The Latest Kissinger Outrage Why is a proven liar and wanted man in charge of the 9/11 investigation?,
by Christopher Hitchens, Slate, November 27, 2002
"The Bush administration has been saying in public for several months that it does not desire an independent inquiry into the gross 'failures of intelligence' that left U.S. society defenseless 14 months ago. By announcing that Henry Kissinger will be chairing the inquiry that it did not want, the president has now made the same point in a different way. But the cynicism of the decision and the gross insult to democracy and to the families of the victims that it represents has to be analyzed to be believed. 1) We already know quite a lot, thanks all the same, about who was behind the attacks. Most notable in incubating al-Qaida were the rotten client-state regimes of the Saudi Arabian oligarchy and the Pakistani military and police elite. Henry Kissinger is now, and always has been, an errand boy and apologist for such regimes. 2) When in office, Henry Kissinger organized massive deceptions of Congress and public opinion. The most notorious case concerned the 'secret bombing' of Cambodia and Laos and the unleashing of unconstitutional methods by Nixon and Kissinger to repress dissent from this illegal and atrocious policy. But Sen. Frank Church's commission of inquiry into the abuses of U.S. intelligence, which focused on illegal assassinations and the subversion of democratic governments overseas, was given incomplete and misleading information by Kissinger, especially on the matter of Chile. Rep. Otis Pike's parallel inquiry in the House (which brought to light Kissinger's personal role in the not-insignificant matter of the betrayal of the Iraqi Kurds, among other offenses) was thwarted by Kissinger at every turn, and its eventual findings were classified. In other words, the new 'commission' will be chaired by a man with a long, proven record of concealing evidence and of lying to Congress, the press, and the public ... Earlier this year, a London court agreed to hear an application for Kissinger's imprisonment on war crimes charges while he was briefly in the United Kingdom. It is known that there are many countries to which he cannot travel at all, and it is also known that he takes legal advice before traveling anywhere. Does the Bush administration feel proud of appointing a man who is wanted in so many places, and wanted furthermore for his association with terrorism and crimes against humanity? Or does it hope to limit the scope of the inquiry to those areas where Kissinger has clients? There is a tendency, some of it paranoid and disreputable, for the citizens of other countries and cultures to regard President Bush's "war on terror" as opportunist and even as contrived. I myself don't take any stock in such propaganda. But can Congress and the media be expected to swallow the appointment of a proven coverup artist, a discredited historian, a busted liar, and a man who is wanted in many jurisdictions for the vilest of offenses? The shame of this, and the open contempt for the families of our victims, ought to be the cause of a storm of protest."

Want a Cover-Up Expert? Kissinger's Your Man,
The Nation, December 3, 2002
"The President clearly does not want to know the truth about September 11. Otherwise he would not have appointed Henry Kissinger to head an inquiry into the origins of arguably the most successful terrorist attack in history. Long an unabashed advocate of concealing and distorting the truth in the name of national security, he is the last guy who has the right to ask someone in government, 'What did you know and when did you know it?' Kissinger, after all, was the member of the Nixon White House most bent on destroying Daniel Ellsberg for giving a copy of the Pentagon Papers, the government's secret history of the Vietnam War, to the New York Times. His obsession with preventing all government leaks, except those of his creation, is well documented in the Nixon tapes. And this is the man who publicly lied about everything from the bombing of Cambodia to the cover-up of the Watergate break-in of Democratic Party headquarters to the overthrow and death of the democratically elected leader of Chile. But even if truth serum could be slipped into his morning espresso, Kissinger still would be an appalling choice to lead what should be the fearless, unbiased fact-finding investigation necessary to prevent future tragedies like the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. He has been much too personally embroiled in the gamesmanship, greed and opportunism underlying politics in the Mideast; neither is he willing to disclose his long list of lucrative government and business contracts that pose potential conflicts of interest. For example, Kissinger Associates, the former Secretary of State's ultra-connected consulting firm, has had dealings in the past with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait--the two nations most closely linked with the 9/11 hijackers--and was the subject of a Congressional investigation for its role in the $4-billion bankrolling of Saddam Hussein in the late 1980s by the Atlanta office of Italy's BNL bank. Kissinger Associates then included Brent Scowcroft, who became National Security Adviser for President George H.W. Bush, and Lawrence Eagleburger, Secretary of State in that Administration. That those ties crisscross with other suspicious activities of close Bush family advisors--including Poppy Bush's consulting role with the Carlyle Group that took him to Saudi Arabia to drum up business--makes Kissinger's selection as understandable as it is dishonest. The truth is, the Administration doesn't want a commission looking into what went wrong on September 11 because its focus might turn too close to home."

Paying for the Bullet,
Sobran's, November 28, 2002
"I have nothing against Arabs, but a lot of them seem to hate me. Not as an individual, but just as an American. I think I understand why. An eight-year-old Arab boy was shot the other day. He died at the hospital. I paid for the bullet that killed him. It happened in Nablus, on the West Bank, the territory claimed and occupied by Israel. Some schoolchildren threw stones at a jeep driven by Israeli soldiers, who opened fire. The boy was hit in the chest. One witness said he wasn’t among those throwing stones and was about a hundred yards from the jeep. The Israelis say the kids were throwing unspecified 'explosive devices.' So the eight-year-old was killed in self-defense. Maybe this was a horrible accident. But I don’t think so. These 'accidents' happen too often. The Israelis have shot more than a few children. It’s getting to be a habit. It no longer shocks. And Americans like me pay for the bullets. The Arabs know this. That’s why some of them dislike Americans. All I can say is that I regret it and I wish I had a choice. A mere taxpayer has no choice. Maybe the Arabs think that even taxpayers should consult their consciences — or at least their interests. But few Americans are disturbed by these killings. They make no connections. When Arabs retaliate against American targets, Americans say, 'Why do they hate us? It must be because we’re free.' But if we were really free, we could refuse, as individuals, to support these outrages. Yes, Arab murders of Israeli children are horrible too, but at least we aren’t forced to pay for those murders. Paying for the murder of Arab children is now part of what it means to be an American. I figure that my share of American aid to Israel has bought quite a few bullets for Israeli soldiers by now. One of those soldiers looked through his sight, took aim at a little boy’s chest, and squeezed the trigger. What kind of man could even bear to do that? I don’t know, but Israel seems to produce quite a few of them ... American Middle Eastern policy seems based on the assumption that the Arabs won’t notice the obvious. But if the murder of their children doesn’t shock us, neither should their hatred."

Al-Qaeda: `We're waging war against U.S. because of Israel,'
by Ze'ev Schiff, Ha'aretz (Israel)
"A statement titled 'Letter to the American People,' allegedly written by Osama bin Laden and disseminated over the Internet in Arabic a few days before Thursday's double attack in Mombasa, for the first time claims that Israel's very existence is the main reason why Bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization has declared war on the United States. 'The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you [the Americans] are the leaders of its criminals,' the letter said, according to an English translation first published in the British journal The Observer. '[T]here is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel. The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution toward this crime must pay its price, and pay for it heavily' ... Only after this lengthy treatment of the Israel issue does the letter proceed to a one-sentence mention of other conflicts involving Muslims, including Kashmir, Chechnya and Somalia, and accuses America of supporting the non-Muslim parties to these conflicts. It also attacks Arab governments that have recognized Israel. The letter is novel in that it offers al-Qaida's first explanation of why it deems attacks on American civilians legitimate - because their elected representatives in the administration and Congress are responsible for these crimes against Muslims, and because their taxes pay for 'the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade of Iraq. These tax dollars are given to Israel for it to continue to attack us and penetrate our lands.'"

Analysis / Israel depends on U.S. in struggle against int'l terror,
by Yossi Melman, Ha'aretz (Israel), December 2, 2002
"Israel frequently spoke about the need for international cooperation, but usually preferred to fight terror on its own. This has completely changed in the past year. Israel is continuing its assassination operations, but they are not carried out by Mossad agents around the world (especially in Europe), but rather by the Shin Bet, Air Force, and special IDF units trained to operate against Palestinian terrorists in the territories ... But the September 11 events forced Israel's intelligence community and especially the military intelligence research department and the Mossad to focus on the new threat, which they called 'World Jihad.' The fact that Al Qaida cells are directing their attention at Israel and Jews – in sermons, Internet messages, and on the operational level – and the terror attack several months ago near the Jewish synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba, in which 21 people were killed, led Israel's intelligence community to the conclusion that there is an urgent need to change direction and assign the 'World Jihad' threat a higher priority."

Mossad agents sent in to kill,
The Australian (Australia), December 2, 2002
"As soon as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon learned of last Thursday's terrorist attacks in Kenya, he summoned Mossad chief Meir Dagan to a meeting that promises to have momentous consequences for the conduct of the US-led war on terror. War had been declared on the state of Israel by the global Islamic terror syndicate, Mr Sharon told Israel's top anti-terrorist expert. Change your priorities and get the enemy one by one. Mr Sharon's blunt order on the day of his re-election to the leadership of his right-wing Likud party will compel Mossad – Israel's secret service for intelligence and special operations – to resort to the kind of measures it has not taken for 30 years. According to a well-informed source, the service has alerted sleeper agents in Saudi Arabia and Yemen to hunt down the planners of the attacks on the Israeli-owned tourist hotel and Israeli passenger plane at Mombasa. Codenamed Warriors, these highly trained agents who volunteer to live under cover in Arab countries normally remain dormant except in wartime, when their mission is to undermine Arab preparations for strikes against Israel. The last time such a serious order was given was in 1972. The then prime minister, Golda Meir, ordered Mossad to kill the Palestinians involved in the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. All but one were eliminated over six years. Mr Dagan is a veteran of such operations and is reputed to have killed more than 30 Palestinian terror suspects in Gaza during the 1970s ...'If bin Laden was involved in the Kenya attack, this man is a walking corpse,' said one agent. 'The price tag on Jewish blood is very high.' Others criticised Mossad's decision to activate the Warriors as overkill. One source said: 'Muslim terrorism is not a critical threat to the state of Israel. We should keep these people for an all-out war.'"

Saudi Minister: Jews Behind 9/11 Attacks,
ABC News, December 5, 2002
"The Saudi police minister has claimed Jews were behind the Sept. 11 attacks because they have benefited from subsequent criticism of Islam and Arabs, according to media reports. Interior Minister Prince Nayef made the remarks in the Arabic-language Kuwaiti daily Assyasah last month. The latest edition of Ain al-Yaqeen, a weekly Internet magazine devoted to Saudi issues, posted the Assyasah interview and its own English translation. 'We know that the Jews have manipulated the Sept. 11 incidents and turned American public opinion against Arabs and Muslims,' Prince Nayef was quoted as saying in the Arabic text, while Ain al Yaqeen's English version referred to 'Zionists' instead of 'Jews.' 'We still ask ourselves: Who has benefited from Sept. 11 attacks? I think they (the Jews) were the protagonists of such attacks,' Nayef was quoted as saying ... 'The Bush administration continually defends Saudi Arabia as a friend of the United States and a committed partner in the war on terror," [Jewish congressman Eliot] Engel said. 'Does this Saudi minister sound like a partner in the war on terror?' [Jewish] Sen. Charles Schumer, also a New York Democrat, wrote this week in a letter to the Saudi ambassador to the United States that 'the interior minister's comments only serve to confirm American suspicions about the Saudi government's commitment to the war on terror' ... On the net: www.ain-al-yaqeen.com "

Top Lawyer Urges Death For Families Of Bombers Lewin: 'A Policy Born of Necessity',
by Ami Eden, [Jewish] Forward, June 7, 2002
"A prominent Washington attorney and Jewish communal leader is calling for the execution of family members of suicide bombers. Nathan Lewin, an oft-mentioned candidate for a federal judgeship and legal advisor to several Orthodox organizations, told the Forward that such a policy would provide a much-needed deterrent against suicide attacks. Under the proposal, which Lewin unveiled in the current issue of the opinion journal Sh'ma, family members would be spared if they immediately condemned the bombing and refused financial compensation for the loss of their relative. (Lewin's article appears on the web at http://www.shma.com/may02/nathan.htm.) While a 20-month spate of suicide bombings has been met in the Jewish community with calls for increasingly Draconian preventive measures, Lewin appears to be the first Jewish communal leader to approve publicly of the concept of executing innocent civilians in the hopes of curbing terrorism ... Lewin argued that the biblical injunction to destroy the ancient tribe of Amalek serves as a precedent in Judaism for taking measures that are 'ordinarily unacceptable' in the face of a mortal threat ... Several leading Jewish figures, including Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, argued that the plan represented a legitimate if flawed attempt to strike a balance between preventing terrorism and preserving democratic norms. But the proposal was strongly condemned by the head of the Reform movement, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, and the executive vice chairwoman of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Hannah Rosenthal ... In an article that appeared in the Sh'ma journal alongside Lewin's essay, Brandeis University Jewish studies professor Arthur Green wrote, 'I only wonder how long it will take [Lewin], by the force of this proof-text, to go all the way and suggest that the Palestinian nation as a whole has earned the fate of Amalek [genocide]' ... Dershowitz and Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, rejected the notion that Lewin should be elbowed out of communal life. They argued that his proposal represented a legitimate attempt to forge a policy for stopping terrorism. Foxman declined to take a stand on the actual proposal, citing his policy of deferring to Jerusalem on Israeli security issues. Though they declined to endorse the controversial proposal, top officials at the O.U. and Agudath Israel of America, for whom Lewin has done legal work, expressed sympathy for Lewin's efforts to curb what they described as an unprecedented wave of suicide attacks in Israel. '[Lewin] is not a Kahanist; he is not a nut,' said Richard Stone, chair of the O.U.'s Institute of Public Affairs ... Rabbi William Altshul, headmaster of the Melvin J. Berman Hebrew Academy, a Modern Orthodox Jewish day school in Washington, D.C., told the Forward that he did not regret the decision to honor Lewin this week at the school's annual dinner ... Even as several observers rejected the notion of blackballing Lewin, they offered substantive critiques of his argument. Dershowitz, author of 'Why Terrorism Works' (Yale University Press, 2002), and terrorism researcher Steven Emerson, who both favor the limited use of torture to extract information about an impending terrorist attack, said that they balked at the execution of innocent civilians ... Dershowitz argued that the same level of deterrence could be achieved by leveling the villages of suicide bombers after the residents had been given a chance to evacuate (an idea Lewin disparagingly likened to "using aspirin to treat brain cancer"). Rabbi Steven Pruzansky of Orthodox Congregation Bnai Yeshurun in Teaneck, N.J., a trained lawyer known for hawkish views on Israeli security issues, argued that a policy of mass deportations, rather than executions, could serve as an effective, but less deadly, deterrent against future attacks. Several observers defended Lewin by noting that the United States killed tens of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

