“Lucky Larry” Silverstein
You’ve got to be lucky to make a $4 Billion killing
on a 6-month investment of $124 Million ...
Larry Silverstein is the New York property tycoon who purchased the entire WTC complex just 6 months prior to the 9/11 attacks. That was the first time in its 33-year history the complex had EVER changed ownership.
Mr. Silverstein’s first order of business as the new owner was to change the company responsible for the security of the complex. The new security company he hired was Securacom (now Stratasec). George W. Bush's brother, Marvin Bush, was on its board of directors, and Marvin’s cousin, Wirt Walker III, was its CEO.
According to public records, not only did Securacom provide electronic security for the World Trade Center, it also covered Dulles International Airport and United Airlines — two key players in the 9/11 attacks.
The company was backed by an investment firm, the Kuwait-American Corp., also linked for many years to the Bush family. KuwAm has been linked to the Bush family financially since the Gulf War. One of its principals and a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, Mishal Yousef Saud al Sabah, served on the board of Stratesec.
Now, consider: The members of a small cabal owned the WTC complex, controlled its electronic security, and also controlled the security not only for one of the airlines whose aircraft were hijacked on 9/11, but the airport from which they originated.
Another little “coincidence” -- Mr. Silversten, who made a down-payment of $124 million on this $3.2 billion complex, promptly insured it for $7 Billion. Not only that, he covered the complex against “terrorist attacks”.
Following the attacks, Silverstein filed TWO insurance claims for the maximum amount of the policy ($7B), based on the two -- in Silverstein's view -- separate attacks. The insurance company, Swiss Re, paid Mr. Silverstein $4.6 Billion — a princely return on a relatively paltry investment of $124 million.
There’s more. You see, the World Trade Towers were not the real estate plum we are led to believe. From an economic standpoint, the trade center -- subsidized since its inception by the NY Port Authority -- has never functioned, nor was it intended to function, unprotected in the rough-and-tumble real estate marketplace. How could Silverstein Group have been ignorant of this?
The towers required some $200 million in renovations and improvements, most of which related to removal and replacement of building materials declared to be health hazards in the years since the towers were built. It was well-known by the city of New York that the WTC was an asbestos bombshell. For years, the Port Authority treated the building like an aging dinosaur, attempting on several occasions to get permits to demolish the building for liability reasons, but being turned down due the known asbestos problem. Further, it was well-known the only reason the building was still standing until 9/11 was because it was too costly to disassemble the twin towers floor by floor since the Port Authority was prohibited legally from demolishing the buildings.
The projected cost to disassemble the towers: $15 Billion. Just the scaffolding for the operation was estimated at $2.4 Billion!
In other words, the Twin Towers were condemned structures. How convenient that an unexpected “terrorist” attack demolished the buildings completely.
WTC Building 7 was a part of the WTC complex, and covered under the same insurance policy. This 47-storey steel-framed structure, which was NOT struck by an aircraft, mysteriously collapsed 8 hours later that same day into its own footprint at freefall speed — exactly in the manner of the Twin Towers.
How could this have happened? Mr. Silverstein gave the world the answer when he slipped up during a PBS television interview a year later, on 9/11/2002:
"I remember getting a call from the...er...fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, 'We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.' And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse."
As anyone who knows anything about construction can tell you, “Pull” is common industry jargon for a controlled demolition.
One thing is for sure, the decision to 'pull' WTC 7 would have delighted many people. Especially because it has been reported that thousands of sensitive files relating to some of the biggest financial scams in history — including Enron and WorldCom -- were stored in the offices of some of the building’s tenants:
US Secret Service
NSA
CIA
IRS
BATF
SEC
NAIC Securities
Salomon Smith Barney
American Express Bank International
Standard Chartered Bank
Provident Financial Management
ITT Hartford Insurance Group
Federal Home Loan Bank
The Securities and Exchange Commission has not quantified the number of active cases in which substantial files were destroyed by the collapse of WTC 7. Reuters news service and the Los Angeles Times published reports estimating them at 3,000 to 4,000. They include the agency's major inquiry into the manner in which investment banks divvied up hot shares of initial public offerings during the high-tech boom. ...
"Ongoing investigations at the New York SEC will be dramatically affected because so much of their work is paper-intensive," said Max Berger of New York's Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann. "This is a disaster for these cases."
