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Today's
Stories
March 7,
2007
Christopher Ketcham
What Did Israel Know in Advance
of the 9/11 Attacks?
Christopher Ketcham
The Kuala Lumpur Deceit: a CIA Cover
Up
Alexander Cockburn / Jeffrey
St. Clair
Ketcham's Story: Coming in From the Cold
March 6,
2007
Gary Leupp
Meet
Eliot Cohen: "As Extremist a Neocon and Warmonger as It
Gets"
Uri Avnery
Esterina Tartman: The Big Mouth of Israeli Fascism
Patrick Cockburn
The War on Terror is a Bust: Bush is Now Al Qaeda's Top Recruiter
Saul Landau
World
in Crisis, Candidates in Denial
Corporate Crime Reporter
John Edwards' Big Lie
Ron Jacobs
The Legacy of Lordstown: The Union Makes Us Strong!
Mike Roselle
Judi Bari: Ten Years Gone
P. Sainath
Neoliberalism and the Ideology of the Cancer Cell
Joshua Frank
Dump the Dems, Unite Against the War
Aniket Alam
Women's Day, Lenin and a Riot in Copenhagen
Dave Zirin
Resurrecting Don Barksdale: Basketball's Forgotten Pioneer
Website of
the Day
Physicians for a National Health Program
March 5,
2007
Greg Moses
Holding
Suzi Hazahza for Profit
Patrick Cockburn
Exodus of Iraq's Ancient Minorities
James Petras
Bush vs. Chavez
Frida Berrigan
US Nuclear Hypocrisy and Iran
Marjorie Cohn
Conscientious Objector Faces Court-Martial:
the Case of Augustín Aguayo
Douglas Kammen
and S.W. Hayati
The Rice Crisis in East Timor
Sen. Barack Obama
On Israel and AIPAC: "We Must Preserve Our Total Commitment
to Our Unique Defense Relationship with Israel"
Michael Young
Sy Hersh and Iran: the Dark Side of Spun a Lot?
Dave Lindorff
It's the People of Washington vs. Pelosi, et al
Sonja Karkar
Raiding Nablus: Israel's Hot Winter Offensive
Website of the Day
How Obama Learned to Love Israel
March 3
/ 4, 2007
Alexander Cockburn
The
Persecution of Sami Al-Arian
Corporate Crime
Reporter
"No Fingernails, No Good:" Al-Arian Prosecutor's Anti-Muslim
Bias
Jeffrey St. Clair
Glory Boy and the Snail Darter: Al Gore, the Origins of a Hypocrite
Patrick Cockburn
War Reporting in Iraq: Only Locals Need Apply
Ralph Nader
Hillary, Inc.: Sen. Clinton and Corporate America
M. Shahid Alam
American Mamlukes
Gilad Atzmon
From Esther to AIPAC
Fred Gardner
It's Official!: Cannabis Reduces Pain
George Ciccariello-Maher
The Fourth World War Started in Venezuela
Rock &
Rap Confidential
Do the James Brown!: "No One Could Speak More Authoritatively
for Blacks"
Gillian Russom
The Court Martial of Agustín Aguayo
Michael McPhearson
My Small Act of Civil Disobedience
Kevin Zeese
The Democrats and the Peace Movement: Who Owns Whom?
Sunsara Taylor
Four Years of an Unjust War
Wendy Thompson
Re-Organizing the UAW
Kenneth Rexroth
Gibbon's "Decline and Fall"
Missy Beattie
Regarding Cheney
Don Monkerud
Jesus Turned Away at US Border
Tina Louise
Stuffed with Terror, Starved of Dreams
Poets' Basement
Richards, Landau and Davies
Website of the Weekend
John Prine: Flag Decal
March 2,
2007
Roger Morris
Cheney's
Bagram Ghosts
Phil Gasper
Prisoners of Ideology
Mike Roselle
Buffalo Gore: The Blood-Stained Snow of Yellowstone
Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Scam
John V. Walsh
Who is He This Time?: Kerry's Strange Call to Filibuster the
War
Sherwood Ross
Bush and Walter Reed Hospital: Praise the Care, Slash the Budget
China Hand
Who Let North Korea Get the Bomb?
