Israel's Role In 9/11
FBI evidence supports prior knowledge or complicity
Philip Giraldi • May 28, 2019
The
tale of 9/11 will just not go away, largely because it is clear to
anyone who reads the lengthy 9/11
Commission Report that many issues
that should have been subject to inquiry were ignored for what would
appear to be political reasons. The George W. Bush Administration quite
obviously did not want to assume any blame for what had happened and
that bias also extended to providing cover for U.S. “allies,” most
particularly Saudi Arabia and Israel. Those who have sought the truth
about 9/11 have been persistent in their attempts to find out
information that was suppressed but they have been blocked repeatedly in
spite of numerous FOIA requests.
Now,
eighteen years after the event, there has been something like a
breakthrough, penetrating the wall of silence erected by the government.
FBI reports on the possible Israeli role in 9/11 were released on May 7th
and they serve to support speculation by myself and other former
intelligence officers that Israel, at a minimum, had detailed prior
knowledge of what was to take place. More than that, Israeli
intelligence officers working in the United States might well have
enabled certain aspects of the conspiracy.
To recount some of what is already known and suspected, one should first examine the 2016 release of a heavily edited and redacted 28 pages
long annex to the 9/11 Commission Report that explored the Saudi
Arabian role in the terrorist attack . The section concluded that the
Saudi government may have played a direct role in 9/11 by assisting two
of the hijackers, including a dry run exercise intended to learn how to
get into a plane’s cockpit. There was also considerable evidence
suggesting that wealthy Saudis and even members of the Royal Family had
been supporting and funding al-Qaeda.
But
far exceeding the Saudi role is the involvement of the Israeli
intelligence service Mossad, which was not subject to any serious
inquiry or investigation by U.S. intelligence or police agencies.
Israel, in spite of obvious involvement in 9/11, was not included in the
9/11 Commission Report despite the existence of an enormous Israeli
intelligence operation freely working in the United States that was
known to the FBI. Some of those Mossad officers were notably filmed
celebrating as the Twin Towers were burning and collapsing.
In
the year 2001 Israel was running a massive spying operation through a
number of cover companies in New Jersey, Florida and also on the west
coast that served as spying mechanisms for Mossad officers. The effort
was supported by the Mossad Station in Washington D.C. and included a
large number of volunteers, the so-called “art students” who traveled
around the U.S. selling various products at malls and outdoor markets.
The FBI was aware of the numerous Israeli students who were routinely
overstaying their visas and some in the Bureau certainly believed that
they were assisting their country’s intelligence service in some way,
but it proved difficult to actually link the students to undercover
operations, so they were regarded as a minor nuisance and were normally
left to the tender mercies of the inspectors at the Bureau of Customs
and Immigration.
American
law enforcement was also painfully aware that the Israelis were running
more sophisticated intelligence operations inside the United States,
many of which were focused on Washington’s military capabilities and
intentions. Some specialized intelligence units concentrated on
obtaining military and dual use technology. It was also known that
Israeli spies had penetrated the phone systems of the U.S. government,
to include those at the White House.
In
its annual classified counterespionage review, the FBI invariably places
Israel at the top for “friendly” countries that spy on the U.S. In
fact, the pre-9/11 Bureau did its best to stay on top of the problem,
but it rarely received any political support from the Justice Department
and White House if an espionage case involved Israelis. By one
estimate, more than 100 such cases were not prosecuted for political
reasons. Any Israeli caught in flagrante would most often be quietly
deported and most Americans who were helping Israel were let off with a
slap on the wrist.
But
the hands-off attitude towards Israel shifted dramatically when, on
September 11, 2001, a New Jersey housewife saw something from the window
of her apartment building, which overlooked the World Trade Center. She
watched as the buildings burned and crumbled but also noted something
strange. Three young men were kneeling on the roof of a white transit
van parked by the water’s edge, making a movie in which they featured
themselves high fiving and laughing in front of the catastrophic scene
unfolding behind them. The woman wrote down the license plate number of
the van and called the police, who responded quickly and soon both the
local force and the FBI began looking for the vehicle, which was
subsequently seen by other witnesses in various locations along the New
Jersey waterfront, its occupants “celebrating and filming.”
The
license plate number revealed that the van belonged to a New Jersey
registered company called Urban Moving Systems. At 4 p.m. the vehicle
was spotted and pulled over. Five men between the ages of 22 and 27
years old emerged and were detained at gunpoint and handcuffed. They
were all Israelis. One of them had $4,700 in cash hidden in his sock and
another had two foreign passports. Bomb sniffing dogs reacted to the
smell of explosives in the van, which had very little actual moving
equipment inside.
According
to the initial police report, the driver identified as Sivan Kurzberg,
stated “We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our
problems. The Palestinians are the problem.” The four other passengers
were Sivan’s brother Paul, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari.
The men were detained at the Bergen County jail in New Jersey before
being transferred the FBI’s Foreign Counterintelligence Section, which
handles allegations of spying.