Citigroup says some information that the committee is seeking [about WorldCom] was destroyed in the Sept. 11 terror attack on the World Trade Center. Salomon had offices in 7 World Trade Center. The bank says that back-up tapes of corporate emails from September 1998 through December 2000 were stored at the building and destroyed in the attack.
Inside WTC 7 was the US Secret Service's largest field office with more than 200 employees. "All the evidence that we stored at 7 World Trade, in all our cases, went down with the building," according to US Secret Service Special Agent David Curran.
What a neat, complete, and fortuitous turn of events was 9/11.
Incidentally, it’s worth noting that one of Lucky Larry’s closest friends — a person with whom it’s said he speaks almost daily by phone — is none other than former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
More on that cozy little relationship later...
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LARRY SILVERSTEIN PULLS IT OFF
by Barry Chamish
18 April 2006
I was in Cyprus for five days where I stayed with Jim Searcy. He had just produced a 9-11 CD and noted, "They screwed up Building 7 and UA Flight 93. If people figure those out, the scandal will fly."
I answered him, "They're already figured out. It's the same scandal."
Jim didn't know what I was saying. And when I got home I looked on the internet. No one had put it together. I can't believe this, but you're hearing a new 9-11 fact.
Flight 93 was supposed to knock Building 7 down and the building was jammed with explosives for that moment. But instead, the plane fell in Pennsylvania, so owner Larry Silverstein had to bring the building down by himself.
But first some facts. Building 7 fell in a controlled demolition. Larry said so. Do you know how how long it takes to rig a building for a perfect fall? Larry broke the record by a few weeks, [allegedly] rigging his building in a few hours, while the twin towers still smoldered beside him and WTC was on fire.
Yet, despite the paramount importance of the remains, they were hauled away and melted down as quickly as possible. The steel was sold to scrap metals vendors and most was soon on ships bound for China and India. Some of the smaller pieces and a few token large pieces of steel marked 'save' were allowed to be inspected at Fresh Kills landfill by FEMA's BPAT volunteers. Officials running the "cleanup operation" took pains to make sure the structural steel didn't end up anywhere but in blast furnaces.
They installed GPS locater devices on each of the trucks hauling loads from Ground Zero at a cost of $1000 each.
Meanwhile, Flight 93 had to be shot down. Its nose was found eight miles from the tail in a Pennsylvania field.
Such stories were made up to explain the mess!
The terrorists let the toughest guys get together to use their personal handsets to call home. Someone heard, "Let's get rolling, boys." They rushed the cockpit and saved the nation.
Except cellphones don't work from 35,000 feet up.
CeeCee Lyles husband said that he saw the caller ID, Ed Felt had called from a bathroom, and Airphone cords don't reach that far.
As a matter of fact, in a bathroom, one would expect that it would be harder to make a call, probably bringing down the power about in 1/2 (3dB).
Ted Olson first said that Barbara had used a cell phone, then he said she was in the bathroom, then he said she forgot her purse and had to borrow a credit card from someone to make an airphone call. His story kept changing.
If you look at the flight maps, most of the calls for flight 93 "should" have been made at 35,000ft or even above.
http://team8plus.org/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?315
And who were the select passengers on board? Pretty unusual and tiny group, no?
Flight 93 had only forty four people in total, including four suspected hijackers. Thirty
seven passengers (excluding crew) on a plane that holds around two hundred people
http://team8plus.org/content.php?article.8
At least 23 of the 44 passengers bought tickets at the last minute !
Also several people came from flight 91 that was cancelled.
Did ANYONE buy tickets for flight 93 ahead of time???
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ZIONIST CIRCLES BENEFIT FROM WTC COLLAPSE Who benefited when the World Trade Center towers collapsed? Who controlled access prior to Sept. 11? These burning questions continue to be ignored by the mainstream media.
By Christopher Bollyn
Larry Silverstein, lease-holder of the World Trade Center, and Lewis Eisenberg, the man who negotiated the lease, have both held high positions in the largest Israeli fundraising institution in the United States.
Silverstein and his Australian-Israeli partner, Frank Lowy, are the real estate developers who obtained 99-year leases on the rental and retail spaces of the World Trade Center shortly before the catastrophe
of Sept. 11.