David Rosen
To Cut or Not to Cut?: the Politics of Circumcision in America
Chris Genovali
Connecting the Dots
Peter Harley
The Wall, Apartheid and Mandela
Website of the Day
Courage to Resist
March 1,
2007
Laura Carlsen
Return
to Sender: Migrants as Globalization's Junk Mail
Paul Craig
Roberts
The Tragedy of a Dozen Evil Men
Ray McGovern
How Far is Iran from the Bomb? Who the Hell Knows?
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush's Theater of the Absurd
Najum Mustaq
America's Musharraf Dilemma
Brent Bowden
The War on Terror and the Terror of War
Tina Richards
Demoralizing the Troops? The Mother of an Iraq War Vet Responds
Ethan Nadelman
Mexico and the Drug War
Mike Stark
"Tough on Crime" is the Problem, Not a Solution
Wadner Pierre
/ Jeb Sprague
Haiti's Poor Under a State of Siege by UN
Mike Whitney
Market Meltdown: the Dead Hand of Greenspan
Website of
the Day
Dylan Hears a Who
February
28, 2007
Peter Linebaugh
An
Amazing Disgrace
Tao Ruspoli
A Conversation with Francisco Letelier
China Hand
The Shanghai Crash: Take the Money and Run
Marjorie Cohn
Why the Boumediene Case on Gitmo Detainees and Habeas Corpus
Was Wrongly Decided
Sarah Olson
Is Lt. Watada an Isolated Case of Military Dissent?
Susan Van Haitsma
Mark Wilkerson: Standing for a Soldier's Right to Conscience
Nicole Colson
License to Torture
Harvey Wasserman
The Sham of Nuclear Power
William S. Lind
The Non-Thinking Enemy
Nicola Nasser
US Turnabout?: Engagement and Confrontation in the Middle East
Website of the Day
Andrew Cockburn on Rumsfeld
February
27, 2007
Tariq Ali
The
Khyber Impasse: the Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan
Tom Barry
America's
Crusaders: Santorum and Lieberman
Uri Avnery
The Next War
Antonia Juhasz / Raed Jarrar
Oil Grab: the Secret Scheme to Split Iraq
Jeff Nygaard
Howard Hunt and the National Memory System
Hugh O'Shaughnessy
Grenada: an Invasion Revisited
Mitchell Kaidy
Israel's Cluster Bombs: Made in USA, Ground-Tested in Lebanon
Carl Finamore
Airline Bankruptcies, Mergers and Profits
Anne McElroy
Dachel
The Really Big Lie About Autism
Ramzy Baroud
Who is Really in Control?
Andrew Rouse
The Queen, Her Apothecary and the War on Iraq
Website of the Day
New York City Skyline
February
26, 2007
Franklin Lamb
US
Israel Lobby Targets Lebanon's Jihad al-Bina
Bill Quigley
The
Right to Return to New Orleans
Greg Moses
Suzi Hazahza in Haskell Hell
Col. Dan Smith
Calling All Carriers
Ralph Nader
The Bush Administration is a Threat to Our National Security
Paul Buchheit
The Income Gap
Jeff Leys
How Democrats Are Buying the Iraq War
Dave Zirin
Bojangling for Bigots: an Open Letter to Jason Whitlock
Mike Whitney
Doomsday Dick and the Plague of Frogs
Michael Dickinson
Free Kareem Amer!
Website of the Day
Beware the Chickenhawks!
February
24 / 25, 2007
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Frightening
Tales of Endangered Species
R. T. Naylor
Inside Islamic Charity
Gary Leupp
AIPAC Demands "Action" on Iran
Saul Landau
Modern Day Miracle: Rev. Haggard Cured! Thank You, Jesus!
Ron Jacobs
Missile Defense Redux
Jeffrey Blankfort
A Debate on the Israel Lobby
Chris Sands
Afghanistan in Winter: Where Death Comes Cheap
Gary Freeman
The N-Word and Black History Month
Larry Portis
Zionism and the United States: the Cultural Connection
P. Sainath
Two Million People in "Maximum Distress"
Lee Sustar
What Next for the Immigrants' Rights Movement?
