditated attack on Lebanon go more smoothly. Now, we know that an ultimate goal of the Axis powers in the Middle East is to overrun Iran, or at least neutralize and subjugate it. Without the attack on Hezbollah and Lebanon of the past few weeks, any attack on Iran would obviously have resulted in a hail of Hezbollah rockets raining down on northern Israel, as Hezbollah in southern Lebanon has been a kind of "front line" for Iran.

Axis military planners have clearly calculated that the damage caused by Hezbollah rockets and missiles would be considerably reduced in conditions where they were under attack from Israel, rather than if Axis forces attacked Iran, and then unmolested Hezbollah forces launched a sideswipe against northern Israel. For this reason, in preparation for the assault on Iran, Axis strategists have decided to "take the sting out of Hezbollah" and let northern Israel "take the heat now", rather than leave them with a full arsenal when the time comes to go after Iran. Israel has aimed to inflict as much damage as possible on Hezbollah, and is actually glad that they are firing many rockets into northern Israel, as this depletes their inventory. It is true that many Lebanese civilians have been killed and made homeless by these attacks, but in the eyes of Axis planners this was justified as the target was Hezbollah fighters, and if these civilians happened to be too close to them, that was their misfortune - they are expendable, as are ordinary US soldiers in Iraq. Furthermore, the pulverizing of Lebanon was designed to demonstrate to the world at large and the Arab world in particular the ruthless might of the Axis, and to further foment polarization - to incense and outrage the Arab world and thus raise their profile as an enemy.

[...]

Source: http://www.safehaven.com/article-5986.htm

[Armenian]

Re: Pentagon Attack on 911

High-Fivers and Art Student Spies

What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?

By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, an FBI bulletin known as a BOLO x- "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 x- two more men had apparently joined the group since the morning x- 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 x- falsely x- 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 xxxish 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 x- from news reports, statements by former intelligence officials, an array of circumstantial evidence, and the reported acknowledgment by the Israeli government -x 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 -x supported, though not proven, by several pieces of evidence x- 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 bullxxxx", 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 x- 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."

Continue Reading: http://www.counterpunch.org/ketcham03072007.html