Although their leased property is destroyed, the lease-holders themselves stand to gain billions of dollars from insurance. Eisenberg, the former chairman of the Port Authority of New York and
New Jersey, personally arranged the privatization of the World Trade Center property and oversaw the negotiations that delivered the leases into the private hands of Silverstein and Lowy.
Eisenberg was [rewarded by being] appointed finance chairman of [George Bush's] Republican National Committee.
How did these well-known supporters of Israel come to control the property? What actually caused the buildings to collapse? There are two schools of thought.
There is the "official" theory that hijacked planes crashed into the towers and the subsequent fuel fires caused the twin towers to fall. The second theory, however, argues that other devices, such as explosive charges, were used to collapse the towers in a kind of controlled demolition for which the planes provided a useful
distraction.
There remain significant amounts of eyewitness testimony and evidence to support the theory that explosives contributed to the collapse of the twin towers and Seven World Trade Center, which fell for no apparent reason during the afternoon of Sept. 11.
Seven WTC was a 47-story building built by Silver stein on property leased from the Port Authority.
There are video recordings and photographs which appear to show explosions occurring at the base of the towers prior to and during the collapses.
In a remarkable three-dimensional image published in the German
magazine GEO EPOCHE, which dedicated the December 2001 issue to 9-11,
there are five or six large and deep craters to be seen beneath the
rubble. At least four huge craters are seen where the twin towers stood
and one is squarely at the center of Seven-WTC. Another photograph
shows what appears to be a sand-colored blast originating at the base
of one of the towers and growing into an immense cloud of dust.
If explosive charges were used to collapse the towers, the question of
who had access to the buildings prior to 9-11 emerges. Silverstein
controlled access to the towers from the end of July when he obtained
the 99-year lease.
Who Silverstein is and how he obtained these leases for a fraction of
their value are questions that have been completely avoided by the
mainstream media.
Silverstein is the New York City commercial landlord who built Seven
World Trade Center in 1987. Silverstein won, with Lowy's Westfield
America, a 99-year right-to-lease of the World Trade Center from
Eisenberg, the former chairman of the Port Authority of New York and
New Jersey on July 26, 2001. While Silverstein controlled the 10.6
million-square-foot office space in the WTC complex, Westfield leased
the 427,000 square-foot retail mall.
Silverstein and Eisenberg have both held leadership positions with the
United Jewish Appeal (UJA), a billion dollar Zionist "charity"
organization.
Silverstein is a former chairman of United Jewish Appeal Federation of
Jewish Philanthropies of New York, Inc. This is an umbrella
organization which raises hundreds of millions of dollars every year
for its network of hundreds of member Zionist agencies in the United
States and Israel.
Eisenberg, who was instrumental in obtaining the lease for Silverstein,
sits on the Planning Board of UJA/ United Jewish Federation.
Eisenberg was the key person in negotiating the lease for Silverstein
and Westfield, who were in fact the low bidders in the final bidding
process on the 110-story towers.
While the high bid came from Vornado Realty Trust, its path was
reportedly blocked by demands to pay back taxes. In March 2001 the
company pulled out after failing to reach a purchase agreement with
Eisenberg. When Vornado pulled out, the door was opened for Silverstein
and Lowy. Lowy obtained the retail lease in April while it took Silverstein
until the end of July to obtain funding for the down payment.
One lender, GMAC Commercial Mortgage Corp., accused Silverstein of
misallocating insurance money paid out after the Sept. 11 attack. In a
complaint filed on Jan. 14 in the State Supreme Court in Manhattan, the
lender, GMAC Commercial Mortgage Corp., asserts that Silver stein used
some insurance money to pay lobbyists in Albany and in Washington to
try to limit his liability to the victims.
Eisenberg is a "New York moneyman" and a former Democrat who supports
the liberal wing of the Republican Party. He has donated hundreds of
thousands of dollars to "pro-choice" Republican candidates. The newly
appointed finance chairman for the Republican National Comittee,
Eisenberg has also served as vice president of the strong arm of the
Israeli lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (APIAC).
When New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman appointed Eisenberg
chairman of the Port Authority in February 1996, Forbes magazine said
the formerly disgraced Goldman Sachs partner "got real lucky."
"What a strange political appointment," the magazine said, "considering
the part he played in the sex scandal that rocked Goldman and the
financial community in the late 1980s."
Eisenberg quit Goldman Sachs after his secretary accused him of
sexually harassing her.