Kevin Wehr
Liberal vs. Radical Enviros: the Thrill isn't Gone, It's Just
Moved
Ken Couesbouc
The African Card
Soffiyah Elijah
FBI Hunting Dead Panthers: Can John Bowman Ever Rest in Peace?
Kathlyn Stone
Iraqi Labor vs. Big Oil
Dave Lindorff
Breaking the Dam in Olympia
Jason Kunin
Criticizing Israel is Not an Act of Bigotry
Kevin Zeese
Can Hillary be Trusted?
Remi Kanazi
All Roads Lead to Checkpoints
Missy Beattie
Five Words That Change Lives
Poets' Basement
Davies, Holt and Rodriguez
Website of the Weekend
Caught on Tape: an Anti-War Movement Finding Its Feet?
February
23, 2007
Franklin Spinney
Top
Gun vs. the Axis of Evil: Is This What We Have Become?
Jonathan Cook
Watching
the Checkpoints
Patrick Cockburn
The True Extent of Britain's Failure in Basra
Kathy Kelly
Do Something Good
Chris Dols
Islamophobia at Urban Outfiters: the Case for Keffiyehs
Evelyn Pringle
The Neurontin Suicides: Risks Kept Hidden for Years
Stephen Pearcy
If Bush is a War Criminal, What About the Troops?
Dan Brook
Making Poverty History
Yifat Susskind
Iraqi Police Commit Rapes
Website of
the Day
A Citizens Arrest of Patty Murray
February
22, 2007
Robert Fantina
Repeating
History
Tariq Ali
Prodi's Soap Operatic Fall: Neoliberalism and War in Italy
Michael Shank
An Interview with Noam Chomsky on Iran, Iraq, the Democrats and
Climate Change
John Ross
Calderon's War on Drugs
Christopher Brauchli
Stockcars on Dope: How NASCAR and the Tour de France are Bring
the World Together
Cindy Litman
Paying for the Damage Done to Iraq
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Mr. Jefferson's Inheritors: Caution, Calculation and Cold Feet
Kevin Zeese
Finally, a Populist Antiwar Candidate for President
Aseem Shrivastava
The New Indian Way?: a Developer's Model of Development
Reza Fiyouzat
A Letter to the Israeli People: We are All Led by Mad Men
Illinois Students Against the
War
Why We Protested at Obama's Speech
Website of
the Day
An Interview with Mike Gravel
February
21, 2007
Maass / St.
Clair
The
Clintons: the Art of Politics Without Conscience
Sharon Smith
Inside
the Imperial Budget
Greg Moses
Showdown Over Texas Immigrant Prisons
Margaret Kimberly
America the Stupid
Ralph Nader
Making Cancer Cool: Tobacco and Hollywood
Nicola Nasser
Evasive Diplomacy: Bush Adm. Shuns Middle East Peace Talks
Mike Whitney
The Second Great Depression
Tao Ruspoli
Revolutionary But Gangsta: a Conversation with Stic.Man of Dead
Prez
Byeong Jeongpil
Beyond the "Protection Facility",
Another Prison
Corporate Crime
Reporter
Why Hillary, Obama and Edwards Oppose Single-Payer Health Care
Josh Mahan
The Lost Art of Shattuck: a Good, Old-Fashioned Drinking Story
Website of
the Day
Time to Free the Puerto Rican Nationalists
February
20, 2007
Sgt. Martin
Smith
Structured
Cruelty: Learning to be a Lean, Mean Killing Machine
Werther
How
to be a Washington Expert
Corporate Crime Reporter
Exposing SAIC
Carl G. Estabrook
Common Sense About the Recent Past
China Hand
Setting Sun: The Diverging US-Japan Relationship
Joshua Frank
Cleaning Up Exxon's Greenpoint Oil Spill
Megan Boler
The Daily Show and Political Activism
John Feffer
People Power vs. Military Power in East Asia
Daryll E. Ray
What's Inside the New Farm Bill
Alan Gregory
Midwest Wolves Fall Prey to Slob Hunters' PR Scam
Website of the Day
"Not a Target Rich Environment?"