After
the arrest, the FBI obtained a warrant to search Urban Moving System’s
Weehawken, N.J., offices. Papers and computers were seized. The company
owner Dominick Suter, also an Israeli, answered FBI questions but when a
follow-up interview was set up a few days later it was learned that he
had fled the country for Israel, putting both his business and home up
for sale. The office space and warehouse were abandoned. It was later
learned that Suter has been associated with at least fourteen businesses
in the United States, mostly in New Jersey and New York but also in
Florida. Suter and his wife Omit Levinson Suter were the owners of 1
Stop Cleaner located in Wellington Florida and Dominick was also
associated with Basia McDonnell, described as a Polish “holocaust
survivor,” as a business partner in yet another business called Value
Ad. Florida was a main focus for the Israeli intelligence operation in
the U.S. that was directed against Arabs.
The
five Israelis were among 140 Israelis arrested after 9/11, most of whom
had military backgrounds, including some who were trained in
“intelligence.” The five were held in Brooklyn, initially on charges
relating to visa fraud. FBI interrogators questioned them for more than
two months. Several were held in solitary confinement so they could not
communicate with each other and two of them were given repeated
polygraph exams, which they failed when claiming that they were nothing
more than students working summer jobs. The two men that the FBI focused
on most intensively were believed to be Mossad staff officers and the
other three were volunteers helping with surveillance.
The
Israelis were not exactly cooperative, but the FBI concluded from
documents obtained at their office in Weehawken that they were targeting
Arabs in New York and New Jersey, most particularly in the Paterson
N.J. area, which has the second largest Muslim population in the U.S.
They were particularly interested in local groups possibly linked to
Hamas and Hezbollah as well as in charities that might be used for fund
raising. The FBI also concluded that the Israelis had actually monitored
the activities of at least two of the 9/11 hijackers.
To
be sure, working on an intelligence operation does not necessarily imply
participation in either the planning or execution of something like
9/11, but there are Israeli fingerprints all over the place, with cover
companies and intelligence personnel often intersecting with locations
frequented by the hijackers.
Apart
from the interrogations of the five men from Weehawken, the U.S.
government has apparently never sought to find out what else the
Israelis might have known or were up to in September 2011. There are a
lot of dots that might well have been connected once upon a time, but
the trail has grown cold. Police records in New Jersey and New York
where the men were held have disappeared and FBI interrogation reports
have been inaccessible. Media coverage of the case also died, though the
five were referred to in the press as the “dancing Israelis” and by
some, more disparagingly, as the “dancing Shlomos.”
Inevitably,
the George W. Bush White House intervened. After 71 days in detention,
the five Israelis were released from prison by Attorney General John
Ashcroft, put on a plane, and deported. Two of the men later spoke about
their unpleasant experience in America on an Israeli talk show, one
explaining that their filming the fall of the Twin Towers was to
“document the event.” In 2004 the five men sued the United States
government for damages, alleging “that their detention was illegal and
that their civil rights were violated, suffering racial slurs, physical
violence, religious discrimination, rough interrogations, deprivation of
sleep, and many other offenses.” They were represented by Nitsana
Darshan-Leitner, who in the previous year had founded the Shurat HaDin
Israel Law Center which seeks to bankrupt groups that Israel considers
to be “terrorists.” Shurat HaDin is closely tied to the Israeli
government.
Now
it is just possible that the Urban Moving Israelis were indeed
uninvolved in 9/11 but nevertheless working for Mossad, which the
Israeli government even subsequently admitted, but the new evidence suggests
that the Israelis almost certainly had considerable prior knowledge and
were likely involved in what developed. The new information reveals
that minutes after the first plane struck the World Trade Center, five
Israelis had taken up position in the parking lot of the Doric Apartment
Complex in Union City, New Jersey, where they took pictures and filmed
the attacks while also celebrating the fall of the towers and “high
fiving.” One eyewitness
interviewed by the Bureau had seen the Israelis’ van circling the
building parking at 8:00 a.m. that day, more than 40 minutes prior to
the attack, indicating prior knowledge of what was about to happen.
The eyewitness testimony is supported by copies of photos taken by the men that the FBI seized. The photo reproductions were obtained via a FOIA request made by a private citizen
and are of poor quality, deliberately made so by the FBI to conceal
faces and other details. They constitute only 14 of over seventy photos
taken by the Israelis. Nevertheless, they clearly demonstrate that a
celebration was going on. One photo, intriguingly, shows Sivan Kurzberg
holding a lit lighter in front of the Manhattan Skyline on September 10th,
one day before 9/11. It was apparently taken at the Doric Complex on a
reconnoitering visit made on that day and suggests that Kurzberg was
simulating the attack on the towers on the following day.
Why
would the Israelis do it? Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
described 9/11 initially as “a good thing.” He was later quoted as saying
somewhat more expansively “We are benefiting from one thing, and that
is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle
in Iraq.” To be sure, 9/11 was a gift to Israel and it is a gift that
keeps on giving. America is at war in a number of Muslim countries and
its troops blanket the Middle East, to include a base in Israel
dedicated to the defense of that country. It is all a result of the
Global War on Terror and the GWOT started with 9/11. And just maybe it
was a fire that was ignited by Israel.
Philip
M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the
National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation
(Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S.
foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
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