"The truth ended up being that, yes, they had a brief affair, but, no,
she was never harassed," Forbes wrote, adding, "all charges were
dismissed, though Eisenberg did resign."
Silverstein is engaged in a lawsuit to double his insurance pay-off and
may win as much as $7.1 billion from the insurance companies by arguing
that the destruction of the towers was two insured events instead of
one. The property was insured for $3.55 billion. Silverstein Properties
Inc. had asked the judge to rule on the one-loss-or-two issue in a
lawsuit against 20 of the 22 insurers on the property. District Judge
John S. Martin Jr. rejected a motion for summary judgment in June.
A trial is scheduled Sept. 3, although a request for a delay by the
insurers is under consideration.
While Silverstein Properties, a family-owned business, is "disappointed that the issue was not decided at this time, they are confident that they will prevail at trial," said Howard Rubenstein, a spokesman for Silverstein.
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Alex Jones Responds To Ben Chertoff,
Popular Mechanics 9/11 Debunking Campaign
Popular Mechanics featured a so-called 'serious analysis' of alternative explanations behind 9/11 in their March issue.
In actual fact, the entire article was a straw man exercise. Popular Mechanics attributed false arguments to researchers and then attacked them. On top of that they lied outright by claiming that there was only one intercept of errant aircraft before 9/11.
... Ben Chertoff, the chief editor of the piece, [is the COUSIN of] Michael Chertoff, the new Secretery of Homeland Security, an agency which owes its very existence to the establishment version of the 9/11 attack.
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Murdoch's Deeply Hidden Jewish Roots -- A Biography
By Christopher Bollyn – American Free Press
Murdoch “became an American citizen for business reasons,” according to Richard H. Curtiss, editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. Keith Rupert was born in Melbourne, Australia, on March 11, 1931. “Rupert’s father, Sir Keith Murdoch, was a newspaper publisher, and his mother an Orthodox Jew,” Curtiss wrote, “although Murdoch never offers that information in his biographies.”
Murdoch’s father married Elisabeth Joy Greene, daughter of Rupert Greene in 1928. They had one son, Keith Rupert and three daughters. Later in life, Keith Rupert chose to use Rupert, the first name of his Jewish maternal grandfather.
The young Keith Rupert was educated at Australia’s fashionable Geelong private school, and went on to the elitist and aristocratic Oxford University in England, according to Candour (UK) magazine.
“Rupert’s father Sir Keith Murdoch attained his prominent position in Australian society through a fortuitous marriage to the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family, née Elisabeth Joy Greene. Through his wife’s connections, Keith Murdoch was subsequently promoted from reporter to chairman of the British-owned newspaper where he worked. There was enough money to buy himself a knighthood of the British realm, two newspapers in Adelaide, South Australia, and a radio station in a faraway mining town,” Candour wrote in 1984. “For some reason, Murdoch has always tried to hide the fact that his pious mother brought him up as a Jew.”
While Murdoch may have “tried to hide” his Jewish roots, he has been quite forthright about his support for extreme right-wing Zionists, such as Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon.
Netanyahu, who wrote a book entitled The War on Terror: How the West Can Win in 1986, is a frequent commentator on Murdoch’s Fox News.
Murdoch’s support for Zionism extremists is well known and a matter of record. As New York Governor George Pataki said, “There is no newspaper in the U.S. more supportive of Israel than the [Murdoch’s] New York Post.”
It is through a network of Zionist organizations, in which Murdoch plays a central role, that Murdoch is connected to the individuals who arranged the privatization – and obtained control of the World Trade Center – shortly before its destruction.
These key individuals are: Larry Silverstein and the former Israeli commando Frank Lowy, the lease holders of dubious repute who gained control of the WTC property six weeks before 9/11, and Port Authority Chairman Lewis M. Eisenberg, who authorized the transfer of the leases.
Murdoch belongs to, and has been honored by, a number of leading Zionist organizations in which Silverstein, Lowy, and Eisenberg all hold senior positions. These organizations include the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the United Jewish Appeal (UJA), and the New York-based Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.
Fifty days before 9/11, Silverstein Properties and Lowy’s Westfield America secured 99-year leases on the WTC. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey turned control of the World Trade Center over to the private hands of Silverstein and Lowy on July 24, 2001.
Silverstein and Lowy then took control of the 10.6 million-square-foot complex, which included the twin towers office buildings and two nine-story office buildings. Silverstein and the former Israeli commando Lowy then controlled all access to the World Trade Center.
