PV Vivekanand
AMERICANS should be shocked. Fresh evidence gathered through meticulous research by a respected American lawyer shows that Israeli intelligence had been following most of the people named as the suicide hijackers of 9/11 for more than one year throughout the US. They always stayed with a stone's throw from the houses rented by the would-be hijackers, both on the east and west coasts of the US, and it was clear that they were spying on them. The implication is clear: Israelis knew in advance of the plan to stage the Sept.11 attacks. The Israeli secret agency, Mossad, had made a pretense of tipping off its US counterpart that an attack was coming, but the warning was at best vague and Mossad is seen to have deliberately held back specifics. After all, Israel stood to benefit best from the 9/11 air assaults, as subsequent events have proved.
IT was indeed reported that US intelligence and law enforcement agencies had come across nearly 140 Israelis who were masquerading as arts students but actually spying on top officials of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) shortly before the Sept.11 attacks. It was also found that some of them were staying in the same area as at least four of the 9/11 suicide hijackers were staying. On the day of the attacks, four Israelis were found to have positioned themselves with a video-camera at a spot what offered the best view of New York's World Trade Center towers shortly before the attacks took place and then started dancing when the first plane slammed into the South Tower. A woman who thought the four were Arabs informed police and they were arrested subsequently. The world does not know what the four told American security agencies, but they were freed and allowed to leave the US after a few weeks.
People in the Middle East could immediately put two and two together and come up with the conclusion that Israelis had played a major role in the attacks. The assumption was that Israeli agents with Yemeni, Iraqi and Moroccan origins posed themselves as Arab Muslims, penetrated Al Qaeda, learnt about plans to stage anti-US attacks or even instigated the attacks, provided logistical and technical support from within the American communications and aviation system (which Al Qaeda operatives would never have been able to obtain on their own) and stood back after setting the ground and applauded and danced when the assaults were carried out.
However, the meticulous memorandum prepared by Gerald Shea, a retired corporate lawyer, an alumnus of Phillips Academy, Yale , and Columbia Law School and an associate for many years with one of New York's most prominent law firms, does not suggest a direct or indirect Israeli role in the attacks, but it clearly establishes that Mossad had prior information but kept it away from the US.
Shea has sent the memorandum to the the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States (also known as the 9/11 Commission), the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
He notes that the 9/11 Commission conducted an investigation and has already published its findings.
The central theme of the document is "Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers and FBI Suspects in the September 11 Attacks and Their
Failure to Give Us Adequate Warning: The Need for a Public Inquiry."
Constructed like a desertaton thesis, the memorandum includes direct quotes and references to DEA reports, documents of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and four maps of various states of the US as well as an overall map showing where the would-be suicide hijackers as well as the Israelis spying on them stayed between December 2001 and September 2001.
Its preamble says: "I do not know whether the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks or the Senate and House Committees on Intelligence have had the opportunity to consider these issues carefully. If so, I hope this memorandum will be helpful. If not, I respectfully urge them, in accordance with the mandate of the commission’s charter and in the exercise of the committees’ responsibilities, to investigate the facts and resolve the questions presented."
"I emphasiSe at the outset that the purpose of this memorandum is not to accuse any individual or individuals (excluding the hijackers themselves), or any company, of any unlawful act or any other act harmful to the United States.
"That will be the task of others only after, and solely if justified by, the determination of all the relevant facts in the course of the public inquiry."
In summary, he submits that the months leading up to Sept 11, 2001, Israeli intelligence agents were spying on the United States and also keeping Arab groups in the under surveillance, including the future hijackers and other FBI suspects
The base of operations for both the Israelis and the would-be hijackers was in and around Hollywood, Florida. Israeli agents were also keeping under surveillance Arab groups in Bergen and Hudson Counties, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Manhattan, including the would-be hijackers of the plane that slammed into the Pentago.
"The Israeli New Jersey group appears to have been aware, before they occurred, that hijackings had been planned by Arab terrorists, as evidenced by their jubilation when the World Trade Center was first struck," he says.