The White Van Were Israelis Detained on Sept. 11 Spies?,
ABC News, June 21, 2002
"Maria, who asked us not to use her last name, had a view of the World Trade Center from her New Jersey apartment building ... But as she watched the disaster, something else caught her eye. Maria says she saw three young men kneeling on the roof of a white van in the parking lot of her apartment building ... The men were taking video or photos of themselves with the World Trade Center burning in the background, she said. What struck Maria were the expressions on the men's faces. 'They were like happy, you know … They didn't look shocked to me. I thought it was very strange,' she said. She found the behavior so suspicious that she wrote down the license plate number of the van and called the police. Before long, the FBI was also on the scene, and a statewide bulletin was issued on the van. The plate number was traced to a van owned by a company called Urban Moving ... A police officer pulled the van over, finding five men, between 22 and 27 years old, in the vehicle. The men were taken out of the van at gunpoint and handcuffed by police. The arresting officers said they saw a lot that aroused their suspicion about the men. One of the passengers had $4,700 in cash hidden in his sock. Another was carrying two foreign passports. A box cutter was found in the van. But perhaps the biggest surprise for the officers came when the five men identified themselves as Israeli citizens ... The driver of the van, Sivan Kurzberg, told the officers, 'We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.' The other passengers were his brother Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari. When the men were transferred to jail, the case was transferred out of the FBI's Criminal Division, and into the bureau's Foreign Counterintelligence Section, which is responsible for espionage cases, ABCNEWS has learned. One reason for the shift, sources told ABCNEWS, was that the FBI believed Urban Moving may have been providing cover for an Israeli intelligence operation. After the five men were arrested, the FBI got a warrant and searched Urban Moving's Weehawken, N.J., offices. The FBI searched Urban Moving's offices for several hours, removing boxes of documents and a dozen computer hard drives. The FBI also questioned Urban Moving's owner. His attorney insists that his client answered all of the FBI's questions. But when FBI agents tried to interview him again a few days later, he was gone. Three months later 2020's cameras photographed the inside of Urban Moving, and it looked as if the business had been shut down in a big hurry. Cell phones were lying around; office phones were still connected; and the property of dozens of clients remained in the warehouse. The owner had also cleared out of his New Jersey home, put it up for sale and returned with his family to Israel ... The five Israelis were held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, ostensibly for overstaying their tourist visas and working in the United States illegally. Two weeks after their arrest, an immigration judge ordered them to be deported. But sources told ABCNEWS that FBI and CIA officials in Washington put a hold on the case. The five men were held in detention for more than two months. Some of them were placed in solitary confinement for 40 days, and some of them were given as many as seven lie-detector tests ... Since their arrest, plenty of speculation has swirled about the case, and what the five men were doing that morning. Eventually, The Forward, a respected Jewish newspaper in New York, reported the FBI concluded that two of the men were Israeli intelligence operatives. Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of operations for counterterrorism with the CIA who is now a consultant for ABCNEWS, said federal authorities' interest in the case was heightened when some of the men's names were found in a search of a national intelligence database. Israeli Intelligence ... According to Cannistraro, many people in the U.S. intelligence community believed that some of the men arrested were working for Israeli intelligence ... For the FBI, deciphering the truth from the five Israelis proved to be difficult. One of them, Paul Kurzberg, refused to take a lie-detector test for 10 weeks — then failed it, according to his lawyer. Another of his lawyers told us Kurzberg had been reluctant to take the test because he had once worked for Israeli intelligence in another country. Sources say the Israelis were targeting these fund-raising networks because they were thought to be channeling money to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, groups that are responsible for most of the suicide ... Despite the denials, sources tell ABCNEWS there is still debate within the FBI over whether or not the young men were spies. Many U.S. government officials still believe that some of them were on a mission for Israeli intelligence ... Sources also said that even if the men were spies, there is no evidence to conclude they had advance knowledge of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 ... But no one has been able to find a good explanation for why they may have been smiling with the towers of the World Trade Center burning in the background."

FBI's Top Anthrax Letters Suspect is Jewish,
What Really Happened
[A listing of articles about the anthrax terrorist attack]

Palestinians arrest al-Qaeda 'poseurs',
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), December 8 2002
"Palestinian security forces have arrested a group of Palestinians for collaborating with Israel and posing as operatives of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network, a senior official said yesterday. The arrests come two days after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon charged al-Qaeda militants were operating in Gaza and in Lebanon. 'The Palestinian Authority arrested a group of collaborators who confessed they were working for Israel, posing as al-Qaeda operatives in the Palestinian territories,' said the official, on condition of anonymity. He said the alleged collaborators sought to 'discredit the Palestinian people, justify every Israeli crime and provide reasons to carry out a new (military) aggression in the Gaza Strip.' The official did not say how many suspects had been arrested, nor where or when they were nabbed ... Sharon's announcement marked the first time Israel officially claimed that al-Qaeda, held responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, was operating in the Palestinian territories. It was considered a surprise because the Gaza Strip is virtually sealed off by Israeli troops."

Ibrahim, the Shin Bet wants you to join Qaida. PA unveils Israeli intelligence scheme, denies Gaza links to bin Laden,
by Danny Rubinstein, Ha'aretz (Israel), December 15, 2002
"Early last week, Rashi Abu Sba, head of the preventive security apparatus in Gaza, the equivalent of the Shin Bet [Israel's secret police/"FBI"], accused the Israeli security service of tricking young Palestinians into conducting missions in the name of Al-Qaida. Last Tuesday, a young man named Ibrahim was presented to reporters in Gaza. Ibrahim hid his face behind a mask, and told what happened to him. He said that a year ago he sent in a personal, with his photo and phone number, to East Jerusalem's Posta, a cultural-entertainment weekly with a personals section. Three months later, the Gazan received a phone call from an older man, who introduced himself as a merchant named Ahmed, who told Ibrahim that his photo reminded him of his son. They spoke on the phone a number of times, with Ahmed asking Ibrahim about the situation - and if he was a devout Muslim. During one of the conversations, Ahmed told Ibrahim that he wanted to help Gazans in economic distress and began sending money - cash in dollars and Jordanian dinars - through the Nablus branch of the Cairo-Amman bank. Ibrahim told Ahmed that he had never been arrested nor involved in any political organization. Then, in one of the conversations, Ahmed said he was working for Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaida organization, and Ibrahim was meant to be one of its organizers in northern Gaza since the group already had an infrastructure in the south. Ahmed gave Ibrahim a list of people, mostly Hamas activists, and was told to collect information about them and follow them so they could also be drafted for the Al-Qaida cause. The two never met, but at a certain point during their telephone contact, Ibrahim became suspicious. He contacted a preventive security officer in Gaza and told him the whole story. The officer looked into the matter and told Ibrahim that Ahmed was an Israeli Shin Bet agent, and Ibrahim should immediately cut off any contacts with him. Palestinian sources said last week that the case was not unusual, and they reported it, as well as similar cases, during a security meeting with top-level U.S. security officials."

The US May Use Torture Against Terrorism,
by Alisdair Palmer, Telegraph (UK), December 15, 2002
[See later article entitled THE ISRAELIZATION OF AMERICA]
" Is there anything which can be done to prevent an impending catastrophe? It seems that there is. Only last week, the Intelligence Committee of the US Congress concluded that, had the FBI and the CIA actually responded effectively and efficiently to the information in their possession, they could have prevented the suicide hijackings which led to the devastation at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the deaths of more than 3,000 people. The Congressional Report does not provide much detail on what would be 'effective' in forestalling the next terrorist outrage in America. But when I talked to several officers from both the CIA and FBI in New York and Washington last week, they were in no doubt about what they would have to do: they would have to torture people. It is not just officers in the intelligence agencies who think this: senior lawyers working for the US government do so too. The unanimity in American law-enforcement circles is striking. Torture is no longer simply a topic for debate. The debate has been won. 'After the next al-Qaeda outrage in the US, the pressure will be irresistible,' one federal prosecutor told me ... 'In a sense, we already use torture anyway,' one CIA officer told me. 'When we arrest a foreign national who we think has important information, we hand him over to a foreign government such as the Egyptians. Its police will arrest the suspect's wife and children, put them at the other end of the same cell, and then produce a couple of pit bulls and say: 'Talk, or we let these dogs go at your wife and child.' That usually works' ... All the same, the idea that torture could become a part of America's justice system is profoundly shocking. Is it really possible to imagine FBI headquarters echoing with the screams of people having their teeth drilled without anaesthetic? One senior FBI officer told me: 'If I knew that the man in front of me had the critical information that would enable the US to prevent a catastrophic attack from taking place on its soil, I would torture him, and take the consequences. Wouldn't you?" 'You can duck the question,' the FBI officer continued, 'But we can't. Our ability to protect you depends on how we answer it. We can't rely on other countries' doing it, because the one man who knows the secrets may be a US citizen who we pick up right here in the US' ... The force of that argument explains why there are US lawyers who now advocate the introduction of 'torture warrants'. The FBI would have to apply to the courts for them in the same way they obtain search warrants. Alan Dershowitz, a professor of law at Harvard and one of America's most distinguished advocates of civil liberties, has come to the conclusion that judicial torture is not prohibited by the US Constitution. He argues that the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits self-incrimination, only means that statements elicited by torture could not be introduced as evidence against the tortured defendant. He argues that the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits 'cruel and unusual punishment', is not violated by torture either: it applies only to punishment after an individual has been convicted."

British envoy questions Israel on terrorism,
Guardian (UK) , December 17, 2002
"Britain's ambassador in Tel Aviv has described terrorism as justified, if defined in certain ways, drawing parallels between the Jewish fight for a state of Israel and the present day Palestinian struggle. Sherard Cowper-Coles said that the killing of non-combatants, particularly children, could never be defended. 'Terrorism defined as attacks against innocent civilians is always and absolutely wrong'" he told a conference in Berlin on European-Israeli relations. However, he went on to say: 'If terrorism is defined more widely as attacks on formal military units, we can all think of times in history when it was not always wrong.' Mr Cowper-Coles pointed to Israel's own struggle for independence and the activities of the Stern Gang, labelled as terrorist by the British authorities in Palestine for bombing Jerusalem's King David hotel and for killing British soldiers but seen as national heroes by many Israelis. Ariel Sharon's government prefers to describe the killing of all Israelis, in whatever circumstances, as terrorist. The Palestinian leadership argues that soldiers in the occupied territories and, sometimes, Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza are legitimate. In carefully worded remarks, the ambassador suggested that the failure to pursue political options fuels terrorism."

Israel Has 5,000 Palestinians in Custody,
Earthlink (from Associated Press), December 18, 2002
[NOTE: There are about 3 million Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, 5000 jailed as possible "terrorists." Per the American population of 280 million people, a parallel percentage in the United States would represent over 450,000 people jailed without charges for suspicion of political activity]
"During Israel's forays into the West Bank in recent months, the army has detained more than 5,000 Palestinian men in roundups that government officials say have slowed, but not halted, attacks on Israel. About 1,000 of those prisoners face indefinite detention without trial -- a status easily renewed every six months. For Israel's security forces, the roundups that began in March amid an unprecedented wave of Palestinian suicide bombings have proved the most effective tool in limiting attacks. Israeli human rights groups have protested the mass arrests, but with Israelis still facing bombings and shootings, broad public support remains. 'These arrests have directly contributed to the reduction in terror attacks we have witnessed in recent months,' the army said in a written response to The Associated Press ... . The Palestinian Ministry of Prisoners says about 5,500 Palestinians arrested since the fighting began in September 2000 remain incarcerated ... Of the total, more than 1,200 Palestinians have been convicted in Israeli military courts and are serving sentences, according to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem and others ... To accommodate the increasing number of prisoners, Israel has reopened the Ketsiot prison in the Negev Desert. More than 1,000 Palestinians were detained there at the beginning of this month, including 840 under 'administrative detention,' meaning they can be held indefinitely without charge, B'Tselem said. During the first Palestinian uprising of 1987-1993, the camp was notorious for its harsh conditions _ overcrowded cells, frequent reports of beatings, excessive heat in the summer, freezing cold in the winter, a lack of family visits. The prison closed in 1996 but reopened in April. 'Many of those recently detained without charge have been subject to torture and ill-treatment,' said Hisham Abdel Razek, the Palestinian Minister for Prisoners ... Today, prisoners being interrogated are permitted little or no sleep for days or weeks, Fares said. They are forced to stand for hours as their feet swell with pain. Interrogators tell a prisoner his relatives have been killed, or that the family home will be demolished if he does not confess, he said."

Odigo says workers were warned of attack,
by Yuval Dror, Ha'aretz (Israel), December 21, 2002
"Odigo, the instant messaging service, says that two of its workers received messages two hours before the Twin Towers attack on September 11 predicting the attack would happen, and the company has been cooperating with Israeli and American law enforcement, including the FBI, in trying to find the original sender of the message predicting the attack. Micha Macover, CEO of the company, said the two workers received the messages and immediately after the terror attack informed the company's management, which immediately contacted the Israeli security services, which brought in the FBI. 'I have no idea why the message was sent to these two workers, who don't know the sender. It may just have been someone who was joking and turned out they accidentally got it right. And I don't know if our information was useful in any of the arrests the FBI has made,' said Macover. Odigo is a U.S.-based company whose headquarters are in New York, with offices in Herzliya."

Activist group cites ‘threat’ of new mosque. Muslim leaders blast accusations of connections to terrorists,
Boca Raton News (FL), December 25, 2002
"A group called Citizens Against Hate opposes the construction of a 9,000-foot mosque planned for 3 acres on Northwest 35th Street. The group says activities at the mosque would present a threat to the area, but a spokesman for the Islamic Center says A group called Citizens Against Hate is rallying the community to halt the construction of a new mosque for the Islamic Center of Boca Raton. 'This mosque, if allowed to be built, would be a major threat to Boca Raton and all of South Florida,' said Joe Kaufman, 32, of Tamarac, chairman of the group ... 'It is not the Muslims we are fighting,' said Kaufman. 'The mosque might be a threat to the community. If it is built, we don’t know what is going on behind the walls' ...[Kaufman] accused the ICBR [Islamic Center of Boca Raton] of having 'anti-Semitic material' on its Web site ... Kaufman said the ICBR Web is still linked to anti-Semitic stories ... Kaufman asked residents to call Boca Raton City Hall and object to the mosques. Mayor Steven Abrams, who said he knows Kaufman, said he received one telephone call Monday from a resident objecting to the mosque plan ... Kaufman, who has run unsuccessfully twice for the Florida House of Representatives, said, “I am not running for office now.”

Honorary Doctorate Speech - Turin University,
by Harold Pinter (27th November 2002)
[Playwright Pinter is of partial Jewish descent]
"The US is at this moment developing advanced systems of 'weapons of mass destruction' and it prepared to use them where it sees fit. It has more of them than the rest of the world put together. It has walked away from international agreements on biological and chemical weapons, refusing to allow inspection of its own factories. The hypocrisy behind its public declarations and its own actions is almost a joke. The United States believes that the three thousand deaths in New York are the only deaths that count, the only deaths that matter. They are American deaths. Other deaths are unreal, abstract, of no consequence. The three thousand deaths in Afghanistan are never referred to. The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children dead through US and British sanctions which have deprived them of essential medicines are never referred to. The effect of depleted uranium, used by America in the Gulf War, is never referred to. Radiation levels in Iraq are appallingly high. Babies are born with no brain, no eyes, no genitals. Where they do have ears, mouths or rectums, all that issues from these orifices is blood. The two hundred thousand deaths in East Timor in 1975 brought about by the Indonesian government but inspired and supported by the United States are never referred to. The half a million deaths in Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Argentina and Haiti, in actions supported and subsidised by the United States are never referred to. The millions of deaths in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are no longer referred to. The desperate plight of the Palestinian people, the central factor in world unrest, is hardly referred to. But what a misjudgement of the present and what a misreading of history this is. People do not forget. They do not forget the death of their fellows, they do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice, they do not forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of mighty powers. They not only don't forget. They strike back. The atrocity in New York was predictable and inevitable. It was an act of retaliation against constant and systematic manifestations of state terrorism on the part of the United States over many years, in all parts of the world."