Lowy leased the shopping concourse called the Mall at the World Trade Center, which comprised about 427,000 square feet of retail space.
“Six weeks before the WTC towers were destroyed, the Port Authority completed the process of leasing them for 99 years to Larry Silverstein, the developer who had built 7 World Trade Center [which mysteriously self-demolished at 5:25 p.m. on 9/11].
“Simultaneously, the retail space underneath the complex was leased to Westfield America, the US division of an Australian company that is one of the world’s largest operators of shopping malls.” Paul Goldberger wrote in New Yorker, May 20, 2002.
“Silverstein and Westfield were given the right to rebuild the structures if they were destroyed, and Westfield has the right to expand the retail space by 30 percent,” Goldberger wrote.
Silverstein is suing for some $7.2 billion in insurance money for the loss of the destroyed World Trade Center – and his expected earnings – for property he had leased with a down payment of $100 million – of borrowed funds.
**Note: After a court battle Larry walked away with an "official" $2 billion ... which should see him right even after he has rebuilt the Towers.
Murdoch the Zionist
“Murdoch is a close friend of Ariel Sharon,” Sam Kiley, The Times (UK) veteran journalist on the Middle East wrote about the man who took over the once famous British paper. Kiley said Murdoch’s friendship with the Israeli prime minister had caused senior staff at the paper to rewrite important copy.
“Murdoch’s executives were so afraid of irritating him that, when I pulled off a little scoop of tracking down and photographing the unit in the Israeli army which killed Mohammed al-Durrah, the 12-year-old boy whose death was captured on film and became the iconic image of the conflict, I was asked to file the piece ‘without mentioning the dead kid.’” Kiley wrote. “After that conversation, I was left wordless, so I quit.”
Sharon and Murdoch are old friends. On Oct. 15, 1982, a month after the massacres of thousands of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps of Beirut, war crimes which occurred under Sharon’s direct command, the Israeli defense minister held meetings with Rupert Murdoch and others, reportedly in order to advance his “West Bank real estate grab.”
The visit with Sharon included a trip for Murdoch and his editors from New York and London that “took them on a bird’s-eye tour of Israel aboard a helicopter gunship, flying over the Golan Heights, West Bank and settlements.”
“I have always believed in the future of Israel and the goals of the international Jewish community,” Murdoch said at a spring fund-raiser for the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust on April 29, 2001.
From the beginning, News Corp., his global media company, “has been supportive of the Jewish national cause,” Murdoch said.
Larry Silverstein, who had not yet acquired the lease on the World Trade Center, attended the fund-raiser with Murdoch and reportedly said about museum chairman Robert Morgenthau’s plans to expand the museum: “I’ll support you…as long as you keep it under 110 stories.”
Murdoch and the ADL
“Henry Kissinger, Rupert Murdoch and Mortimer Zuckerman are on the [ADL] dinner committee,” according to a recent New York Times report on the ADL’s recent fund-raiser in which the controversial Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi received the ADL’s Distinguished Statesman Award.
Silverstein and Eisenberg have both held senior leadership positions with the United Jewish Appeal (UJA), a billion dollar Zionist “charity” organization, to which Murdoch and Lowy generously contribute. In 1997, Henry Kissinger presented Murdoch with the UJA’s award for “Humanitarian of the Year.”
Silverstein is a former chairman of UJA. This organization raises hundreds of millions of dollars every year for a network of Zionist agencies in the United States and Israel. Eisenberg, who was instrumental in obtaining the lease for Silverstein, is on the Planning Board of UJA.
Eisenberg in his role with the Port Authority was the key person who negotiated the 99-year leases for Silverstein and Frank Lowy’s Westfield America, who were in fact the low-bidders for the lease on the 110-story towers and the retail mall.
Murdoch and the Czechoslovakian-born Israeli commando Frank Lowy, a former fighter in Israel’s Golani Brigade, who emigrated to Australia in the 1950s, have had a long friendship, which Murdoch recounted during an American Australian Association fund-raising dinner in honor of Frank’s son, Peter S. Lowy, in New York on November 20, 2002. Larry Silverstein and his wife also attended the American Australian event.
Some reporters refer to the American Australian Association, whose membership includes James Wolfensohn, the president of the World Bank, who raised cash for Rupert Murdoch when he first expanded into the United States, as “the kangaroo mafia.”