February
19, 2007
Paul Craig
Roberts
Economists
in Denial: Blind to the Consequences of Offshoring
Gary Leupp
"A Genocidal, Suicidal Nation:" Mitt Romney Joins Iran's
Hysterical Accusers
Ron Jacobs
The Mecca Agreements: the Future Remains Bleak
Michael F.
Brown
The Peace Process Industry
Robert Jensen
Liberal Icons and War: Bi-Partisan Empire-Building
Roger Burbach
Ecuador Stands Up to US
Monica Benderman
America, Where Are You Now?
Sonja Karkar
Apocalyptic Archaeology: Israel's Provocations Threaten Jerusalem
John Walsh
Some Good News from Beantown
Talli Nauman
Colorado Delta Blues: Challenging the Law of the River
Website of the Day
"The Best Place to be in Town"
Feburary
17 / 18, 2007
Alexander Cockburn
Sold
to Mr. Gordon, Another Bridge!
Tao Ruspoli
CounterViews: a Conversation with Patrick Cockburn, Part Two
Gary Leupp
Iran: A Chronology of Disinformation
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Dark Mesas in an Ancient Light
Roger Morris
The Undertaker's Tally: the Tragedy of Donald Rumsfeld
Uri Avnery
Facing Mecca
James Brooks
Palestinians and the "Diplomatic Horizon"
Sen. Russell
Feingold
Congress Must Defund the Iraq War
Linn Washington, Jr.
"Death Row is a Web That Catches Only the Poor"
Michele Brand
Iran: the Proxy War?
Fred Gardner
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on Music and Basketball in the Harlem Renaissance
Mitchel Cohen
Storming the Pentagon: Lessons from 1967
Mike Ferner
Democrats Keep Ohio Refugee Free: "No Iraqis in Our Backyards!"
David Swanson
Memo to Don Young: What Lincoln Really Said
P. Sainath
In the Theater of the Jungle Belt
Mike Stark
GoreAid: Gore Plans Concert with Musicians He and Tipper Betrayed
in the 80s
Missy Beattie
The Object of My Disaffection
Jonathan Franklin
Carnival: Where Dance is Hope
Website of the Weekend
The Godfather and the Tenor: "It's a Man's World"
February 16, 2007
Marc Levy
Turning
Point: Veterans' Voices Trigger Response
Andrew Cockburn
In Iraq, Anyone Can Make a Bomb
Glen Ford
Powell, Rice and Obama: Putting Black Faces on Imperial Aggression
Greg Moses
The Terror of Suzi Hazahza: Why Her Family Must Be Freed
Ron Jacobs
Marching on the Pentagon: Then and Now
John W. Farley
Hook, Line and Sinker: The Press and Stephen Hadley
James Marc Leas
Vermont Legislature Says: "Bring Them Home Now!"
Tim Rinne
The Most Dangerous Place on the Face of the Earth?: StratCom
and the Coming War on Iran
Albert Wan
Star-Cross'd Lovers?: The Strange Romance of Hillary and David
Brooks
Website of
the Day
Did Wal-Mart Murder Tweety Bird?
February 15, 2007
Patrick Cockburn
Who
is Muqtada al-Sadr?
Saul Landau
How
to Obsess Your Enemies
Stephen Lendman
The Rules of Imperial Management
Evelyn Pringle
More Zyprexa Postcards from the Edge
Michael Simmons
Is the Joke Over?: an Evening with Ralph Steadman
Kevin Zeese
A Congressional Kabuki Show
Dave Lindorff
The Co-Dependent Congress
Pete Shanks
They Want You to Eat Cloned Meat--And They Don't Want You to
Know It
Peter Rost
The Michelle Manhart Affair: the Air Force Listens!