Terrorism, 1940-1949,
Centre for Defence and International Security Studies
"1945 October 31 - Jewish terrorist offensive against British rule in Palestine begins, with a wave of bomb attacks on police vehicles, railway sites and Haifa oil refinery. One policeman, one soldier and two railway workers killed. November 27 Eight British soldiers killed in bomb attack on police station Jerusalem, Palestine, in Jewish Irgun terrorist attack ... 1946 July 22 -Ninety people killed and forty five wounded after Jewish terrorists blow up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, Palestine, which was home to British government and military offices. The terrorists held workers at pistol point while they planted the explosives in the basement of the hotel ... October 31 - British embassy in Rome, Italy, wrecked by two bombs in suit cases left by Jewish Irgun terrorists. No casualties. 1947 July 12 - Jewish Irgun terrorists kidnap and then hang two British Army sergeants. The terrorists were trying to secure the release of three Irgun members who had been sentenced to death by the British authorities in Palestine. September 29 - Jewish Irgun terrorists bomb police station in Haifa, Palestine, killing four British and four Arab policemen, as well as two Arab civilians. Forty six people injured ... December 12 - Twenty Arabs, five Jews and two British soldiers killed and thirty wounded in Jewish terrorist bomb attacks on buses in Haifa and Ramleh, Palestine. British mandate to rule Palestine ends on 15 May 1948; state of Israel established. December 29 - Jewish Irgun terrorists throw grenades from passing taxi into café near the Damascus gate, Jerusalem, Palestine, killing eleven Arabs and two British policemen ... 1948 March 11 - Headquarters of the Jewish Agency, Jerusalem, Palestine, destroyed by Arab car bomb killing thirteen and injuring eighty four. April 9 - Jewish Irgun terrorist group attacks Deir Yassim, Palestine, murdering two hundred and fifty four Arab women and children captured in the remains of the village ... September 17 - United Nations mediator in Palestine, Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, murdered by Jewish Stern gang extremist in Jerusalem, Palestine, who fired at point blank range through window of his official car."

New Chomsky Interview: "U.S. Is A Leading Terrorist State",
by Noam Chomsky,
San Francisco Indymedia, December 28, 2002
"Noam Chomsky: First of all I think we ought to be very cautious about using the phrase 'War on Terror'. There can't be a War on Terror. It's a logical impossibility. The US is one of the leading terrorist states in the world. The guys who are in charge right now were all condemned for terrorism by the World Court. They would have been condemned by the U.N. Security Council except they vetoed the resolution, with Britain abstaining of course. These guys can't be conducting a war on terror. It's just out of the question ... US adventurism is just driving countries into developing weapons of mass destruction as a deterrent - they don't have any other deterrent. Conventional forces don't work obviously, there's no external deterrent. The only way anyone can defend themselves is with terror and weapons of mass destruction. So it's plausible to assume that they're doing it. I suppose that's the basis for the CIA analysis and I suppose the British intelligence are saying the same thing ... The fact is that war with Iran is probably underway. It's known that about 12% of the Israeli airforce is in south eastern Turkey. They're there because they're preparing for the war against Iran. They don't care about Iraq. Iraq they figure's a pushover, but Iran has always been a problem for Israel. It's the one country in the region that they can't handle and they've been after the US to take it on for years. According to one report, the Israeli airforce is now flying at the Iranian border for intelligence, provocation and so on. And it's not a small airforce. It's bigger than the British airforce, bigger than any NATO power other than the US. So it's probably underway. There are claims that there are efforts to stir up Azeri separatism, which makes some sense. It's what the Russians tried to do in 1946, and that would separate Iran, or what's left of Iran, from the Caspian oil producing centres. Then you could partition it. That will probably be underway at the time and then there'll be a story about how Iran's going to kill us tomorrow, so we need to get rid of them today. At least that's been the pattern."

Israel's Sacred Terrorism,
written by Livia Rokach, A study based on Moshe Sharett's Personal Diary, and other documents. Foreword by Noam Chomsky,
"Popular support of Israel over the last quarter of a century has been based on a number of myths, the most persistent of which has been the myth of lsrael's security. Implying the permanent existence of grave threats to the survival of Jewish society in Palestine, this myth has been carefully cultivated to evoke anxious images in public opinion to permit, and even encourage, the use of large amounts of public funds to sustain Israel militarily and economically. 'Israel's security' is the official argument with which not only Israel but also the U.S. denies the right of self-determination in their own country to the Palestinian people. For the past three decades it has been accepted as a legitimate explanation for lsrael's violation of international resolutions calling for the return of the Palestinian people to their homes. Over the past thirteen years Israel has been allowed to evoke its security to justify its refusal to retreat from the Arab and Palestinian territories occupied in 1967. Security is still the pretext given by successive Israeli governments for widespread massacres of civilian populations in Lebanon, for expropriations of Arab lands, for the establishment of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, for deportations, and for arbitrary detentions of political prisoners. Although the security of the Arab populations in the whole region has been repeatedly threatened over these years by overt and covert warfare, terrorist plots and subversive designs, and although UN resolutions demand the establishment of secure borders for all states in the region, so far only lsrael's security has been at the center of international discussion."

Jewish Militants: Fifteen Years, and More, of Terrorism in France,
Institute for Historical Review
"This essay, written in June 1995, is based on documentation provided by Dr. Robert Faurisson. Copies of the French-language text have been sent to key French government and police authorities. In its issue of June 1991, the French monthly Le Choc du mois ('The Shock of the Month) published a rather lengthy report entitled 'Jewish Militants: Fifteen Years of Terrorism' ('Milices juives. Quinze ans de terrorisme,' pp. 7-13). Under the main headline, a subtitle summed up: 'Jewish Action Group,' 'Jewish Combat Organization,' 'Jewish Defense Organization'... Under these various names, Jewish activists for 15 years have unceasingly sown terror [in France] with total impunity. Provocations that have no other aim than to incite reprisals. As if certain people wanted the [French] Jewish community to feel threatened ... The report reviews 50 cases of physical aggression committed by organized Jewish groups during the period from June 19, 1976, to April 20, 1991. Not mentioned, therefore, are physical attacks committed by individual Jews (which are, in any case, rare). The victims of the 50 cases listed by Le Choc du mois, who number in the hundreds, suffered: loss of life, an eye put out, acid throwing, numerous hospitalizations, injuries followed by deep coma, lifetime disabilities, and serious post-traumatic conditions, 'the commission of barbaric acts,' severe beatings in the presence of policemen who refused to intervene, and numerous ambush attacks (in one case with the complicity of the daily newspaper Libération). Most of these acts of aggression were passed over in silence by the media or only briefly reported. Some were applauded by Jewish publications or organizations which, in general, after a few pro forma words of censure, suggested that the victims deserved their fate, that such attacks are 'only natural and normal,' and that no one need expect any leniency in future if he should ever again arouse Jewish 'anger.' It is worthy of note that not one Jew has been the victim of a single attack in revenge by any 'revisionist' or so-called 'extreme right' group."

Report: FBI warns Jews in U.S. of possible Qaida attacks,
Haaretz (Israel), February 9, 2003
"New intelligence reports pointing to the possibility of multiple imminent attacks by Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaida network against Jewish targets in the United States prompted the Bush administration to raise the national threat alert from 'yellow' to 'orange' on Friday, according to Newsweek. Citing law-enforcement officials, the Newsweek report said that FBI officials on Friday quickly began contacting Jewish leaders and rabbis around the United States to warn them to be especially vigilant and to increase security measures at Sabbath services and other events over the weekend. The officials said the new intelligence reports warned of possible attacks on synagogues, Jewish community centers, youth groups, hotels and resorts ... Officials said that the possibility of attacks on Jewish-owned hotels was raised during a 90-minute conference call of FBI officials on Friday. During the call, a senior official cited the Al Qaida attack in a Bali nightclub in October last year, in which 200 people were killed, saying that the bureau now believes it was targeted specifically because the owner was Jewish. Newsweek said that it could not independently confirm that assertion."

Bin Laden tape: Text US officials say they believe the tape is real. The following is the full text of an audio message purported to be by al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, broadcast on Arab television station al-Jazeera on 11 February,
BBC (UK), February 11, 2003
"We are following up with great interest and extreme concern the crusaders' preparations for war to occupy a former capital of Islam, loot Muslims' wealth, and install an agent government, which would be a satellite for its masters in Washington and Tel Aviv, just like all the other treasonous and agent Arab governments. This would be in preparation for establishing the Greater Israel."

Hypocrisies, Double Standards and Lies. Al-Arian arrest reveals how selective the press and government are in dealing with terrorism funding,
by John F. Sugg, Weekly Planet, February 26, 2003
"Here's what you're supposed to know: Sami Al-Arian was indicted as a terrorist leader on Feb. 20.Here's what you're not supposed to think about: Sami Al-Arian never, even according to the indictment, committed violent acts. His nemesis Israel, on the other hand, will conduct 'targeted killings in the United States and other friendly countries.' (UPI, Jan. 15, 2003) ...Here's what you're supposed to know: Palestinians have terrorist groups that kill civilians. Two young American women, who were slain in a bombing claimed by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, figure into Al-Arian's indictment. Here's what you're not supposed to consider: Palestinians have no nation and no army. They have been under military occupation for 35 years. International law supports the right of occupied people to resist -- although the civilized world has recoiled at the suicide bombings of civilians. However, Israel, with one of the most powerful armies in the world, has killed far more civilians than the Arab terrorist groups. Here's what you're supposed to know: Al-Arian supposedly used financial schemes to conceal fundraising for Palestinian causes. Keep in mind, the total amount at stake is, at most, several hundred thousand dollars, and all money that flows to Palestinians from the U.S. is a trickle. Here's what you're not supposed to consider: Tens of millions are collected annually by American pro-Israeli groups and funneled through tax-exempt organizations. Some of the money goes to support military support operations, freeing Israeli money for weapons and lethal operations against Palestinians. Other money goes to underwrite "settlements," the colonial taking of Arab lands. One American businessman, Irving Moskowitz, has raised as much as $80-million for settlements. Here's what you're supposed to believe: Al-Arian posed the most serious terrorist threat in Florida's recent history. Clearly, all the news reports (310 nationwide in the three days after his arrest) prove that. Here's what you're not supposed to recall: While the feds were targeting Tampa Muslims, there was a real terrorist plot in Jacksonville in 1997 to bomb and kill former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. The perp was an Orthodox Jew, Harry Shapiro, who intended to blame the murder on (who else but?) Muslims. (That received one tiny brief in the Tampa Bay area dailies; 119 reports nationwide.) And, just last year, St. Petersburg podiatrist Robert J. Goldstein was collared with a stash of guns and bombs, and a plan to blow up mosques (91 reports across the nation). The press accepts the standard 'mentally ill' explanation in these cases -- and neither the media nor authorities show interest in pursuing the possibility of broader conspiracies. Here's what you're supposed to know: Al-Arian and friends associated with terrorists. Here's what you're not supposed to know: A lot of people have associated with terrorists, including George W. Bush, who posed in 2000 for a touching photo with the Al-Arian family. George's brother, Jeb, has long been chummy with one of the Western Hemisphere's most notorious terrorists, Orlando Bosch, mastermind of a jetliner bombing that killed 73 people in 1976. And, of course, President Bush is offering Israeli strongman Ariel Sharon an Iraq war gift of more than $10-billion, maybe as much as $16-billion. Sharon is regarded as a war criminal by much of the world, stemming from his complicity in the slaughter of as many as 800 people, mostly women and children, at the Chatilla and Sabra refugee camps."

[Note: Hezbollah is an Islamic activist organization in Lebanon that continues to fight Israeli violence and repression with violence. Its fight is with Israel, yet the Jewish Lobby has succeeded in pulling U.S. courts into Israeli service.]
Hezbollah aid case brings life sentence First trial under 1996 ban on supporting terrorist organizations,
Charlotte Observer, March 01, 2003
"Mohamad Hammoud, one of two Lebanese brothers convicted in Charlotte of conspiring to aid Middle Eastern terrorists, on Friday was handed what amounts to a life sentence. U.S. District Judge Graham Mullen sentenced Hammoud, 29, to the maximum punishment: 155 years in prison. Hammoud was the first person tried in the United States under a 1996 federal law banning material support to terrorist organizations. He was convicted in June by a federal jury in Charlotte of conspiring to provide material support to Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia group the United States considers a terrorist organization. Hammoud, identified by authorities as the leader of a Hezbollah support cell in Charlotte, stood and addressed the court for 20 minutes before being sentenced. He talked about the Lebanese people's fight to drive Israel from his homeland and how he had dreamed of starting a new life in the United States."

Alan Dershowitz And The Ticking Time-Bomb,
By Kurt Nimmo, Information Clearinghouse, March 5, 2003
"America, don't worry. Alan Dershowitz is on your side. He's back on the idiot tube circuit talking about our options in this interminable war on terrorism. If Khalid Shaikh Mohammed won't talk, says the respected lawyer, our guys need to violate the Geneva Accords and jam a 'sterilized needle' under his fingernails. Sterilized, of course, because we don't want him to get an infection. Now that would be inhumane. As for the Geneva Accords, 'countries all over the world violate' them, so what's the big deal? This torture thing, Dershowitz told Wolf Blitzer the other day, it should be done 'with accountability,' it needs to be done 'openly' so we don't 'adopt the way of the hypocrite.' Maybe they can do it on Blitzer's show, on CNN's dime? Get Walter Isaacson to cut for the needles and sterilization kits. Imagine of the ratings. It'd put Joe Millionaire to shame. As a lawyer, Dershowitz knows about this kind of stuff. For instance, he proposes 'a torture warrant, which puts a heavy burden on the government to demonstrate by factual evidence the necessity to administer this horrible, horrible technique of torture.' So, I take it al-Qaeda evildoers will be tortured after they get their day in court? Of course, that may take years. If anybody knows how long the legal process takes, it's Alan Dershowitz. No, I imagine this 'torture warrant' would need be based on circumstantial evidence. Like that bin Laden tape the experts found to be a fake. Or maybe Bush can base the evidence on the word of some poor schmuck in an orange jumper and blacked out goggles at Gitmo. Some people will say anything to get a good night's sleep. Dersh's against 'subcontracting' our torture work out -- to say Jordan, the Philippines, or Egypt. If magnetos need to be attached to the testicles of al-Qaeda operatives, it's best we do it ourselves lest we become hypocrites. Apparently it is better to be a sadist than a hypocrite. 'Candor and accountability in a democracy is very important,' asserts the Harvard Law School professor and author of 'Chutzpah,' a book determined to minimize the plight of Palestinian refugees, many who have experienced torture personally ... The problem with Dersh is he likes to be on TV too much. We need to be more like Israel, says Dershowitz ...Shin Bet agent Danny Yatom knows all about summary execution. He personally crushed the skulls of two Palestinian detainees with a large rock after they were arrested for a failed attempt to hijack an Israeli settler bus at the Deir El Balah Junction in the Gaza Strip. Yatom did such a good job Sharon appointed him as 'Head of Counter Terrorism' ... Obviously, Dershowitz looks to Israel for his cues. The savage dust of 911 had hardly settled when the civil libertarian Dershowitz went before a dense crowd at the Jewish Community Center in Creve Coeur, Missouri, and told the gathered that terrorist acts should make civil rights activists readjust their thinking on certain issues. 'Torture would only be used under court-issued warrants, which we already use for searches and arrests,' Dershowitz told the crowd. 'Society needs to be protected from immigrants and other undesirables.'"

