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 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

Ketcham's story continued from page 1)

Editors

Alexander Cockburn

Jeffrey St. Clair

Assistant Editor

AlevtinaRea

Business Becky Grant DevaWheeler

Counselor

Ben Sonnenberg

Published twice monthly except one in July & one in August, 22 issues a year

CounterPunch.

All rights reserved.

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counterpunch@counterpunch.org

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 Dershowitzalso stepped in as a negotiator
on behalf of the men to smooth out differences with the U.S. government.
(Dershowitzdeclined 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 FBIProbe

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

In the months before 9/11, Israel was running an active spy network inside
the United States, with Muslim extremists as the target.


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."

Israel's "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.

4/CounterPunch

"It was immediately assumed at CIA headquarters that this basically was
going to be a cover-up so th

You are repeating the same shit you posted last year.... Its called spamming, but in your case it might be your Hamas/Hezbollah job to repeat and spam Anti-Jewish shit on any forum that will let you..

Hey, we Know you...

__________________
"You are Republican, you would not understand what it is to support the platform of the Democratic party" = Cats Meow..
http://www.tellthechildrenthetruth.com/

Neo-Nazi Fools.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...ican_neo-Nazis

If it ain't broke, Don't Fix It!

The above pasts are from a Stormfront poster who thinks by dominating these forum with multiple cut and paste jobs anyone cares.

veritas dura sed veritas =History