CounterPunch

Tells the Facts and Names the Names


Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair

VOL. 14, NO. 3/4

2007, 3 & 4 of 22 issues.

Cheering Movers and Art Student Spies

Ketcham's Story

By Alexander Cockurn & Jeffrey St. Clair

Across these ten pages runs a sober, carefully reported narrative by a
well-respected reporter, Christopher Ketcham. He's a journalist whom
publications such as Harper's and Salon.com have been happy to publish.
Indeed, it was in May of 2002 that Salon published a 9,000-word story by
Ketcham on the so-called Israeli "art students" whose curious activities
before 9/11/2001, around U.S. government offices and in locations in many
cases identical to those frequented by the 9/11 hijackers, had been the
subject of much speculation.

In the fall of 2005 Ketcham ran across a short report in the Philadelphia
Times-Herald about a 166-page memorandum written by a retired corporate
lawyer named Gerald Shea. The memo, which Shea sent to the 9/11 Commission
and the relevant Senate and House intelligence committees, reviewed all
publicly known information about the activities of possible Israeli
intelligence operatives working in New Jersey, Florida and elsewhere, and
posed the questions: how much had the Mossad learned about the hijackers'
plans; what had they divulged to the agencies of the U.S. government ?

These are not questions likely to receive an enthusiastic reception in the
U.S. press or in Congress. Shea's memo, which he sent to many major news
outlets, received almost no coverage aside from that tiny story in the
Philadelphia Times-Herald (written,

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

. Who Were the Israelis Living Next to Mohammed Atta?

. What was in the Van on the New Jersey Shore?

. How did Two Hijackers Land on Watch List Weeks Before 9/11?

. Who Shut Down Fox News' Carl Cameron?

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],

(Israeli spies cont. on page 2 col three)

(Ketcham's story cont. on page 2 col one)


it should be noted, by Keith

to follow

Israeli spies cont. on page 2 col three)

(Ketcham's story cont. on page 2 col one)


it should be noted, by Keith Phucas, who broke the Able Danger story).

After reading Shea's full memo, Ketcham went back to the leads and sources
he'd developed for the earlier piece that he'd done for Salon. By May 2006
he'd completed an 11,000-word report for Salon. One hour before it was due
to go up on Salon's site, the story was killed. The word from inside Salon
is that the top editors suddenly decided that there was nothing newsworthy
about Ketcham's report.

Anyone familiar with the verbal smokescreens sent up by a publication
killing a story knows well two standard ploys: one is the last-minute
assertion, often after weeks of enthusiastic editorial preparation, that
"there's really nothing new here", that "it's an old story". The other is
that the facts are so explosive, so fresh, that unusually explicit
corroboration is required, demanding the reporter get multiple named sources
and so forth.

Salon's editors obviously decided that an exposé with words like "Israeli
spies" and "9/11" in the same headline was just too hot to handle. But in
that case why wait to the last minute, after long hours of editorial work
preparing the story for publication? They probably didn't like to admit to
themselves that were just not prepared to take heat for the story and that
they simply got cold feet.

Ketcham took the story to a number of other magazines and got nowhere. Then,
in the late summer of 2006 he took it to the Nation, whose editors said that
yes, they wanted the story, but wouldn't schedule it till after the crush of
political coverage in the run-up to the November elections. The target
publication date was December 8. At the last minute, the Nation pulled the
piece.

When we first read it, we felt - and still feel - somewhat baffled at the
difficulty this piece had in getting published. This is a report that deals
with substantiated events that demand explanation, starting with the van on
the New Jersey shore and the Israelis who were seen cheering as the planes
crashed into the towers, and who on the afternoon of 9/11 were arrested
following an FBI alert.

It is not as though Ketcham is alone in probing the background and
activities of the celebrating Israelis. That has been the topic of a fine
piece of investigation published in The Forward in 2002. The Forward's
sensational discoveries were studiously ignored by the press. ("Old
story..", "unsubstantiated".) Similarly, the saga of the "art students" has
been the object of careful investigation and broadcast pieces by Fox News'
Carl Cameron.

Yes, when it comes to Israel and the U.S. press we are familiar with
obstructions to raising edgy topics. That's why we're glad we have
CounterPunch, to welcome good reporters like Ketcham in from the cold. CP.

'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 lie-detector 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

2/CounterPunch

"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.'"

(Israeli spies continued from page 1)

(Ketcham's story continued from page 1)

Editors

Alexander Cockburn

Jeffrey St. Clair

Assistant Editor

AlevtinaRea

Business Becky Grant DevaWheeler

Counselor

Ben Sonnenberg

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