[The Israeli -- and Jewish American visitor -- version of Disneyland].
Settlers offer West Bank 'terror tours'. Tourists will be taken to West Bank hotspots,
BBC, March 5, 2003
"Jewish settlers are offering special 'terror tours' of the West Bank and Gaza, in which tourists will be trained to fire weapons and participate in mock fights with Arab militants. The four-day excursion will include aerial tours of 'terrorist' enclaves and a chance to sit in the cockpit of a fighter-plane capable of delivering nuclear bombs. 'There's a lot of the 'wow' factor, like going up in an army helicopter and firing machine guns,' organiser Jake Greenwald told BBC News Online, 'but it is also aimed at training people in how to deal with a terrorist situation'. Mr Greenwald said it was also a way of attracting thrill-seekers to Israel at a time when tourism is suffering because of the violence with the Palestinians. US-born Mr Greenwald said he got the idea after seeing how people coped with the 11 September, 2001, attacks on the United States' ... He said so far more than 20 people - including a judge, doctors, and a Middle East lecturer - have signed up from the United States, at a cost of $5,500 each. For the participants, daily activities begin with what Mr Greenwald called 'light exercises' in hand-to-hand combat. Tourists will also be taught how to fire a range of weapons, including M16s, Uzis, pistols and Kalashnikov machine guns, and learn how to operate a tank. There will be talks by Israelis who took part in Israel's military offensive in Jenin last April, and lessons in how to track 'terrorists' across the desert. Participants will be taken on a helicopter tour of Palestinian 'terrorist enclaves' and be shown arms and suicide bomber belts seized by the Israeli army. The highlight of the trip involves a paintball fight in a simulated Arab village, where participants will be able to go from room-to-room 'cleaning out Arab terrorists', said Mr Greenwald."

Analysis: Hamas history tied to Israel,
By Richard Sale, UPI, June 18, 2002
"In the wake of a suicide bomb attack Tuesday on a crowded Jerusalem city bus that killed 19 people and wounded at least 70 more, the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, took credit for the blast. Israeli officials called it the deadliest attack in Jerusalem in six years. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon immediately vowed to fight 'Palestinian terror' and summoned his cabinet to decide on a military response to the organization that Sharon had once described as 'the deadliest terrorist group that we have ever had to face.' Active in Gaza and the West Bank, Hamas wants to liberate all of Palestine and establish a radical Islamic state in place of Israel. It is has gained notoriety with its assassinations, car bombs and other acts of terrorism. But Sharon left something out. Israel and Hamas may currently be locked in deadly combat, but, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years. Israel 'aided Hamas directly -- the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization),' said Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies. Israel's support for Hamas 'was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative,' said a former senior CIA official ... But with the triumph of the Khomeini revolution in Iran, with the birth of Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorism in Lebanon, Hamas began to gain in strength in Gaza and then in the West Bank, relying on terror to resist the Israeli occupation. Israel was certainly funding the group at that time. One U.S. intelligence source who asked not to be named said that not only was Hamas being funded as a 'counterweight' to the PLO, Israeli aid had another purpose: 'To help identify and channel towards Israeli agents Hamas members who were dangerous terrorists.' In addition, by infiltrating Hamas, Israeli informers could only listen to debates on policy and identify Hamas members who 'were dangerous hard-liners,' the official said. In the end, as Hamas set up a very comprehensive counterintelligence system, many collaborators with Israel were weeded out and shot. Violent acts of terrorism became the central tenet, and Hamas, unlike the PLO, was unwilling to compromise in any way with Israel, refusing to acquiesce in its very existence. But even then, some in Israel saw some benefits to be had in trying to continue to give Hamas support: 'The thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the others, if they gained control, would refuse to have any part of the peace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place,' said a U.S. government official who asked not to be named ... According to former State Department counter-terrorism official Larry Johnson, 'the Israelis are their own worst enemies when it comes to fighting terrorism.' 'The Israelis are like a guy who sets fire to his hair and then tries to put it out by hitting it with a hammer.' 'They do more to incite and sustain terrorism than curb it,' he said."

Jewish Group Probed for Blast at Palestinian School,
Reuters, April 9, 2003
"An explosion wounded 20 students at a Palestinian high school in the West Bank on Wednesday, and Israeli police said they were investigating whether it was the work of Jewish vigilantes. Lutfi Abu Oun, mayor of the village of Jaba'a, said two of the teenagers were seriously hurt and all of the wounded were taken to hospitals in the West Bank cities of Jenin and Nablus. School headmaster Ismail Salah said the explosion tore through a classroom for 16-year-old boys just as they returned from a midday recess. Desks and chairs were thrown about and splintered, and pools of blood and glass shards littered the floor, witnesses said. An unknown Jewish group calling itself 'Revenge of the Infants' claimed responsibility for the blast in a message sent to Israeli reporters' pagers, police said."

[As usual, one standard for Jews and another for everyone else:]
Florida Muslims Decry Leniency For Terrorist,
Information Clearinghouse, April 14, 2003
"Florida's office of the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-FL) today expressed deep disappointment over the government's failure to charge as a 'terrorist' a man who was actively plotting to bomb 50 Islamic centers and Muslim schools in that state. Robert Goldstein, 38, pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiracy to violate civil rights, attempting to damage religious property and a weapons possession charge. He faces a maximum of 15 years in prison. Goldstein was arrested last August when authorities found a large arsenal in his town house. That arsenal included more than 30 explosive devices, light-armor rockets, hand grenades, a 5-gallon gasoline bomb, .50-caliber machine guns, and sniper rifles. Authorities also found a detailed plan that called for planting bombs and using automatic weapons to attack a local mosque and cultural center. Goldstein had a list targeting 50 Muslim institutions in the Tampa area. According to court documents, Goldstein, who is Jewish, wanted to make a statement for 'his people' following the 9/11 terrorist attacks ... CAIR-FL is calling on the U.S. Attorney's office to explain why Goldstein was not charged as a terrorist under the USA Patriot Act of 2001, and why no effort was made to seek testimony from the intended Muslim victims. 'The fact that Goldstein was not charged as a terrorist demonstrates that the Patriot Act is a tool to be used solely against Muslims and Arabs,' said CAIR-FL Executive Director Altaf Ali. 'The leniency shown in this case sends the wrong signal to Florida's Muslim community. It signals that the charges and sentencing for planned acts of terrorism now depend on the perpetrator's religion and ethnicity,' added CAIR-FL Communications Director Ahmed Bedier. CAIR-FL is urging the sentencing judge and the probation department to hear from the Muslim community and issue a tougher sentence than the maximum of 15 years agreed to in the plea bargain."

[The omnipresent Jewish dual standard throughout American culture: one standard for Jews (who are secularly sacred) and another standard for everyone else:]
Terrorism or hate crime? U.S. authorities apply different labels to crimes committed by two extremists -- one Muslim, the other Jewish,
by Eric Boehlert, salon.com, April 17, 2003
"On Independence Day last summer, a depressed 41-year-old Muslim immigrant by the name of Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, whose views on the Arab-Israeli conflict had become increasingly extreme, approached the ticket counter of the Israeli-run El Al airline at Los Angeles International Airport. Loaded down with a recently purchased .45-caliber semiautomatic Glock pistol, a 9 mm handgun and a 6-inch knife, he opened fire. During a 30-second rampage, Hadayet emptied the 10-round revolver, killing two people and injuring scores more, before an El Al security guard shot him dead. Six weeks later, in Tampa, Fla., a depressed Jewish podiatrist by the name of Dr. Robert Goldstein, 38, who wanted to send a message on behalf of 'his people' following the attacks of Sept. 11, and to express his anger over the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict, was arrested after police raided his home. There they discovered a detailed plan to blow up 50 local mosques and Islamic centers, 'kill all 'rags‚'' and 'liquidate' Muslims during the attacks if necessary. Police also uncovered a vast illegal stash of weapons, including 30 explosive devices, light-armor rockets, hand grenades, a 5-gallon gasoline bomb, .50-caliber machine guns, silencers, and sniper rifles. Ultimately, law enforcement authorities would label one man a terrorist, and the other a dangerous but deluded perpetrator of hate crimes. How do two crimes with similarities that seem highly relevant in the midst of a war on terrorism come to be defined so differently? Some observers cite paranoia in the wake of Sept. 11 as the reason. Others don't. But even some law enforcement officials are stymied by the choices made by their colleagues in the two cases."

While Media Spotlights One Anthrax Suspect, Another Is Too Hot to Touch,
By Delinda Curtiss Hanley, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September-October 2002, p. 18-19
"America’s mainstream press finds some stories too hot to handle. One of the most egregious examples of this is its coverage of the hunt for the perpetrator of the post-9/11 anthrax letters—a matter of concern to all Americans. After an initial flurry of reports, the media inexplicably ignored the FBI’s laborious search for the person who last fall mailed anthrax-laced letters to news organizations and the Capitol Hill offices of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (S-SD) and Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-VT). Did the U.S. media merely lose interest after the government failed to find an Iraqi or al-Qaeda connection, and therefore could not link the postal terrorism to Sept. 11? Or was the press warned off the sensitive subject? After months of silence, in August the subject of the anthrax attacks once again hit the newspapers and network TV stations. The scientist in the spotlight, however, may be little more than a hapless 'fall guy.' Five people died and more than a dozen more were made seriously ill from exposure to the deadly Ames variety of anthrax. Americans across the country feared opening their mail. It’s a safe bet that, had a Muslim- or Arab-American scientist been the prime suspect, press coverage would have been unrelenting. Apparently journalists’ interests weren’t sufficiently aroused by the FBI profile of a disgruntled American bioweapons scientist who may have launched the lethal attack merely to help his career and increase government funding in his area of expertise. This homegrown terrorist murdered innocents, sowed fear across the United States, and created chaos in the U.S. and international postal services, but for 10 months he stayed out of the news. The still-unknown culprit also sought to throw suspicions on Muslim or Arab terrorists. First there was the timing of the letters—days after the Sept. 11 attack. The first anthrax letters, as well as some hoax letters, were mailed Sept. 18 to 25. The first public report of an anthrax case in Florida was not until Oct. 4. Then there was the text: the letters clearly intended to imply the writer was of Middle Eastern origin and included deliberate misspellings (the letters suggested taking “penacilin”), a Star of David, as well as threats to Israel, Chicago’s Sears Tower, and President George W. Bush. Someone obviously hoped to focus attention on an Arab scapegoat. The perpetrator added to the already terrible woes of Arabs and Muslims living in the United States post-Sept. 11. The letters could very well have sparked internment camps for Arab Americans, who already faced backlash from the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The U.S. might have launched a military attack on Iraq, as rumors circulated that Saddam Hussain was to blame for the anthrax attacks. Fortunately, early on federal investigators discounted the Arab terrorist theory—although plenty of outsiders still can’t give it up. The FBI narrowed its search for the terrorist to 200 scientists who had worked with the U.S. anthrax program in the last five years ... A Feb. 26 New York Times article cast suspicion on a Somali Muslim student at an unnamed Midwestern university. It was soon confirmed, however, that the student could not have had any knowledge of Patrick’s weaponization technique. This August—nearly a year after the anthrax attack—the story hit the front pages again. The FBI’s second highly visible examination of Steven J. Hatfill’s apartment was conducted with reporters, cameras and a news helicopter hovering overhead. Although Hatfill once worked at the Fort Detrick lab, his lawyer, Victor Glasberg, said the scientist 'did not do anthrax work. Steve has never worked with anthrax' ... Are the media and the government using Dr. Hatfill to take the fall for another scientist? Before the investigation of Dr. Hatfill captured national headlines, another insider scientist had come under FBI scrutiny without much media fanfare. It was easy to miss the few stories published in January 2002 about Lt. Col. Philip Zack, who, like Hatfill, also had access to a well-equipped laboratory with lax security. Zack, moreover, actually worked with military-grade anthrax at Fort Detrick. Dr. Zack left Fort Detrick in December 1991 amid allegations of unprofessional conduct. The Jewish scientist and others were accused of harassing their co-worker, Dr. Ayaad Assaad, until the Egyptian-born American scientist quit, according to an article in Connecticut’s The Hartford Courant, the country’s oldest newspaper in continuous publication. Dr. Assaad sued the Army, claiming discrimination after Zack’s badgering. Although Dr. Zack was let go, he returned frequently to visit friends, and used the Fort Detrick laboratories for 'off-the-books' work after hours. After reports of missing biological specimens—including anthrax, Ebola and the simian AIDs virus—came to light, as well as reports of unauthorized research, a review of surveillance camera tapes recorded Dr. Zack entering the lab late on the night of Jan. 23, 1992, according to The Hartford Courant report. He was let in that night by Marian Rippy, a lab pathologist and close friend of Zack’s, although she now says she has no memory of the evening. She did say that Zack occasionally visited and that other friends let him in. Inexplicably, the national press ignored these documented unauthorized visits to a top-secret government lab embroiled in the anthrax attacks. Did journalists fear being labeled anti-Semitic for casting suspicions on a Jewish scientist? Soon after the 9/11 attack, a long, typed anonymous letter was sent to Quantico Marine Base accusing the long-suffering Assaad, Zack’s victim in 1991, of plotting terrorism. This letter was received before the anthrax letters or disease were reported. The timing of the note makes its author a serious suspect in the anthrax attacks. The sender also displayed considerable knowledge of Dr. Assaad, his work, his personal life and a remarkable premonition of the upcoming bioterrorism attack. After interviewing Assaad on Oct. 2, 2001, the FBI decided the letter was a hoax. While major newspapers noted that an anonymous letter had accused Dr. Assaad of bioterrorism, none followed up on it after his innocence was established. Zack’s name never surfaced again as one of the 30 suspects. When the Washington Report asked Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, Ph.D., a biological arms control expert at the State University of New York, if the allegations regarding Dr. David Hatfill now took the heat off Lt. Col. Philip Zack, she replied, 'Zack has NEVER been under suspicion as perpetrator of the anthrax attack.' It is hard to believe that, with his connection to Fort Detrick, Dr. Zack is not one of the 20 to 50 scientists under intense investigation ... Another person not naming names is New York Times reporter Nicholas D. Kristof. In a series of articles published on July 2, 12, and 19, however, he called the anthrax perpetrator 'Mr. Z' (not 'Mr. H'). Kristof’s description of 'Mr. Z' sounds very much more like Dr. Zack than Dr. Hatfill. The New York Times journalist reported that “Mr. Z” was caught with a girlfriend after hours in Fort Detrick. According to Kristof, 'Mr. Z' talked about the importance of his field and his own status in it, and often used the B’nai B’rith attack as an example of how anthrax attacks might happen. He also 'had a penchant for dropping Arab names' when he discussed the possibility of anthrax attacks. Is the anthrax culprit, or 'Mr. Z,' actually Dr. Zack or Dr. Hatfill, or another undisclosed scientist? Is Dr. Hatfill being framed while Dr. Zack stays out of the spotlight? Will the investigation simply peter out without an arrest? Are the U.S. government and the media engaging in a shameful cover-up? It remains to be seen whether the anthrax story will share the fate of the one-day wonders hidden on the back pages of America’s mainstream newspapers—whose publishers shy away from articles they fear may bring a spate of hate mail, charges of 'anti-Semitism,' or threats to end advertising or subscriptions. Another too-hot-to-handle story published in the Oct. 31, 2001 Miami Herald described an FBI search for six 'Middle-Eastern looking men with Israeli passports stopped in the Midwest the previous weekend.' The six men stopped by police were traveling in groups of three in two white sedans. The article noted that, despite law enforcement agencies being on high alert after the Sept. 11 attacks, the men were released—even though they had in their possession photographs and descriptions of a nuclear power plant in Florida and the Trans-Alaska pipeline. As a result of the scare, the Federal Aviation Administration imposed flight restrictions around nuclear plants nationwide, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission advised the nation’s 103 nuclear plants to fortify security. This news story vanished, but an urgent terrorism alert sounded by Attorney General John Ashcroft received much media attention. Somehow the new alert now was based largely on a message transmitted by an Osama bin Laden supporter in Canada to Afghanistan."