Lenni Brenner
/ Gilad Atzmon
An Exchange
Website of the Day
Barack Obama vs. Huey P. Newton
February
14, 2007
Tao Ruspoli
CounterViews:
A Conversation with Patrick Cockburn
Dick J. Reavis
War
Without a Name
Margaret Kimberly
Medical Apartheid in America
Christopher Brauchli
The Perils of Charity: You Can be Prosecuted for Funding Terror
Even If the Designation of the Group as a Terrorist Organization
was Wrong!
Paul Craig
Roberts
Cracks in the Pentagon
John Ross
The Plot Against Mexican Corn
Michael F.
Brown
The Democrats and Palestine: New Chairman, Old Rules
Dave Lindorff
The Press Bites, Again: a Word of Caution on Those Iranian Weapons
J.L. Chestunut,
Jr.
Texas-style Injustice in Black and White
Don Fitz
Hybrids, Biofuels and Other False Idols
Michael Donnelly
Give Love, Give Life
Dr. Susan Block
The Chemistry of Love
Website of
the Day
Code Pink Drops By Hillary's Office
February
13, 2007
Uri Avnery
Three
Provocations: the Method in the Madness
Patrick Cockburn
Targeting Tehran
Ralph Nader
When Wall Street Whines (You Know They're Making a Killing)
Marjorie Cohn
Fool Us Twice? From Iraq to Iran
Col. Dan Smith
Iran Bashing Goes Prime Time
Col. Douglas
MacGreagor
Empty Vessels: Gen. Patraeus and Other Hollow Men
Thomas Power
Coal Ambivalence: Mining Montana
Nicola Nasser
The Politics of Archaeology in Jerusalem
David Swanson
Iran War Talking Points
Columbia Coalition
Against the War
Why We Are Striking
Website of the Day
Our Friends at Antiwar.com Need Your Help
February
12, 2007
Patrick Cockburn
Scapegoating
Iran
Paul Craig
Roberts
How the World Can Stop Bush: Dump the Dollar!
John Walsh
A Splintered Antiwar Movement: Nader and Libertarians Not Welcome
Dr. John Carroll,
MD
What Next for Haiti's Cite Soliel?: a Journey Through the World's
Most Miserable Slum
Greg Moses
An Outrageously Sickening Immigration Policy
Nicole Colson
The Frame-Up That Fell Apart: Jury See Through Another Botched
Federal "Terrorism" Case
Dave Lindorff
Acting in Bad Feith: Inappropriate
Behavior and Impeachment
Ray McGovern
The Kervorkian Administration: Are Bush and Cheney the Biggest
Threats to the Existence of Israel?
Doug Giebel
Rampant Cyncism
David Swanson
Twisted: Sex and Torture in America
Website of the Day
The Texas Model: Executing Women in Iraq
February
10 /11, 2007
Weekend Edition
Alexander Cockburn
Will
They Nuke Iran?
Gabriel Kolko
Israel, Iran and the Bush Administration
Patrick Cockburn
Now
It's War on the Shia
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Till the Cows Come Home: How the West was Eaten
Kevin Alexander Gray
Barack Obama: Not a Bold Bone in His Body
M. Shahid Alam
The Pacification of Islam
Greg Moses
The Words of Mohammad: an 11 Year-Old Prisoner
Paul Craig
Roberts
Brzezinski's
Damning Indictment
George Ciccariello-Maher
Coups and Democracy in Venezuela
Kevin Zeese
"You Can't Oppose the War and Fund the War:" a Conversation
with Anthony Arnove
Turner / Kim
The World's Factory: China's Filthiest Export
George Duke
Has Jazz Lost Its African-American Core?
Walter Brasch
A Dream Still Unfulfilled: America Remains Divided
Shepherd Bliss
Veterans' Love Story
Missy Beattie
Fear and Diversions: Anna Nicole, Wolf Blitzer and the Missing
Body Count in Iraq
Peter Harley
Mr. Hyde and Uncle Sam: Reading Stevenson in an Age of Shock
and Awe
Pat Wolff
Oprah's Strange Endorsement of "The Secret"
Poets' Basement
Davies, Holt, Engel and Louise
Website of the Day
The 25 Most Corrupt Members of Bush Administration
February 9, 2007
Conn Hallinan
The
Najaf Massacre: an Annotated Fable
Gary Leupp
Charging
Iran with "Genocide" Before Nuking It
Lee Sustar
An Interview with Patrick Cockburn
Nikolas Kozloff
Bombing Venezuela's Indians
Newton Garver
Politics
and Apartheid
Yitzhak Laor
Under the Steamroller
Dave Lindorff
Truth or Consequences: Some Questions for Bush
David Swanson
The Politics of Self-Congratulation: Democrats Change Gas, Claim
It's a New Car
Website of the Day
Why Corporate Social Responsibility is Not Working for Workers
February
8, 2007
John V. Walsh
Filibuster
to End the War Now!