“Frank was a brave and determined fighter,” Rafi Kocer, Lowy’s former commander, said. Lowy has donated some $350,000 to build a memorial museum in Israel for his former brigade.
Today, Lowy and his three sons control Westfield Corporation, one of the largest operators of shopping centers in the United States – and the world.
Insured Against Terrorist Attacks
On September 12, 2001, The Jerusalem Post reported: “Frank Lowy, who emigrated to Australia from Israel in 1952, owns the 99-year lease for the 425,000 square foot retail portion of the destroyed World Trade Center…Westfield said today that it has insurance cover against terrorist attacks and its earnings will not be materially affected.”
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British Broadsheet Links Mossad to 9/11
The respected New York Jewish newspaper, The Forward, reported in March 2002 that it had received a briefing on the case of the five Israelis arrested for espionage on 9/11 from a US official who was regularly updated by law enforcement agencies.
This is what he told The Forward: “Their assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it.” He added that “the FBI concluded that they “did not know anything about 9/11” but "were spying on local Arabs" -- "coincidentally," the very same "local Arabs" who carried out the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center ...
by Meil Mackay
There was ruin and terror in Manhattan, but, over the Hudson River in New Jersey, a handful of men were dancing. As the World Trade Centre burned and crumpled, the five men celebrated and filmed the worst atrocity ever committed on American soil as it played out before their eyes. Who do you think they were? Palestinians? Saudis? Iraqis, even? Al-Qaeda, surely? Wrong on all counts. They were Israelis – and at least two of them were Israeli intelligence agents, working for Mossad, the equivalent of MI6 or the CIA.
Their discovery and arrest that morning is a matter of indisputable fact. To those who have investigated just what the Israelis were up to that day, the case raises one dreadful possibility: that Israeli intelligence had been shadowing the al-Qaeda hijackers as they moved from the Middle East through Europe and into America where they trained as pilots and prepared to suicide-bomb the symbolic heart of the United States. And the motive? To bind America in blood and mutual suffering to the Israeli cause.
After the attacks on New York and Washington, the former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was asked what the terrorist strikes would mean for USA-Israeli relations. He said: “It’s very good.”
Then he corrected himself, adding: “Well, it’s not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy [for Israel from Americans].”
If Israel’s closest ally felt the collective pain of mass civilian deaths at the hands of terrorists, then Israel would have an unbreakable bond with the world’s only hyperpower and an effective free hand in dealing with the Palestinian terrorists who had been murdering its innocent civilians as the second Intifada dragged on throughout 2001.
It’s not surprising that the New Jersey housewife who first spotted the five Israelis and their white van wants to preserve her anonymity. She’s insisted that she only be identified as Maria. A neighbour in her apartment building had called her just after the first strike on the Twin Towers. Maria grabbed a pair of binoculars and, like millions across the world, she watched the horror of the day unfold. As she gazed at the burning towers, she noticed a group of men kneeling on the roof of a white van in her parking lot. Here’s her recollection: “They seemed to be taking a movie. They were like happy, you know … they didn’t look shocked to me. I thought it was strange.”
Maria jotted down the van’s registration and called the police. The FBI was alerted and soon there was a state-wide all points bulletin put out for the apprehension of the van and its occupants. The cops traced the number, establishing that it belonged to a company called Urban Moving. Police Chief John Schmidig said: “We got an alert to be on the lookout for a white Chevrolet van with New Jersey registration and writing on the side. Three individuals were seen celebrating in Liberty State Park after the impact. They said three people were jumping up and down.”
By 4pm on the afternoon of September 11, the van was spotted near New Jersey’s Giants stadium. A squad car pulled it over and inside were five men in their 20s. They were hustled out of the car with guns levelled at their heads and handcuffed. In the car was $4700 in cash, a couple of foreign passports and a pair of box cutters – the concealed Stanley Knife-type blades used by the 19 hijackers who’d flown jetliners into the World Trade Centre and Pentagon just hours before. There were also fresh pictures of the men standing with the smouldering wreckage of the Twin Towers in the background. One image showed a hand flicking a lighter in front of the devastated buildings, like a fan at a pop concert.