[The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States has 53 members. 18 members have likely Jewish surnames: Berkowitz, Byman, Felzenberg, Ginsburg, Greenburg, Jacobson, Kaplan, Lederman, Lesemann, Levitt, Marcus, Raidt, Rundlet, Scheid, Tobin, Wermter, Yerkes, Zelikow. "Inquiries regarding Commission staff may be directed to Al Felzenberg, deputy for communications, at (202) 331-4062."
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States,
U.S. Government
EXAMPLES:
"Bruce Berkowitz: Consultant. Research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and senior analyst at RAND. Began career at the CIA. Author of several books, including The New Face of War and Best Truth: Intelligence in the Information Age. Has also served on Senate Intelligence Committee staff and as a consultant to the intelligence community and Defense Department ...
Alvin Felzenberg: Deputy for Communications. Formerly at Voice of America, after serving as communications consultant to Secretary of the Navy Gordon England. Directed the Heritage Foundation's 'Mandate 2000' project on the presidential transition process, and was editor of Keys to a Successful Presidency. Held several senior staff positions with the House of Representatives.
Susan Ginsburg. Counsel. Former senior official in the Treasury Department's Office of Enforcement. Law clerk for the Honorable Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals and worked in the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics Matters.
Doug Greenburg. Counsel. Former litigation partner at Winston and Strawn and a former staff attorney with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Former law clerk to the Hon. Alan E. Norris, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ...
Stephanie Kaplan: Special Assistant. Former assistant director for international security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and a former associate with the Aspen Strategy Group, a policy program of The Aspen Institute ...
Matthew Levitt. Consultant. A senior fellow in terrorism studies at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. A former intelligence research specialist in the FBI's International Terrorism Intelligence Unit."

[Another Jewish "Terror Slut" exposed. Steven Emerson is a frequent TV pundit on "terrorism."]
Withdraws Defamation Suit. "Terror" Slut Steve Emerson Eats Crow (Just for Starters),
CounterPunch, May 19, 2003
"Wire Self-styled 'terrorism expert' Steven Emerson has filed for dismissal of a multi-million-dollar defamation suit against a Florida newspaper and its senior editor. The 'notice of voluntary dismissal' (Case No. 00-03739) filed in the Circuit Court in and for Hillsborough County, Fla., states: 'Plaintiff Steven Emerson herewith serves notice of his dismissal of this action, without prejudice, against defendants John Sugg and The Weekly Planet, Inc.' 'This lawsuit did not have any merit, and I believe it was filed in bad faith to deter us and others from telling the truth about Emerson. I think that 'pseudo-journalist' is a perfect description for Steven Emerson,' said Sugg, currently senior editor of Creative Loafing in Atlanta, Ga. Sugg added: 'We reported the truth. In four years of litigation, Emerson has been unwilling or unable to come up with any evidence that what we reported was false. Now that we were close to forcing him to back up his claims, he has run away.' Emerson's lawsuit alleged that Sugg, then senior editor of Florida's Weekly Planet newspaper, 'maliciously and repeatedly published false and defamatory utterances' in an 'ongoing campaign to undermine Emerson's credibility and damage his professional and personal reputation.' Emerson sought one million dollars in actual damages and ten million dollars in punitive damages on each of three causes of action. The complaint centered on allegations reported by Sugg that two Associated Press reporters said Emerson gave them a document on terrorism supposedly from FBI files: 'One reporter thought he'd seen the material before, and in checking found a paper Emerson had supplied earlier containing his own unsupported allegations. The two documents were almost identical, except that Emerson's authorship was deleted from the one purported to be from the FBI. 'It was really his work,' one reporter says. 'He sold it to us trying to make it look like a really interesting FBI document.'" (Weekly Planet, May 1998) ... The lawsuit also disputed allegations that Emerson gave false information to a Senate subcommittee during testimony in 1998. In an article headlined 'Ties to Spies?' Sugg wrote: "In a missive submitted to a U.S. Senate subcommittee in February, Emerson stated that a federal lawman and other authorities in 1995 told him 'radical Islamic fundamentalists had been assigned to carry out an assassination of me. An actual hit team had been dispatched...' Emerson claimed the authorities said he could probably 'get permission to enter the Witness Security Program' "After I sent Emerson's document to the Justice Department's Terrorism and Violent Crimes Section, this on-the-record response was made by spokesman John Russell on May 5. 'You pushed the right button asking about your friend Steve Emerson,' Russell said. 'We've never given any thought to putting him in the witness protection program.' Is there any truth to the allegation of an assassination team? 'No, none at all,' Russell responded.' In documents filed with the court, Emerson said he was 'notified by U.S. government officials in 1995 of a death threat against him.' Emerson is best known for his controversial 1994 PBS production 'Jihad in America.' Muslims say he has a long history of defamatory and inaccurate attacks on the Islamic community in this country."

Lehi planned to kill Bevin MI5,
By DOUGLAS DAVIS, Jerusalem Post, May 25, 2003
"London Britain's MI5 intelligence agency feared that the Lehi [a Jewish terrorist organiation] was planning to assassinate anti-Zionist foreign secretary Ernest Bevin in 1947, according to documents that were declassified in London on Thursday. Bevin, who impeded Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine and opposed the establishment of Israel, was regarded as the No. 1 enemy by many in the Yishuv during the period leading to statehood. The declassified documents also reveal that a bombing raid on London was planned by a Rabbi Baruch Korff using surplus World War II American and Canadian aircraft, 'in the course of which leaflets were to be dropped in the name of Lehi, together with highly explosive bombs.' According to the documents, Korff claimed that 'millions of dollars had been subscribed by private American sources' to fund the purchase of the planes. The plot was foiled by MI5 and a number of arrests were made in Paris. A 1947 briefing document for then-prime minister Clement Atlee, entitled 'Present Trends in Zionism,' reported that the Lehi, which assassinated Lord Moyne in 1944, had been steadily recruiting and was believed to number some 600 followers, 'most of whom are desperate men and women who count their own lives cheap...' It went on to note: 'They specialize in political assassinations and it has been reported that they have been training selected members for the purpose of proceeding overseas and assassinating a prominent British personality, special reference having been made several times to Mr. Bevin in this connection.' An earlier document, entitled 'Threatened Jewish Activity in United Kingdom, Palestine, and Elsewhere,' which Atlee is recorded as having read on August 28, 1946, describes the setting up of Lehi cells in the UK. 'Our Jerusalem representative has since received information that the Irgun [Irgun Zva'i Leumi, IZL] and Stern Gang [Lehi] have decided to send five 'cells' to London to work along IRA lines,' said the document. 'To use their own words, the terrorists intend to 'beat the dog in his own kennel.' If the 18 Sternists are executed the Irgun have agreed to cooperate with the Stern group.' It said that if sentences were carried out, Britain could expect at least 100 outrages, including the indiscriminate shooting of British officers and soldiers, as well as assassination of selected VIPs in Britain and throughout the Middle East. The '18 Sternists' were apparently sentenced to death for a sabotage attack on a railway workshop in Haifa. Their sentences were later commuted to life imprisonment. The briefing note said the Lehi had broken away from the IZL at the start of World War II in opposition to the decision of the IZL, led by Menachem Begin, to temporarily cooperate with the British government in Palestine. Begin, who was elected prime minister in 1977, was then described as a 37-year-old Polish Jew on whose head the Palestine Police had placed a 2,000 bounty. The intelligence documents note that the IZL specialized in sabotage, but was equally capable of assassinations, and had been 'responsible in the past for the liquidation of members of police and the military whose activities have been judged especially worthy of Jewish resentment in Palestine.' Atlee's briefing note, which was prepared in advance of a meeting with MI5 director-general Sir Percy Sillitoe, also included a list of precautionary measures taken against the terror threats ... On March 5, 1947, a bomb exploded at the Colonial Club in Trafalgar Square. The following day, 10 suspects were arrested at London Airport, two of them believed to be members of the Lehi. In April, another bomb was planted in London, and 27 hand grenades and detonators were found in a garage in the city."

9-11 -- What Really Happened,
Cosmic Penguin [compilation of links to web sites about 9-11]

"By Way of Deception...",
by Jeremy R. Hammond, Yirmeyahureview, June 4, 2003
"In the weeks following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, a series of letters containing a powder form of the anthrax virus were mailed to various individuals. One such letter, postmarked on the 18th, was mailed to Tom Brokaw at NBC. Another was addressed to the editor of the New York Post. On October 9, similar letters were mailed to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. The anthrax in the letters was identified as being of the "Ames" strain. At least five labs were reported to have the Ames strain, all of which received their samples from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland ... In response to Attorney General John Ashcroft labeling him as a 'person of interest', Hatfill stated, 'My lawyers can find no legal definition for a 'person of interest.' I, however, have a working definition: A 'person of interest' is someone who comes into being when the government is under intense political pressure to solve a crime, but can't do so." He mentioned Barbara Hatch Rosenberg and Nicholas Kristof as being the two most prominent individuals who had implicated his involvement, although Rosenberg made a statement, saying, I have never mentioned any names in connection with the anthrax investigation, not to the FBI, nor to media, nor to Senate Committees or staffs, not to anyone. I have never said or written anything publicly that pointed to one specific person. Anyone who sees parallels is expressing his own opinion' ... The other possible explanation, which Paul Moore fails to recognize, was pointed out distinctly by Delinda Curtiss Hanley, news editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, who wrote, 'Before the investigation of Dr. Hatfill captured national headlines, another insider scientist had come under FBI scrutiny without much media fanfare. It was easy to miss the few stories published in January 2002 about Lt. Col. Philip Zack, who, like Hatfill, also had access to a well-equipped laboratory with lax security. Zack, moreover, actually worked with military-grade anthrax at Fort Detrick. Dr. Zack left Fort Detrick in December 1991 amid allegations of unprofessional conduct. The Jewish scientist and others were accused of harassing their co-worker, Dr. Ayaad Assaad, until the Egyptian-born American scientist quit, according to an article in Connecticut's The Hartford Courant, the country's oldest newspaper in continuous publication. Dr. Assaad sued the Army, claming discrimination after Zack's badgering. Inexplicably, the national press ignored these documented unauthorized visits to a top-secret government lab embroiled in the anthrax attacks. Did journalists fear being labeled anti-Semitic for casting suspicions on a Jewish scientist? Soon after the 9/11 attack, a long, typed anonymous letter was sent to Quantico Marine Base accusing the long-suffering Assaad, Zack's victim in 1991, of plotting terrorism. This letter was received before the anthrax letters or disease were reported. The timing of the note makes its author a serious suspect in the anthrax attacks. The sender also displayed considerable knowledge of Dr. Assaad, his work, his personal life and a remarkable premonition of the upcoming bioterrorism attack. After interviewing Assaad on Oct. 2, 2001, the FBI decided the letter was a hoax. While major newspapers noted that an anonymous letter had accused Dr. Assaad of bioterrorism, none followed up on it after his innocence was established. Zack's name never surfaced again as one of the 30 suspects. When the Washington Report asked Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, Ph.D., a biological arms control expert at the State University of New York, if the allegations regarding Dr. David Hatfill now took the heat off Lt. Col. Philip Zack, she replied, 'Zack has NEVER been under suspicion as perpetrator of the anthrax attack.' It is hard to believe that, with his connection to Fort Detrick, Dr. Zack is not one of the 20 to 50 scientists under intense investigation. Another person not naming names is New York Times reporter Nicholas D. Kristof. In a series of articles published on July 2, 12, and 19, however, he called the anthrax perpetrator 'Mr. Z' (not "Mr. H"). Kristof's description of "Mr. Z" sounds very much more like Dr. Zack than Dr. Hatfill. Is the anthrax culprit, or "Mr. Z," actually Dr. Zack or Dr. Hatfill, or another undisclosed scientist? Is Dr. Hatfill being framed while Dr. Zack stays out of the spotlight? Will the investigation simply peter out without an arrest? Are the US government and the media engaging in a shameful cover-up?... Another too-hot-to-handle story published in the Oct. 31, 2001 Miami Herald described an FBI search for six "Middle-Eastern looking men with Israeli passports stopped in the Midwest the previous weekend." The six men stopped by police were traveling in groups of three in two white sedans. The article noted that, despite law enforcement agencies being on high alert after the Sept. 11 attacks, the men were released—even though they had in their possession photographs and descriptions of a nuclear power plant in Florida and the Trans-Alaska pipeline. As a result of the scare, the Federal Aviation Administration imposed flight restrictions around nuclear plants nationwide, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission advised the nation’s 103 nuclear plants to fortify security.... An Oct. 26, 2001 article in The Jerusalem Post reported that five Israeli men with box-cutters, multiple passports and $4,000 cash detained in New Jersey on Sept. 11, the day of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, would be deported back to Israel for immigration violations. Those men were seen laughing and posing for photographs with the smoking Twin Towers in the background. The U.S. press also deemed that story not fit to print.' The online publication La Voz de Aztlan also picked up on the clear possibility of a government white-wash of the affair, noting that 'Jewish microbiologist Dr. Philip M. Zack may be behind the deadly anthrax contaminated letters' and quotes Dr. Assaad as saying, 'This person knew in advance what was going to happen and created a suitable, well-fitted scapegoat for this action. You do not need to be a Nobel laureate to put two and two together.'"

Garaudy Exposes 'Western Terrorism' In New Book. CIA worked in cahoots with Islamic hardliners to mislead the world and shift the attention away from its 5-decade crimes record, charged Garaudy,
By Hadi Yahmid, Islam Online, June 24, 2003
"In his new book Le Terrorismo Occidental (Western Terrorism) which hit the market Monday, June 23, famed French Muslim writer and intellectual Roger Garaudy traces down the roots of terrorism, culturally, politically and socially. The book, published by an Algerian publishing house after being rebuffed by all French houses fearing backslash from the Jewish lobby, starts 3000 years back an reaches to the modern U.S. civilization, which spearheads the so-called anti-terror campaign to strike hard its enemies, Garaudy told IslamOnline.net."