Marjorie Cohn
Watada Beats Government
Trish Schuh
The Salvador Option in Beirut
Ron Jacobs
The Case of the San Francisco 8
Laura Carlsen
Mexico at Davos: the Split with Latin America Widens
Ramzy Baroud
Countdown for Iran
Brenda Norrell
"Leave It in the Ground": Indigenous Peoples Call for
Global Ban on Uranium Mining
Bryan Farrell
The Splinter and the Beam: Violence in the Eye of the Beholder
Judith Scherr
BP Beds Down with Cal-Berkeley
Website of
the Day
Peace TV
February
7, 2007
Daniel Wolff
"The
Road Home is a Joke": Playing Politics with the Recovery
of New Orleans
Tao Ruspoli
CounterViews:
A Conversation with Oliver Stone on Art, Politics and the Future
of Cinema in Bush's America
Tony Swindell
The
Looming Shadow of Nuremberg
Sharon Smith
Why Protest Matters
Ken Couesbouc
Delenda Est Baghdad: Why Republics End Up as Empires
Jeff Cohen
Jonah
Goldberg's Gambling Debt
Col. Dan Smith
The Self-Destructive Logic of War
Tom Kerr
McCain to Wounded Soldiers: When Words Fail Fundamentally
Joshua Frank
The Democrats and Iran
Adam Elkus
Surging Right Into Bin Laden's Hands
Stephen Fleischman
The Good News About War on Iran
Website of
the Day
Vote Vets: Battling Escalation
February
6, 2007
Diana Johnstone
Frenzy
in France Over Iranian Threat
Gregory Wilpert
Did Chavez Over-reach?: Venezuela's Enabling Law Could Enable
Opposition
Norman Solomon
A Kangaroo Court Martial: Making an Example of Ehren Watada
Dave Lindorff
Borat Goes to Washington: Don't Experiment with the Economy?
William Blum
Space Cowboys: Full Spectrum Dominance
Mike Ferner
War Opponents Occupy Congressional Offices
CP News Service
Nader's CNN Interview: "Hillary's a Panderer and a Flatterer"
Evelyn Pringle
Eli Lilly and Zyprexa: Even the Insurance Companies are Bailing
Christopher Brauchli
Corporate Advice from the Office of Detainee Affairs
Alan Cabal
How Charles Manson Kept Me Out of Vietnam
Website of the Day
Free Josh Wolf: the Longest Jailed Journalist in US History
February 5, 2007
Dave Zirin
Super
Bore: When Hawks Cry
Uri Avnery
The
Fatal Kiss: Wars and Scandals
Ron Jacobs
The
Looming War on Iran: It's Not About Democracy
Paul Craig Roberts
The Real Failed States
Newton Garver
Bush
and the Old Hands: Decider vs. Negotiator
Bruce Anderson
The Genocidal Namesake of the Hastings School of Law
Saul Landau
The Golden Globes After a Mud Bath
Ralph Nader
The Good Fight of Molly Ivins
James T. Phillips
Road Outrageous: Tailgating and Iraq
Mike Whitney
Quarantine USA: Bird Flu Panic and Profiteering
Kenneth Rexroth
Clowns and Blood-Drinking Perverts: Imperial History According
to Tacitus
Website of the Day
Richard Thompson's Anti-War Song: "'Dad's Gonna Kill Me"
February 3 /4, 2007
Alexander Cockburn
Who
Can Stop the War?