He also points out that the leader of the Israeli New Jersey group, who has fled the United States for Israel, is included, along with the names of the hijackers and FBI suspects in a list drawn up by the FBI in May 2002.
He says the Mossad warnings given to the FBI in August 2001 "were too vague and too late to have enabled the United States to take any action to prevent the imminent attacks at unspecified locations."
" Why the Israeli government decided not to share with us all the critical information they had, and the extent of that information, is a subject for the public inquiry," he affirms. "They may have thought some sort of warning prudent in the event their surveillance activities later became a matter of public knowledge. But any energetic Israeli effort to assist the United States in preventing the attacks would not have served their strategic interest, in view of the disastrous effect those attacks were likely to have on the relationships between the United States and the Arab World."
What Shea stops short of saying is something that people in the Middle East have always suspected.
From the very beginning there were suggestions that Mossad was behind the attacks, which led to a series of events that greatly benefited
Israeli interests. This included a big strain in relations between the US and Arab and Muslim worlds — whom Israel considers as its worst enemies. Equally important was the US invasion of Iraq that resulted in eliminating the reign of Saddam Hussein, who, among the Arabs, posed the
greatest challenge to Israel's expansionist ambitions and its quest for regional domination.
Today, the US is going after Syria and Iran, the two other countries
which pose a challenge to Israel's objectives in the
Middle East.
The US is waging a self-styled war on terrorism, and the obvious targets are Arabs and Muslims.
Israel did not have to send a single soldier or fire a single bullet to
remove Saddam from power and render Iraq as a crippled, devastated country which would take decades to get on its own feet let alone rebuild its military capabilities to a level that it had under the reign of
Saddam Hussein.
Shea suggest that also subject the public inquiry should be how the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) handled the information given to it whether the agency condoned the Israeli groups’ surveillance of Arab groups generally in the United States prior to Sept. 11.
Justin Raimundo, an expert who had been following up post-9/11 development and gathering information on pre-9/11 events and who has come up with conclusions similar to those of Shea, observes:
"There are significant new details unearthed by Shea's research and his thoroughness, particularly in tracing the parallel movements of the 9/11 hijackers (and their known associates) and the Israelis. Shea shows the Israelis had the means, the motive, and the physical proximity to track the hijackers' movements and intercept the details of their plans. Of particular interest is how some of the hijackers came to be put on the FBI's watch list — too late to do any good, but in time to provide the Israelis with a cover story if their shadowing activities came to light — which suggests a cover-up of major proportions."
A chart accompanying the Shea memorandum shows the various would-be hijackers according to their geographical locations in one column and the Israeli agents detained and deported or otherwise identified in the other.
"The maps show this correlation in graphic terms: the effect is shocking," says Raimundo. "Whether shocking enough to shake the 9/11 Commission and our government officials out of their torpor remains to be seen."
In June 2001, the Office of Security of the DEA issued a long report describing in precise detail the attempts of approximately 125 or more nationals of a foreign country, most posing as art students, “to penetrate several DEA field offices in the continental United States.” Many of these individuals also visited the residences of numerous DEA officials and “other agencies’ facilities and the residences of their employees.” The DEA report states that “these incidents have occurred since at least the beginning of 2000, and have continued to the present," Shea memorandum says.
It was subseqently discovered that that DEA agents’ communications have been penetrated by the Israelis and suspicion fell on two companies, AMDOCS and Comverse Infosys, both owned by Israelis.
AMDOCS generates billing data for most US phone companies and is able to provide detailed logs of who is talking to whom, and Comverse Infosys builds the tapping equipment used by law enforcement to eavesdrop on all American telephone calls.
By inference, Comverse, which gets half of its research and development budget from the Israeli government, had allowed Mossad access to intelligence and that the secret agency was passing on information to narcotic smugglers on American efforts to fight drug trafficking. If Mossad was able to get access to such information, then it went without saying that it had similar access to the communications of the would-be hijackers.