[Philip Zack is Jewish.]
ANTHRAX ANNIVERSARY. Two years into the persecution of Steven Hatfill shows what the feds have in store for us all,
by Justin Raimondo, antiwar.com, August 4, 2003
"We are fast approaching the second anniversary of the anthrax scare: the first letter filled with the deadly spores was postmarked September 18, 2001. Almost two full years after the FBI fixed its sights on Steven J. Hatfill as a "person of interest" in the anthrax-by-mail attacks, John Ashcroft's G-men are still persecuting Hatfill – without pressing any charges, and persistently ignoring abundant leads pointing away from their hapless victim. While there is not a single iota of physical evidence supporting the case against Hatfill, a recent story in the Washington, D.C. City Paper chronicles the life of a man whose privacy and sanity have been held hostage by the FBI in this, the season of terror. It is a spectacle at once sinister and pathetic ... In the age of terror – that is, government-initiated terrorism directed against us – Hatfill's Kafkaesque predicament is a metaphor for life in the 21st century – life, that is, as our rulers would like to see it. In the world of Steven J. Hatfill, the Bill of Rights has been repealed and you're guilty until proven innocent. You can't go out of your home without being observed, you're subject to warrantless searches, and the FBI shows up for your job interview. The truly nighmarish aspect of all this is Hatfill's glaringly obvious innocence. The case against him is entirely circumstantial, based on his public pronouncements on the subject of bio-terrorism and a "profile" of the anthrax killer worked up by scientist Barbara Hatch Rosenberg. On the other hand, the trail of some pretty substantial evidence leads in another direction altogether, one that has been inexplicably neglected by law enforcement agencies and the news media, but is, nevertheless, a matter of public record ... : "Documents from the inquiry show that one unauthorized person who was observed entering the lab building at night was Langford's predecessor, Lt. Col. Philip Zack, who at the time no longer worked at Fort Detrick. A surveillance camera recorded Zack being let in at 8:40 p.m. on Jan. 23, 1992, apparently by Marian Rippy, a lab pathologist and close friend of Zack's, according to a report filed by a security guard." Zack and Rippy were part of the "camel club," which had left insulting and obscene messages in the mailboxes of Arab scientists at Ft. Detrick – including a 235-line poem, which included the following: "In (Assaad's) honor we created this beast; it represents life lower than yeast." The "beast" referred to is a rubber camel outfitted with sexually explicit appendages, apparently another "camel club"-sponsored activity. In tracking down the real culprit in the anthrax attacks, it would seem that an attempt to frame someone as the anthrax terrorist just as the attacks commenced would be a clue of some significance. The history of Ft. Detrick's "camel club" might also be seen as a hint of what direction the investigation ought to take. But not to our intrepid FBI. They're too busy tormenting poor Hatfill. What's scary is that these are the same people who are now warning us Al Qaeda is poised for another strike at the U.S., once again using planes as weapons. In this context, the question of whether Ashcroft and the feds are the equivalent of the Keystone Kops, or something more sinister, becomes a matter of some urgency ... As in the case of the Iraqi WMD, will we discover that a small group with a particular agenda has been feeding highly dubious "intelligence" regarding Hatfill to law enforcement officials? NOTES IN THE MARGIN: I note, without quite knowing what to make of it, that the most fanatic pursuer of Hatfill, second only to the FBI, is the Jewish Defense Organization (JDO), a split-off from the extremist Jewish Defense League: the JDO has devoted a special website to the proposition that Hatfill is the anthrax terrorist, and also a "Nazi."

[One standard for Jews, another for everyone else. This is a foundation of modern western society:]
BAGHDAD BOMB BLASTED AMERICAN HUBRIS. The dream of empire is exploding in our faces,
by Justin Raimondo, antiwar.com, August 20, 2003
"Closer to home, however, the reported financier of a terrorist plot, Yehuda Abraham, was granted bail by a judge over prosecutors' objections: Abraham, a 76-year-old Orthodox Jew who lives in Queens, was arrested on a charge of financing the attempt by arms dealer Hemant Lakhani to sell surface-to-air missiles to a "Somali terrorist group" that turned out to be the FBI. The Thailand connection: Abraham and his family not only traveled to Thailand frequently, but he is listed here as a contact for the Jewish community of Bangkok. Abraham, whose bail has been set at $10 million, is expected by his defense attorney to meet the terms imposed by the judge – he must wear an electronic tracking device – and "be free this week, as one New Jersey newspaper reported: "Prosecutors acknowledged they have no proof that Abraham knew he was helping to facilitate a weapons deal for terrorists." But that could change. Law enforcement sources say agents are still going over bales of documents and computer equipment seized in the raid on Abraham's Manhattan office. Given what we know now, however, a question arises: why would someone described as "a wealthy and successful man with more than $1 million equity in his home and shops in Europe, the Middle East and Asia" engage in such a risky transaction for a paltry $1,500 commission, as the New York Times reports? Sure, Mr. Abraham is an American citizen, but Federal prosecutors are treating Abraham far differently than, say, an Islamic charity in the U.S. that may have aided and abetted the financing of terrorism directed against Israel. None of those guys got bail: they were just rounded up, closed down, and deported. Why the double-standard? Why isn't he being held, a la John Lindh and Jose Padilla, as an "enemy combatant"? More than a few interesting questions come up if we look a little closer at this case, including what's up with the lawsuit brought by a BBC journalist against Newsweek, over the latter's report that the Beeb leaked news of the arrests before the feds could go after their real quarry. There is a lot more here than meets the eye."

[Who runs U.S. foreign policy? Unspoken by Meacher: Who's at the heart of the "Neo-con" movement (Irving Kristol and the other Jewish American Zionists at their Project for the New American Century) and schemes for "U.S." global domination?]
This war on terrorism is bogus. The 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination,
by Michael Meacher, The Guardian (UK), September 6, 2003
"Massive attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the reasons why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on why the US went to war, and that throws light on British motives too. The conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers were hit, retaliation against al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a natural first step in launching a global war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam Hussein was alleged by the US and UK governments to retain weapons of mass destruction, the war could be extended to Iraq as well. However this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth may be a great deal murkier. We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush's younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role". It refers to key allies such as the UK as "the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership". It describes peacekeeping missions as "demanding American political leadership rather than that of the UN". It says "even should Saddam pass from the scene", US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently... as "Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has". It spotlights China for "regime change", saying "it is time to increase the presence of American forces in SE Asia". The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool". Finally - written a year before 9/11 - it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a "worldwide command and control system". This is a blueprint for US world domination. But before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis ... . Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6 2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15 2001) ... None of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism. The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set against the PNAC blueprint. From this it seems that the so-called "war on terrorism" is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives. Indeed Tony Blair himself hinted at this when he said to the Commons liaison committee: "To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11" (Times, July 17 2002) ... In fact, 9/11 offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the PNAC plan into action. ... [I]t is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance ... The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy? ... Michael Meacher MP was environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003."

Folly Taken To A Scale We Haven't Seen Since WWII,
By Robert Fisk, The Independent (UK), September 2003
"When the attacks were launched against the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon two years ago today, who had ever heard of Fallujah or Hillah? When the Lebanese hijacker flew his plane into the ground in Pennsylvania, who would ever have believed that President George Bush would be announcing a "new front line in the war on terror" as his troops embarked on a hopeless campaign against the guerrillas of Iraq? Who could ever have conceived of an American president calling the world to arms against "terrorism" in "Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza"? Gaza? What do the miserable, crushed, cruelly imprisoned Palestinians of Gaza have to do with the international crimes against humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania? Nothing, of course. Neither does Iraq have anything to do with 11 September. Nor were there any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, any al-Qa'ida links with Iraq, any 45-minute timeline for the deployment of chemical weapons nor was there any "liberation". No, the attacks on 11 September have nothing to do with Iraq. Neither did 11 September change the world. President Bush cruelly manipulated the grief of the American people - and the sympathy of the rest of the world - to introduce a "world order" dreamed up by a clutch of fantasists advising the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld. The Iraqi "regime change", as we now know, was planned as part of a Perle-Wolfowitz campaign document to the would-be Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu years before Bush came to power. It beggars belief that Tony Blair should have signed up to this nonsense without realising that it was no more nor less than a project invented by a group of pro-Israeli American neo-conservatives and right-wing Christian fundamentalists. But even now, we are fed more fantasy. Afghanistan - its American-paid warlords raping and murdering their enemies, its women still shrouded for the most part in their burqas, its opium production now back as the world's number one export market, and its people being killed at up to a hundred a week (five American troops were shot dead two weekends ago) is a "success", something which Messrs Bush and Rumsfeld still boast about. Iraq - a midden of guerrilla hatred and popular resentment - is also a "success". Yes, Bush wants $87bn to keep Iraq running, he wants to go back to the same United Nations he condemned as a "talking shop" last year, he wants scores of foreign armies to go to Iraq to share the burdens of occupation - though not, of course, the decision-making, which must remain Washington's exclusive imperial preserve. What's more, the world is supposed to accept the insane notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - the planet's last colonial war, although all mention of the illegal Jewish colonies in the West Bank and Gaza have been erased from the Middle East narrative in the American press - is part of the "war on terror", the cosmic clash of religious will that President Bush invented after 11 September. Could Israel's interests be better served by so infantile a gesture from Bush? The vicious Palestinian suicide bombers and the grotesque implantation of Jews and Jews only in the colonies has now been set into this colossal struggle of "good" against "evil", in which even Ariel Sharon - named as "personally" responsible for the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre by Israel's own commission of inquiry - is "a man of peace", according to Mr Bush. And new precedents are set without discussion. Washington kills the leadership of its enemies with impunity: it tries to kill Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar and does kill Uday and Qusay Hussein and boasts of its prowess in "liquidating" the al-Qa'ida leadership from rocket-firing "drones". It tries to kill Saddam in Baghdad and slaughters 16 civilians and admits that the operation was "not risk-free". In Afghanistan, three men have now been murdered in the US interrogation centre at Bagram. We still don't know what really goes on in Guantanamo. What do these precedents mean? I have a dark suspicion. From now on, our leaders, our politicians, our statesmen will be fair game too. If we go for the jugular, why shouldn't they? ... Not since the Second World War have we seen folly on this scale. And it has scarcely begun."

[The 9-11 plot thickens. See earlier articles about Odigo, here.]
Odigo says workers were warned of attack,
By Yuval Dror, Haaretz (Israel), September 22, 2003
"Odigo, the instant messaging service, says that two of its workers received messages two hours before the Twin Towers attack on September 11 predicting the attack would happen, and the company has been cooperating with Israeli and American law enforcement, including the FBI, in trying to find the original sender of the message predicting the attack ... Odigo is a U.S.-based company whose headquarters are in New York, with offices in Herzliya. As an instant messaging service, Odigo users are not limited to sending messages only to people on their "buddy" list, as is the case with ICQ, the other well-known Israeli instant messaging application."

Israel official says Jewish extremists planned to attack Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem,
By PETER ENAV, nj.com (from The Associated Press), September 23, 2003
"A suspected Jewish extremist told investigators that his group planned simultaneous attacks on Muslim worshippers at mosques in Jerusalem, including Islam's third holiest shrine, a security official said Tuesday. The attacks were meant to avenge victims of Palestinian violence, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. In recent weeks, Israel's Shin Bet security service has been investigating Jewish extremists in connection with shootings that killed eight Palestinian civilians. Shahar Dvir-Zeliger, an alleged member of the group, told investigators the attacks were to take place during Friday prayers, when the Al Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem and mosques across Israel would be crowded, the official said. Muslims account for nearly 20 percent of Israel's 6.6 million people. Planning for the attacks began last year but was still in the early stages, with the group collecting intelligence on targets, Dvir-Zeliger told investigators, according to the security official said. Dvir-Zeliger was charged last week with stealing weapons from the Israeli military, and prosecutors said he was procuring arms for Jewish vigilantes suspected of killing Palestinians. Police also found a large weapons cache in a West Bank cave, including M-16 rifles, machine-guns, three anti-tank rockets, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and dozens of grenades -- all stolen from the Israeli army. Israeli authorities have detained nine suspected members of a Jewish terror cell, with three of those being charged. The other six were released."

Jewish Lobby forced to apologise to Interpal over 'terror' claim,
Muslim Public Affairs Committee, September 23, 2003
"We found this in the Jewish Chronicle, looks like Muslim groups are starting to fight back at the smear campaign being waged against them by Jewish groups. EMBARRASSED Board of Deputies officials are to apologise to a Palestinian fund-raising group un-der Charity Commission investigation for alleged links to Hamas over a press release branding it a "terrorist organisation." Interpal has threatened legal action over the claim, which the Board admits was "incorrect in UK terms." A spokesman said it would aplogise to Interpal, which was recently banned from operating in the US. "The matter is in the hands of our solicitors," said Board director-general Neville Nagler. "As soon as we heard from Interpal's solicitors, we changed the wording of the press release." The release was issued after the Board had written to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw urging that funds held in the UK for Palestinian terrorist groups be frozen. The Charity Commission recently announced it had opened a formal investigation into Interpal over concerns about "links to Hamas's political or militant activities." In a statement, Interpal chairman Ibrahim Hewitt said it had instructed its legal advisers to begin proceedings against the Board. He denied Interpal had political ties and insisted its funds were distributed "on the basis of humanitarian need, no more, no less."

9/11: WHAT DID RUPERT MURDOCH KNOW?,
by: Christopher Bollyn, Rumor Mill News, October 3, 2003
"[Rupert] Murdoch is said to be television’s “most powerful man in the world with the capacity to reach more than 110 million viewers across four continents.” Murdoch sits at the helm of News Corp., the parent company of Fox News network, and controls a large part of the mass media in the United States, including The New York Post and the Fox cinema and television network. Murdoch’s international media network owns more than 175 newspapers and magazines on three continents, publishes 40 million papers a week and dominates the newspaper markets in Britain, Australia and New Zealand. A “close friend” of the accused Israeli war criminal and prime minister Ariel Sharon, Murdoch and his media network are well known for supporting Israel’s right-wing Likud Party and the Anglo-American “war on terrorism.” Less well known, however, is the fact that Murdoch produced a television program in 2000, which predicted with uncanny accuracy the attacks of 9/11. Murdoch also has long-standing relationships with the key individuals who gained possession of the World Trade Center shortly before 9/11 – and who profited from its destruction. In 2000, Murdoch produced a television program about a terror attack on the World Trade Center, which predicted precisely the kind of attack that occurred on 9/11. He is also closely connected to the two individuals who leased, and then insured the WTC property – and their future earnings – against precisely such an attack ... 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 authorised 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. 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.”