The driver of the van then told the arresting officers: “We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.” His name was Sivan Kurzberg. The other four passengers were Kurzberg’s brother Paul, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari. The men were dragged off to prison and transferred out of the custody of the FBI’s Criminal Division and into the hands of their Foreign Counterintelligence Section – the bureau’s anti-espionage squad.
A warrant was issued for a search of the Urban Moving premises in Weehawken in New Jersey. Boxes of papers and computers were removed. The FBI questioned the firm’s Israeli owner, Dominik Otto Suter, but when agents returned to re-interview him a few days later, he was gone. An employee of Urban Moving said his co-workers had laughed about the Manhattan attacks the day they happened. “I was in tears,” the man said. “These guys were joking and that bothered me. These guys were like, ‘Now America knows what we go through.’”
Vince Cannistraro, former chief of operations for counter-terrorism with the CIA, says the red flag went up among investigators when it was discovered that some of the Israelis’ names were found in a search of the national intelligence database.
Cannistraro says many in the USA intelligence community believed that some of the Israelis were working for Mossad and there was speculation over whether Urban Moving had been “set up or exploited for the purpose of launching an intelligence operation against radical Islamists”.
This makes it clear that there was no suggestion whatsoever from within American intelligence that the Israelis were colluding with the 9/11 hijackers –only that they knew the attacks were going to happen but did nothing to stop them.
After the owner vanished, the offices of Urban Moving looked as if they’d been closed down in a big hurry. Mobile phones were littered about, the office phones were still connected and the property of at least a dozen clients were stacked up in the warehouse. The owner had cleared out his family home in New Jersey and returned to Israel.
Two weeks after their arrest, the Israelis were still in detention, held on immigration charges. Then a judge ruled that they should be deported. But the CIA scuppered the deal and the five remained in custody for another two months. Some went into solitary confinement, all underwent two polygraph tests and at least one underwent up to seven lie detector sessions before they were eventually deported at the end of November 2001. Paul Kurzberg refused to take a lie detector test for 10 weeks, but then failed it. His lawyer said he was reluctant to take the test as he had once worked for Israeli intelligence in another country.
Nevertheless, their lawyer, Ram Horvitz, dismissed the allegations as “stupid and ridiculous”. Yet USA government sources still maintained that the Israelis were collecting information on the fundraising activities of groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Mark Regev, of the Israeli embassy in Washington, would have none of that and he said the allegations were “simply false”. The men themselves claimed they’d read about the World Trade Centre attacks on the internet, couldn’t see it from their office and went to the parking lot for a better view. Their lawyers and the embassy say their ghoulish and sinister celebrations as the Twin Towers blazed and thousands died were due to youthful foolishness.
The respected New York Jewish newspaper, The Forward, reported in March 2002, however, that it had received a briefing on the case of the five Israelis from a USA official who was regularly updated by law enforcement agencies. This is what he told The Forward: “The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it.” He added that “the conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs”, but the men were released because they “did not know anything about 9/11”.
Back in Israel, several of the men discussed what happened on an Israeli talk show. One of them made this remarkable comment: “The fact is, we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event.”
But how can you document an event unless you know it is going to happen?
We are now deep in conspiracy theory territory. But there is more than a little circumstantial evidence to show that Mossad – whose motto is “By way of deception, thou shalt do war” – was spying on Arab extremists in the USA and may have known that September 11 was in the offing, yet decided to withhold vital information from their American counterparts which could have prevented the terror attacks.
Following September 11, 2001, more than 60 Israelis were taken into custody under the Patriot Act and immigration laws. One highly placed investigator told Carl Cameron of Fox News that there were “tie-ins” between the Israelis and September 11; the hint was clearly that they’d gathered intelligence on the planned attacks but kept it to themselves. The Fox News source refused to give details, saying: “Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.” Fox News is not noted for its condemnation of Israel; it’s a ruggedly patriotic news channel owned by Rupert Murdoch and was President Bush’s main cheerleader in the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq.
Another group of around 140 Israelis were detained prior to September 11, 2001, in the USA as part of a widespread investigation into a suspected espionage ring run by Israel inside the USA. Government documents refer to the spy ring as an “organised intelligence-gathering operation” designed to “penetrate government facilities”. Most of those arrested had served in the Israeli armed forces – but military service is compulsory in Israel. Nevertheless, a number had an intelligence background.