Most experts agree that the investigation by the FBI into the Israeli spying againt DEA agents actually exposed the largest foreign spy ring ever uncovered inside the United States, operated by Israel, but no action was taken.
The experts noted that half of the suspected spies were arrested before Sept. 11.
On 9/11 five Israelis are arrested for dancing and cheering while the World Trade Towers collapse.
A summary of the incident shows that:
Supposedly employed by Urban Moving Systems, the Israelis caught with multiple passports and a lot of cash. Two of them were later revealed to be Mossad.
As witness reports tracked the activity of the Israelis, it emerged that they were seen at Liberty Park at the time of the first impact, suggesting a foreknowledge of what was to come. The Israelis were interrogated, and then eventually sent back to Israel.
The owner of the moving company used as a cover by the Mossad agents abandoned his business and fled to Israel.
The United States government then classified all of the evidence related to the Israeli agents and their connections to 9-11.
All of this was reported to the public via a four part story on Fox News by reporter Carl Cameron. Pressure from Jewish groups, primarily the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful lobbying group in Washington, forced Fox News to remove the story from their website.
Two hours prior to the 9-11 attacks, Odigo, an Israeli company with offices just a few blocks from the World Trade Towers, received an advance warning via the internet. The manager of the New York Office provided the FBI with the IP address of the sender of the message, but the FBI did not follow up.
Shea's memorandum names the hijackers as well as the Israeli agents who were keeping them under surveillance.
He notes that all the Israelis had, at one point or another, had works with Israeli security agencies as well as the military (Mossad does not release any record of its operatives anyway), and they were indeed proved to be Israeli spies during the DEA investigations.
It was an Israeli diplomat who intervened and secured the release of some of those detained prior to Sept.11, thus indicating that the detainees had links with the Israeli government.
In any event, most of them actually admitted during FBI questioning that they were Mossad agents.
Shea has established — based on FBI investigations as well as other inquiries — that just two or three months the 9/11 attacks, 15 of the 19 would-be hijackers were also living in Hollywood, Florida, nine in the town itself and six in surrounding towns.
More than 30 of the identified Israeli agents lived in the Hollywood area, 10 in Hollywood itself, according to Shea, who names most of them as well as the would-be hijackers as listed by the FBI.
Similar evidence is cited about all other areas where the would-be hijackers were sighted and known to have visited and stayed, as post-9/11 FBI investigations established.
These included several states (see maps).
One thing is clear: Shea's memorandum proves that Israeli intelligence knew that the 9/11 attacks were coming and did nothing to prevent it.
Beyond that, however, is the reality that Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda could not have carried out the attacks without help from people who had not only deep intelligence connections in the US but also the opportunity and
ability to create the right conditions to stage the
attacks. Those people could not be Al Qaeda
operatives. They had to be people with high connections within the American security and aviation systems with deep knowledge of how the systems worked and what are the best means to set up misleading
information and signs that pointed in the direction
that Arab Muslims were behind the attacks.
The most obvious names that come up is: Israel and Mossad.
For all technical purposes, Mossad told its American counterparts that its agents were keeping an eye on Al Qaeda agents and were in touch with them only to help foil the group's plans, but in actually the Mossad operatives co-operated closely with the hijackers and helped them with hard information (gained through Mossad intelligence operations) on the American aviation security system and other logistic support.
It is worth recalling that Bin Laden himself did not explictly claim responsibility for the 9/11 attacks until October 2004, when he released a video tape two days before American presidential elections.
However, there is no clear answer to why Bin Laden initially disclaimed responsibility, and then only gave vague hints — as if he himself was unsure — before claiming responsibility three years later.
His initial statement was categorical: Bin Laden strongly denied any role in the attacks.
"I was not involved in the Sept.11 attacks in the United States nor did I have knowledge of the attacks," he said shortly after the assaults. "There exists a government within a government within the United
States. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; to the people who want to make the present century a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity. That secret government must be asked as to who carried out the attacks. The American system is totally in control of the Jews, whose first priority is Israel, not the United States."
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