Tao Ruspoli
CounterViews: a Conversation with Dr. Susan Block on Sex, Censorship
and Liberation
Jeffrey St.
Clair
The Thrill is Gone: the Withering of the American Environmental
Movement
Patrick Cockburn
Iraqis
on the Run
P. Sainath
They Take the Early Train
Sen. Russell Feingold
A Symbol of a Timid Congress
Diane Christian
Dying Well: Why Killing Saddam Backfired on Bush
Brian Cloughley
Space Missiles Away!: the Irony of Bush's Indignation
Diana Barahona
How to Turn a Priest into a Cannibal: US Reporting on the Coup
in Haiti
Timothy J. Freeman
The Iraq War Hits Hawai'i: the Stryker Brigade and the Watada
Case
Conn Hallinan
The Vishnu Strategy
John Ross
Felipe's First Fifty Days
Greg Moses
The Government Blinks: Freedom for the Ibrahim Family
Missy Beattie
No More Rebukes or Non-Binding Resolutions
Joshua Frank
Unsafe in Any Seas: Cruising with Ralph Nader?
Evelyn Pringle
"These Drugs are Poison to Some People"
Stephen Fleischman
Let's Hear It for Chuck Hagel!
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
Iraq in Fragments
Poets' Basement
Holt, Engel, Ford and Saavedra
Website of the Day
Flamenco Dali
February 2, 2007
Chris Kutalik
The
Meanest Industry
R. Gibson /
E. W. Ross
Cutting the Schools-to-War Pipeline
Pam Martens
America's "Money Honey" as Corporate Matchmaker: Maria
Bartiromo and the Co-Branding of CNBC and Citigroup
John Feffer
Picturing the President
Daryll E. Ray
Why the Family Farm is Good for Rural America
Ronald Bruce
St. John
Apartheid By Any Other Name
Mitchel Cohen
Listen Gore: Some Inconvenient Truths About the Politics of Environmental
Crisis
Website of
the Day
The Real Issue is Empire
February 1, 2007
Diane Farsetta
An
Army Thousands More: How PR Firms and Major Media Military Recruiters
Marjorie Cohn
Bush
Targets Iran: Cruise Missile Diplomacy
Mark Scaramella
Our
Founding War Profiteers
Ranni Amiri
Senator Prejudice: the Day Joe Biden Threatened to Kick My Ass
Christopher Ketcham
Die, TV!
Winston Warfield
Art Panic Hits Boston!
Corporate Crime Reporter
Jailing the Artists, Not the Executives: the Great Boston Art
Panic, Turner Broadcasting and the AG Who Won't Pursue Corporate
Crime
Thomas P. Healy
Adios Molly Ivins: Populist Journalism and Never Dull
Website of the Dau
The Ordeal of Gary Tyler
January
31, 2007
Patrick Cockburn
Waco
of Iraq?: US "Victory" Cult Leader was a "Massacre"
Jean Bricmont
What
is the Decisive "Clash" of Our Time?
Tao Ruspoli
CounterViews: a Conversation with Dr. Susan Block on Sex, Politics
and Liberation
James T. Phillips
Flashbacks de Jour: Photographing War
William Johnson
Worker Reistance at Smithfield Foods
Tim Wilkinson
A Hawk in Drag: Dershowitz and the Iraq War
Evelyn Pringle
The Judge, the Reporter and the Secret Zyprexa Documents
Joshua Frank
What America Really Needs to Hear
Ramzy Baroud
Shameless in Gaza
Mickey Z.
Nader Still in the Crosshairs
Website of the Day
What's Goin' On?
|
March
7, 2007
A
CounterPunch Special Investigation
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 - "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."
The Israeli
"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-Qaedaconnected
suspects lived and operated near one another, in some cases less
than half a mile apart, for various periods during 200001
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 pep- pered 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 Ketcham's sidebar story -- "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 Israeli- American 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
watch- listing 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.
See Also:
The
Kuala Lumpur Deceit: a CIA Cover Up by Christopher Ketcham
Ketcham's
Story: Coming in From the Cold by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
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 www.christopherketcham.com.
He can be reached at: cketcham99@mindspring.com
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