AP: FBI Sent Hamas Money in Late 1990's,
Yahoo! News (From Associated Press), Oct 6, 2003
"While President Clinton (news - web sites) was trying to broker an elusive peace between Israelis and Palestinians, the FBI was secretly funneling money to suspected Hamas figures to see if the militant group would use it for terrorist attacks, according to interviews and court documents. The counterterrorism operation in 1998 and 1999 was run out of the FBI's Phoenix office in cooperation with Israeli intelligence and was approved by Attorney General Janet Reno, FBI officials told The Associated Press. Several thousand dollars in U.S. money was sent to suspected terror supporters during the operation as the FBI tried to track the flow of cash through terror organizations, the FBI said in a rare acknowledgment of an undercover sting that never resulted in prosecutions. "This was done in conjunction with permission from the attorney general for an ongoing operation, and Israeli authorities were aware of it," the bureau said. One of the FBI's key operatives, who has had a falling out with the bureau, provided an account of the operation at a friend's closed immigration court proceeding. AP obtained and reviewed the court documents. Arizona businessman Harry Ellen testified he permitted the FBI to bug his home, car and office, allowed his Muslim foundation's activities in the Gaza Strip to be monitored by agents, arranged a peace meeting between major Palestinian activists and gained personal access to Yasser Arafat during more than four years of cooperation with the FBI. Ellen's FBI handler in the late 1990s was Kenneth Williams, an agent who later became famous for writing a pre-Sept. 11 memo to FBI headquarters warning there were Arab pilots training at U.S. flight schools. The warning went unheeded. Ellen, a Muslim convert, testified he was taking a trip to the Gaza Strip to bring doctors to the region in summer 1998 when Williams asked him to provide money to a Hamas figure ...Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, said in an interview that the White House wasn't informed of the FBI activities. "We were not aware of any such operation," Berger said. Ellen testified the operation ended abruptly in early 1999 when he and Williams had a series of disagreements over the operation, disputes that began when Ellen angered the FBI by having an affair with a Chinese woman suspected of espionage. FBI officials said they tried to get Ellen to end the relationship and his work was terminated for failing to follow rules."

[List of links to articles about Israeli atrocities in history:]
Jewish/Israeli Massacres and Terrorism,
"Part 1: Massacres King David Hotel in Jerusalem (July 22, 1946). What happened: 91 people killed by explosives planted by the Irgun: 28 Britons, 41 Arabs, 17 Jews and five persons of other nationalities. Of the dead, 21 were British government officials, 13 were soldiers, and three were police officers. There were also 49 employees of either the hotel or the British government and five members of the public ..."

4 radical Jewish websites on US terrorism blacklist,
Middle East Online, October 10, 2003
"The United States has for the first time extended its terrorism blacklist to the internet, designating four websites affiliated with an extremist Jewish group as terrorist organizations, State Department officials said Friday. The move was all but unnoticed when it was put into place last week in a routine redesignation of 25 "foreign terrorist organizations" whose inclusion on the list was about to expire. It affects websites run by or tied to the Kach or Kahane Chai group, which have been on the blacklist for years, the officials said. "This is the first time to our knowledge that a website or any website has been designated an FTO," one official said, using the State Department's acronym for "foreign terrorist organization." The four websites are: www.newkach.org, www.Kahane.org, www.Kahane.net and www.Kahanetzadak.com, according to a State Department notice published in the Federal Register on October 2. With the exception of www.newkach.org, which is currently being redesigned and features no content, the websites offer news, commentary and links to other sites of interest to followers of the late radical Israeli-American rabbi Meir Kahane, who advocated armed anti-Arab resistance."

Terror Alert System Set For Jewish Community. National emergency warning network to be in place in weeks,
by Eric J. Greenberg, Jewish Week, October 12, 2003
"The first national Jewish emergency warning system will be launched within the next few weeks, enabling Jewish leaders to communicate quickly during a terrorist threat or attack, The Jewish Week has learned. It is believed to be the first crisis alert system serving a specific community in the United States. The project, called Secure Community Alert Network, or SCAN, includes the leading Jewish organizations in the nation, as well as hundreds of Jewish community centers, federations and educational institutions. The project comes as federal officials are warning of potential new terrorist threats, and as the High Holy Days season approaches, usually a time when the community goes on a heightened state of alert. SCAN also comes in response to glaring communications failures faced by Jewish organizations since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against America. In recent months, two alleged terrorist plots against Jews, reported in the media based on federal government warnings, led to much confusion and anxiety within the American Jewish community, sources told The Jewish Week, highlighting the serious failure of Jewish leaders to coordinate information or dispel rumors. Those failures led to the unnecessary cancellation of numerous events and the spending of perhaps $1 million in extra security measures, Jewish officials said. SCAN will be “a Jewish crisis communications network,” said Paul Goldenberg, a security consultant to the American Jewish Committee, which generated the idea for the unprecedented early warning system. “By not having this, there’s no way for Jewish leaders across the nation to mass communicate and receive the same messages at the same time,” he said. SCAN will be operated by a “management team” of 10 representatives from major Jewish groups including the AJCommittee, American Jewish Congress, Anti-Defamation League, Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Jewish Community Centers Association, Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Orthodox Union, Union of American Hebrew Congregations (Reform movement), United Jewish Communities and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. Goldenberg, who was formerly in charge of New Jersey’s Hate Crimes Unit, said he and Steve Pomerantz, the FBI’s former chief counterterrorism director, will serve as liaisons to the federal law enforcement community as part of SCAN’s 10-person law enforcement advisory board. SCAN will attempt to verify potential threats to the Jewish community through government channels, as well as check the veracity of unconfirmed reports and rumors about such threats. Heads of Jewish groups across the country were being asked this week if they want to participate in SCAN and to provide emergency contact information to the Presidents Conference, which is administering the program. Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Presidents Conference, said SCAN is essential because “we face a world in danger of increasing global terrorism, where Jews have been a primary target."

[JTR contributor's comment: "Here is an interesting twist to the "suicide bomber" saga. The article indicates that an Israeli was selling bombs. Note the relief at the end, where it says "although police sources say he was in the business of selling explosives to criminals rather than terrorists. " Whew. Criminals only, not "terrorists." Or maybe he is an agent of Mossad, who makes sure the "terrorists" don't run low, so Sharon can maintain the necessary fear level. Who knows?"]
Police find bomb lab run by Israeli Jew,
By Jonathan Lis, Haaretz (Israel), October 14, 2003
"Jerusalem police who Tuesday discovered a bomb lab run by an Israeli Jew believe that the explosives were to be sold to criminals, although are still investigating whether he planned to sell to Palestinian militants as well. Hanan Yadgarov, 29, from Pisgat Ze'ev was arrested two weeks ago after selling a three-kilogram bomb to an undercover police officer for NIS 25,000, said the city police spokesman, Shmulik Ben-Ruby. Yadgarov was remanded for 10 days. Police found explosives, ready-to-use bombs, Israeli and Russian army uniforms, police uniforms and bomb detonators in a Jerusalem apartment, Ben-Ruby said. The undercover police officer asked Yadgarov "if it [the bomb] could also blow up on buses and he said yes," Ben-Ruby said. He said Yadgarov's motives were still under investigation, although police sources say he was in the business of selling explosives to criminals rather than terrorists."

'Comedy Terrorist' ambushed in Edinburgh,
by Lee Levitt, Jewish Chronicle (UK, paper copy), August 8, 2003, p. 4
"Since famously gate-crashing Prince Williams' 21st birthday party dressed as Osama Bin Laden in drag, Aaron Barshak has experienced the ups and downs of media attention ... 'The idea of a man [dressed] as a terrorist in a dress is a funny sketch. People have come up to me and said: 'Good on you' [he said] ... The 37-year old [is the] son of commercial property developer Fred Barschak."

Board to apologise over 'terror' claim,
by Bernard Josephs, Jewish Chronicle (UK, paper copy), September 12, 2003, p. 1
"Embarrassed [Jewish] Board of Deputies officials are to apologise to a Palestinian fund-raising group under Charity Commission investigation for alleged links to Hamas over a press release branding it a 'terrorist organisation.' Interpal has threatened legal action over the claim, which the Board admits was 'incorrect in UK terms.'"

Kipah-wearing trader sold cyanide to BBC reporter,
by Simon Rocker, Jewish Chronicle (UK, paper copy), October 10, 2003
"A BBC documentary has shown an apparently Orthodox businessman selling a large quantity of cyanide to an undercover journalist investigating the threat of terrorism ... In one segment, journalist Paul Kenyon, posing asa businessman, was shown purchasing half a kilo of cyanide powder -- described as 'a ludicrously large amount -- for 20 pounds from a bearded man wearing a black kipah, who was said to be a 'perfectly legitimate' dealer in chemicals. Neither the man nor his company was identified in the programme, but there was a large mezuzah [a Jewish religious ritual artifact] on the door of his premises. The supplier -- said to have asked only to see Mr. Kenyon's driving license as proof of identity -- was heard cautioning: 'If that gets into the wrong hands it could do a lot of damage."

Five Israelis were seen filming as jet liners ploughed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 ... Were they part of a massive spy ring which shadowed the 9/11 hijackers and knew that al-Qaeda planned a devastating terrorist attack on the USA?,
by Neil Mackay, Sunday Herald (UK), November 2, 2003
"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 US-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 statewide 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 US 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 – simply that the possibility remains that they knew the attacks were going to happen, but effectively did nothing to help 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 US government sources still maintained that the Israelis were collecting information on the fundraising activities of groups like Hamas and Islamic Jiha ... 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 US 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 of the matter 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 US 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”. ... [D]id 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."

Smart Bombs vs: Intelligent Bombs The Suicide Bomb Hocus,
By C. E. Carlson, We Hold These Truths
"Israel is justifying its continuing assassination of Palestinian civilians and destruction of their property on grounds that Palestinian "terrorist" bombers are intentionally killing innocent Israelis. What if, in fact, the human bombers attack military targets and not civilians...is this still terrorism? Though the rest of the world sees it the other way around, most Americans seem to be persuaded that the Israelis are the good guys and the Palestinians are the bad guys. According to recent polls, these beliefs are derived largely from the media, which uses the label "terrorist" repeated day after day to describe Palestinians, while labeling Israeli actions as purely defensive. For instance, according to Fox News on May 5, 2002, a mother from Jenin and her three and four year old children were all shot to death, each hit in the head or upper body, and in a separate incident the same day a nine year old boy from Tulkarem was shot twice in the chest and killed...all in one day. But Israel excused these as military targets and provided various excuses. The media has persuaded many Americans that if Palestinians kill Israeli civilians, that's Terrorism which must be fiercely punished. But when Israelis kill Palestinian civilians, often children, that's "collateral damage." Israelis shrug and say they were aiming at government buildings; that civilians were acting suspiciously; or children just got in the way. A majority of Americans buy into the label "terrorist state" to describe Palestinians based on the acts of 55 Palestinian human bombers. This number and our information regarding these acts comes to us from military press releases prepared by Ariel Sharon's government, previous governments, and also from this author's personal observation of military presence in Israel. It can be shown that all or most Israeli death reports carried in the US media purposely omit mentioning of persons who happen to be in the Israeli Defense Forces or paramilitary, and that the "55 terrorist bombing of innocent civilians" were undoubtedly aimed at Military personal. WHTT thinks it is time to examine the one-sided use of the label "terrorist," and to ask whether there is any real difference between Israeli "smart bombs" and Palestinian "human bombs" that warrants one being called "terrorist," but not the other."

[Yes, Aaron Barschak, "the comedy terrorist"featured a while back in the Jewish Chronicle, is Jewish.]
Blam! Pow! Splat! The 'comedy terrorist' attacks the Chapman brothers, the Chapmans attack Goya... Don't panic, says Matt Shinn, the latest wave of vandalism is part of a grand tradition,
Guardian (UK), November 6, 2003
"What would it take for you to walk into a gallery and deface a famous painting? The "comedy terrorist" Aaron Barschak faces a possible jail sentence, after being convicted last week by Oxford magistrates of criminally damaging works in the Chapman brothers' summer exhibition The Rape of Creativity. What makes the case unusual is that some of the artworks concerned, now part of the Chapmans' Turner prize show, have themselves given rise to accusations of vandalism: they include an edition of 80 rare original impressions of Goya's The Disasters of War, on which faces of clowns and puppies have been drawn. You can tell a lot about someone from the art they choose to attack and the way they choose to do it; and you can tell a lot about the age they live in, too ... In this age of anti-art, moreover, it is increasingly common for vandals to claim their mutilations and additions are themselves "art". A wide array of techniques is available to the modern destruction artist ... Barschak claimed unsuccessfully to have been creating a new work by throwing red paint over the Chapmans' efforts. What is it that motivates these artist-vandals and links these different attacks? Is there perhaps some dark connection between creation and destruction revealed? Psychologists Victor Allen and David Greenberger think there might be: their "aesthetic theory of vandalism" is based on evidence that vandals experience an artistic kind of pleasure in what they do, a pleasure heightened by the complexity of what is damaged, and by the novelty and ingenuity of the way it is attacked. For David Freeberg, the psychology of art vandalism combines attention-seeking, obsessiveness (the attack is an attempt to break the hold of a compelling image), and an antagonistic attitude to authority. Thus it may be that the very greatness of old artists triggers feelings of inadequacy and aggression, particularly in other artists ... What sets the Chapmans apart from the vandals, though, is that the Goya etchings were theirs, bought and paid for, which makes all the difference in the eyes of the law. As owners of the prints, they were able to go through them, meticulously drawing on all the faces of the victims of war that Goya had depicted. If I were to make substantial alterations to a listed building, no matter how "beautifully", I might well end up in court. The question here is about the private ownership of cultural property, about what money does and does not entitle you to do. Because they have a legal title to it, the Chapmans are not answerable, in the way that a vandal would be, for their destruction of a small piece of Spanish and world heritage. Why should buildings be protected and not rare prints by Goya?"

[When the American government turns into an appendage of military state Israel, and the Arab world rises up increasingly in revolt against oppression, this is what can happen to Western citizens when the Bureaucratic Robot seeks to expose and isolate "terrorists." Real life, Kafka's "The Trial." Folks, wake up. This story could be yours some day. If you don't stand up for justice, no one else will when they come for you:]
They Put a Bag Over My Head & Flew Me To Syria for Torture and Interrogation. This is What They Did to Me,
By MAHER ARAR, CounterPunch, November 6, 2003
"I am here today to tell the people of Canada what has happened to me. There have been many allegations made about me in the media, all of them by people who refuse to be named or come forward. So before I tell you who I am and what happened to me, I will tell you who I am not. I am not a terrorist. I am not a member of al-Qaida and I do not know any one who belongs to this group. All I know about al-Qaida is what I have seen in the media. I have never been to Afghanistan. I have never been anywhere near Afghanistan and I do not have any desire to ever go to Afghanistan. Now, let me tell you who I am. I am a Syrian-born Canadian. I moved here with my parents when I was 17 years old. I went to university and studied hard, and eventually obtained a Masters degree in telecommunications. I met my wife, Monia at McGill University. We fell in love and eventually married in 1994. I knew then that she was special, but I had no idea how special she would turn out to be. If it were not for her, I believe I would still be in prison ... In September 2002, I was with my wife and children, and her family, vacationing in Tunis. I got an e-mail from the MathWorks saying that they might need me soon to assess a potential consulting work for one of their customers. I said goodbye to my wife and family, and headed back home to prepare for work. I was using my air-miles to travel, and the best flight I could get went from Tunis, to Zurich, to New York, to Montreal. My flight arrived in New York at 2 p.m. on Sept. 26, 2002. I had a few hours to wait until my connecting flight to Montreal. This is when my nightmare began. I was pulled aside at immigration and taken to another area. Two hours later some officials came and told me this was regular procedure -- they took my fingerprints and photographs. Then some police came and searched my bags and copied my Canadian passport. I was getting worried, and I asked what was going on, and they would not answer. I asked to make a phone call, and they would not let me. Then a team of people came and told me they wanted to ask me some questions. One man was from the FBI, and another was from the New York Police Department. I was scared and did not know what was going on. I told them I wanted a lawyer. They told me I had no right to a lawyer, because I was not an American citizen. They asked me where I worked and how much money I made. They swore at me, and insulted me. It was very humiliating. They wanted me to answer every question quickly. They were consulting a report while they were questioning me, and the information they had was so private -- I thought this must be from Canada. I told them everything I knew. They asked me about my travel in the United States. I told them about my work permits, and my business there. They asked about information on my computer and whether I was willing to share it. I welcomed the idea, but I don't know if they did. They asked me about different people, some I know, and most I do not." [Go to the original link and read this man's descent into Hell.]