The first glimmerings of an Israeli spying exercise in the USA came to light in spring 2001, when the FBI sent a warning to other federal agencies alerting them to be wary of visitors calling themselves “Israeli art students” and attempting to bypass security at federal buildings in order to sell paintings. A Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) report suggested the Israeli calls “may well be an organised intelligence-gathering activity”. Law enforcement documents say that the Israelis “targeted and penetrated military bases” as well as the DEA, FBI and dozens of government facilities, including secret offices and the unlisted private homes of law enforcement and intelligence personnel.
A number of Israelis questioned by the authorities said they were students from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, but Pnina Calpen, a spokeswoman for the Israeli school, did not recognise the names of any Israelis mentioned as studying there in the past 10 years. A federal report into the so-called art students said many had served in intelligence and electronic signal intercept units during their military service.
According to a 61-page report, drafted after an investigation by the DEA and the USA immigration service, the Israelis were organised into cells of four to six people. The significance of what the Israelis were doing didn’t emerge until after September 11, 2001, when a report by a French intelligence agency noted “according to the FBI, Arab terrorists and suspected terror cells lived in Phoenix, Arizona, as well as in Miami and Hollywood, Florida, from December 2000 to April 2001 in direct proximity to the Israeli spy cells”.
The report contended that Mossad agents were spying on Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehi, two of leaders of the 9/11 hijack teams. The pair had settled in Hollywood, Florida, along with three other hijackers, after leaving Hamburg – where another Mossad team was operating close by.
Hollywood in Florida is a town of just 25,000 souls. The French intelligence report says the leader of the Mossad cell in Florida rented apartments “right near the apartment of Atta and al-Shehi”. More than a third of the Israeli “art students” claimed residence in Florida. Two other Israelis connected to the art ring showed up in Fort Lauderdale. At one time, eight of the hijackers lived just north of the town.
Put together, the facts do appear to indicate that Israel knew that 9/11, or at least a large-scale terror attack, was about to take place on American soil, but did nothing to warn the USA. But that’s not quite true. In August 2001, the Israelis handed over a list of terrorist suspects – on it were the names of four of the September 11 hijackers. Significantly, however, the warning said the terrorists were planning an attack “outside the United States”.
The Israeli embassy in Washington has dismissed claims about the spy ring as “simply untrue”. The same denials have been issued repeatedly by the five Israelis seen high-fiving each other as the World Trade Centre burned in front of them. Their lawyer, Ram Horwitz, insisted his clients were not intelligence officers. Irit Stoffer, the Israeli foreign minister, said the allegations were “completely untrue”. She said the men were arrested because of “visa violations”, adding: “The FBI investigated those cases because of 9/11.”
Jim Margolin, an FBI spokesman in New York, implied that the public would never know the truth, saying: “If we found evidence of unauthorised intelligence operations that would be classified material.” Yet, Israel has long been known, according to USA administration sources, for “conducting the most aggressive espionage operations against the USA of any USA ally”. Seventeen years ago, Jonathan Pollard, a civilian working for the American Navy, was jailed for life for passing secrets to Israel. At first, Israel claimed Pollard was part of a rogue operation, but the government later took responsibility for his work.
It has always been a long-accepted agreement among allies – such as Britain and America or America and Israel – that neither country will jail a “friendly spy” nor shame the allied country for espionage. Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at Boston’s Political Research Associates and an expert in intelligence, says: “It’s a backdoor agreement between allies that says that if one of your spies gets caught and didn’t do too much harm, he goes home. It goes on all the time. The official reason is always visa violation.”
What we are left with, then, is fact sullied by innuendo. Certainly, it seems, Israel was spying within the borders of the United States and it is equally certain that the targets were Islamic extremists probably linked to September 11. But did Israel know in advance that the Twin Towers would be hit and the world plunged into a war without end; a war which would give Israel the power to strike its enemies almost without limit? That’s a conspiracy theory too far, perhaps. But the unpleasant feeling that, in this age of spin and secrets, we do not know the full and unadulterated truth won’t go away. Maybe we can guess, but it’s for the history books to discover and decide.
Published Wednesday, November 5th, 2003
Article courtesy of Scottish-based Herald Newspapers
Comment
Funny, since the “hijackers” turned out to be alive (Google it!) and no support network has been found (no convictions anywhere), the only people we know were involved in 9-11 are Israelis.
Posted by Anonymous on Monday, 29th March, 2004 - 08:26am GMT