Far from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic peoples have been its victims,
By John Pilger, September 13, 2001
"If the attacks on America have their source in the Islamic world, who can be surprised? Two days earlier, eight people were killed in southern Iraq when British and American planes bombed civilian areas. Not a word appeared in the mainstream media. An estimated 200,000 Iraqis, according to the Health Education Trust, died during and in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter known as the Gulf war. This was never news that touched public consciousness in the west. At least a million civilians, half of them children, have since died in Iraq as a result of a medieval embargo imposed by the United States and Britain. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, the mujahedin, which gave birth to the fanatical Taliban, was largely the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency; the terrorist training camps where Osama Bin Laden, "America's most wanted man", allegedly planned his attacks, were built with American money and backing. In Palestine, the enduring illegal occupation by Israel would have collapsed long ago were it not for American backing. Far from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic peoples have been its victims - that is, the victims of American fundamentalism, whose power, in all its forms, military, strategic and economic, is the greatest source of terrorism on earth. This fact is largely censored from the western media. That Tony Blair, whose government sells lethal weapons to Israel and has sprayed Iraq and Yugoslavia with cluster bombs and depleted uranium and was the greatest arms supplier to the genocidists in Indonesia, can be taken seriously when he now speaks about the "shame" of the "new evil of mass terrorism" says much about the censorship of our collective sense of how the world is managed ... I was writing about Palestine and censorship when the attacks in America took place. A friend, a distinguished American photojournalist, told me how he had stood up at a debate on media censorship in New York the other day and asked why Israel's oppression of an Arab nation, a construct of American power, was not recognised in American political life and the media. He was called an anti-Semite. It is not quite as bad in this country. The censorship is more subtle: the collaborative silence of the Jewish establishment, together with the BBC's promotion of moral equivalence between oppressor and oppressed while adhering essentially to Israel's and CNN's news agenda. The Times, says its former Middle East correspondent Sam Kiley, routinely censored his reports in Israel's favour. It is left to a courageous few to tell the truth."

Truth is, we’re terrorized because we’re hated,
By ROBERT BOWMAN, National Catholic Reporter, October 2, 1998
"Tell people the truth, Mr. President -- about terrorism. If deceptions about terrorism go unchallenged, then the threat will continue until it destroys us. The truth is that none of our thousands of nuclear weapons can protect us from these threats. No Star Wars system -- no matter how technically advanced, no matter how many trillions of dollars are poured into it -- can protect us from a nuclear weapon delivered in a sailboat or a Cessna or a suitcase or a Ryder rental truck. Not one weapon in our vast arsenal, not a penny of the $270 billion a year we spend on so-called defense can defend against a terrorist bomb. That is a military fact. As a retired lieutenant colonel and a frequent lecturer on national security issues, I have often quoted Psalm 33: “A king is not saved by his mighty army. A warrior is not saved by his great strength.” The obvious reaction is, “Then what can we do? Is there nothing we can do to provide security for our people?” There is. But to understand it requires that we know the truth about the threat. Mr. President, you did not tell the American people the truth about why we are the targets of terrorism when you explained why we bombed Afghanistan and Sudan. You said that we are a target because we stand for democracy, freedom and human rights in the world. Nonsense! We are the target of terrorists because, in much of the world, our government stands for dictatorship, bondage and human exploitation. We are the target of terrorists because we are hated. And we are hated because our government has done hateful things. In how many countries have agents of our government deposed popularly elected leaders and replaced them with puppet military dictators who were willing to sell out their own people to American multinational corporations? We did it in Iran when the U.S. Marines and the CIA deposed Mossadegh because he wanted to nationalize the oil industry. We replaced him with the Shah and armed, trained and paid his hated Savak national guard, which enslaved and brutalized the people of Iran -- all to protect the financial interests of our oil companies. Is it any wonder that there are people in Iran who hate us? We did it in Chile. We did it in Vietnam. More recently, we tried to do it in Iraq. And, of course, how many times have we done it in Nicaragua and all the other banana republics of Latin America? Time after time we have ousted popular leaders who wanted the riches of the land to be shared by the people who worked it. We replaced them with murderous tyrants who would sell out their own people so the wealth of the land could be taken out by the likes of Domino Sugar, the United Fruit Company, Folgers and Chiquita Banana. In country after country, our government has thwarted democracy, stifled freedom and trampled human rights. That’s why it is hated around the world. And that’s why we’re the target of terrorists. People in Canada enjoy democracy, freedom and human rights. So do the people of Norway and Sweden. Have you heard of Canadian embassies being bombed? Or Norwegian, or Swedish? We are not hated because we practice democracy, freedom and human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism -- and in the future, nuclear terrorism. Once the truth about why the threat exists is understood, the solution becomes obvious. We must change our ways ... Robert Bowman flew 101 combat missions in Vietnam. He is presently bishop of the United Catholic Church in Melbourne Beach, Fla.

[Anything is possible in this absurd world. Mossad? Or just plain kook?]
Terrorist's wife joined Jewish group,
By John Rolfe, News Interactive, November 12, 2003
"The Sydney woman who in September wed al-Qaeda operative and alleged terrorist Willie Brigitte after converting to Islam had been part of a Jewish gay group just 18 months earlier. Melanie Brown was photographed on the edge of a float in the 2002 Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, wearing long lace-up Doc Martens. The float called "Twice Blessed" was built by Dayenu, a support group for Sydney's Jewish gays and lesbians. The Daily Telegraph understands Ms Brown became part of Dayenu in 2000 and then worked to build its floats in both 2001 and 2002. A former member of Dayenu last night said that he and others in the group could not recall seeing her with a lesbian partner. Ms Brown is believed to have told members of Dayenu her Jewish heritage came from her mother, who had come to Australia from Romania."

Turkey Says Foreign Terrorists May Be Behind Suicide Blasts,
By CRAIG S. SMITH, New Yok Times, November 17, 2003
[Istanbul] "An obscure terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda took responsibility on Sunday for the twin truck bombings at two synagogues that killed 23 people and wounded more than 300 here on Saturday. Turkish officials said they had evidence that suicide drivers had carried out the blasts. The claim of responsibility was conveyed by Abdel Bari Atwan, the editor of Al-Quds al-Arabi, a London-based Arabic newspaper, in an interview with the Arabic satellite station Al Jazeera. Mr. Atwan said the terrorist group, known as the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, had made the claim by e-mail. The group has been linked with Al Qaeda in the past. The group has claimed responsibility for a number of attacks in Iraq in recent months, notably the Aug. 19 truck bombing of the United Nations' Baghdad headquarters and the Oct. 12 car bombing outside a Baghdad hotel used by the Iraqi Governing Council, according to Arabic-language news accounts monitored by the BBC. The group also has claimed responsibility for acts outside Iraq in which no clear evidence of a Qaeda link has been established, including the Aug. 5 bombing in Indonesia, and even the blackouts this summer in the United States and Britain. While it was impossible Sunday night to confirm any role by the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades in the synagogue attacks, the speedy claim of responsibility by a non-Turkish group supported the contention by Turkish officials that the bombings were the work of foreign terrorists, possibly from Al Qaeda, rather than any homegrown organization."

Five Israelis were seen filming as jet liners ploughed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 ... Were they part of a massive spy ring which shadowed the 9/11 hijackers and knew that al-Qaeda planned a devastating terrorist attack on the USA?,
Neil Mackay investigates, Sunday Herald (UK), November 2, 2003
"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 US-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 statewide 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 ... 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 US 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 – simply that the possibility remains that they knew the attacks were going to happen, but effectively did nothing to help 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 US 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 US 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 of the matter 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 ... 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."

Most of WTC Down Payment to Be Returned,
Newsday, November 22, 2003
"Under a pending agreement, a developer and two investors will get back most of their original $124 million investment to lease the World Trade Center just six weeks before a terrorist attack destroyed the twin towers. Developer Larry Silverstein and investors Lloyd Goldman and Joseph Cayre are nearing a deal that would give them about $98 million back from that investment, The New York Times reported Saturday. The deal also would allow Silverstein to retain control of rebuilding the office space at the site in lower Manhattan, the Times said. It was the largest real estate deal in New York history when Silverstein and his partners paid the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey about $800 million in fees and down payments for a 99-year lease. They agreed to pay about $120 million in rent per year."

[Threats from the Jewish "Al-Qaidah," fifty years earlier:]
UK Feared Assassination by Zionists,
by Nathan Jeffay, Jewish Chronicle, November 14, 2003, p. 4 [offline paper edition]
"British intelligence feared a spate of assassinations and attacks by Zionists in post-war London, hithero secret MI5 files reveal. Documents made public today by the National Archives reveal that a 'most wanted' list of Zionists was compiled by Scotland Yard and Special Branch. Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin was seen as a possible assassination target of Jews who wanted the British to withdraw from Palestine. A 1946 report by agent J. C. Robertson warned that right-wing Zionists were about to set up cells in Britain ... Concern extended to the attitude [of] British Jews in general, who 'though completely trustworthy in every other respect, may on this particular subject have divided loyalties.' The agent's [sic] said: 'Feeling over the Jewish question has grown to such a pitch, and the facts as regard Palestine have been so misrepresented by Zionist propaganda, that virtually every Jew is today to some extent in sympathy with Zionist aspirations. This may apply to not only full Jews but to persons of Jewish heritage on one side or the other' ... EXTREMIST BEN-GURION The man who was to become Israel's first prime minister was described as 'the extremist David Ben-Gurion,' in an October 1943 briefing by Middle East Forces, which also made reference to Zionism's 'totalitarian tendency.' It said: 'They [the Zionists] pay lip service to democracy and representative institutions.' Mainstream Zionist organizations were portrayed as equally threatening as right-wing groups."

The Enemy Within. Israel’s gravest danger is not the Palestinians,
by Neve Gordon, In These Times, December 22, 2001
"A portrait of Yasser Arafat lies among the ruins of a Palestinian radio and television station after it was torn down by the Israeli army. Jerusalem—Ariel Sharon appears determined to wreak havoc on the Palestinian Authority. Events in December suggest that the Israeli prime minister’s strategy may be to unseat Yasser Arafat in the hope of precipitating an inner Palestinian conflict, perhaps even a civil war. Israel, so the twisted logic goes, can then help set up a puppet government while changing the West Bank’s territorial demarcation—the Lebanon debacle revisited. “For Israel, September 11 was a Hanukkah Miracle,” Israeli political and security officials recently told the newspaper Ha’aretz. Thousands of American fatalities are considered a godsend—in this cynical world—simply because their deaths helped shift international pressure from Israel onto the Palestinians, while allowing the Israeli government to pursue its regional objectives unobstructed. And indeed, in the past months, the United States has unfalteringly supported all of Israel’s actions.

Osama Doesn't Like Us,
by Charley Reese, Charley Reese, October 31, 2003
"I've noticed that when Osama bin Laden issues a statement, the full text is rarely reported to the American people. In the interest of knowing our enemy, I thought I'd pass along a few of his statements. As you will see, the man doesn't much care for us. The latest statement is addressed to the American people. "Some have the impression," he says, "that you are a reasonable people. But the majority of you are vulgar and without sound ethics or good manners. You elect the evil from among you, the greatest liars and least decent and you are enslaved by your richest and most influential among you, especially the Jews, who lead you using the lie of democracy to support the Israelis and their schemes and in complete antagonism towards our religion." Whew. "These schemes are paid for in our blood and land, and your blood and economy. This has been proved by recent events. And the war on Iraq, which has nothing to do with you, is proof of that." He then goes after President Bush. "Bush and his gang, with their heavy sticks and hard hearts, are an evil to all humankind. They have stabbed into the truth, until they have killed it altogether in the eyes of the world. With this behavior they have encouraged hypocrisy, and spread vice and political bribes shamelessly at the level of heads of state. "This gang and their leader enjoy lying, war and looting to serve their own ambitions. The blood of the children of Vietnam, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq is still dripping from their teeth. They have fooled you and deceived you into invading Iraq a second time. And they have lied to you and the whole world. "Nations are nothing without ethics and morals. If these are gone, the nations are gone." After saying that Iraq has not been as easy as Bush thought it would be, he says: "To Bush I say, you are begging the world to come to your aid, begging mercenaries from every corner of the world, even from small states. This begging has destroyed your pride and revealed how trivial and weak you are after claiming to defend the whole world." He then directs his remarks to the American military people. "And to the American soldiers in Iraq I say, now that all the lies have been exposed and the greatest liar has been revealed, your stay on Iraq's land is compounding the oppression and is a great folly. "It shows you are selling your lives for the lives of others. And you are spilling your blood to swell the bank accounts of the White House gang and their fellow arms dealers and the proprietors of great companies. And the greatest folly in life is to sell your life for the lives of others." Then he gets around to the threat, and it's interesting to note that his threat is not open-ended. "In conclusion I say to the American people we will continue to fight you and continue to conduct martyrdom operations inside and outside the United States until you depart from your oppressive course and abandon your follies and rein in your fools. You have to know that we are counting our dead, may God bless them, especially in Palestine, who are killed by your allies the Jews. We are going to take revenge for them from your blood, God willing, as we did on the day of New York. Remember what I said to you on that day about our security and your security." In case you don't remember, what he said was that as long as the Palestinians had no security, neither would we. Americans should take note of what this dangerous man, truly our enemy, says. He's not angry because we are rich (he's worth about $300 million himself) or free. He's angry because of our foreign policy. And, as public polling has shown, that is exactly what the rest of the people in the Middle East are angry about. Rather than trying to kill our way out of this conflict, maybe we should re-examine the policies that caused it."

[These two bloodthirsty, dual-loyalist Israel-aholics, Frum and Perle, are boths Jews with influential positions in the Bush administration. THEY are America's "enemies," not France (!).]
Hawks tell Bush how to win war on terror,
By David Rennie, Telegraph (UK), December 31, 2003
"President George W Bush was sent a public manifesto yesterday by Washington's hawks, demanding regime change in Syria and Iran and a Cuba-style military blockade of North Korea backed by planning for a pre-emptive strike on its nuclear sites. The manifesto, presented as a "manual for victory" in the war on terror, also calls for Saudi Arabia and France to be treated not as allies but as rivals and possibly enemies. The manifesto is contained in a new book by Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser and "intellectual guru" of the hardline neo-conservative movement, and David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter. They give warning of a faltering of the "will to win" in Washington. In the battle for the president's ear, the manifesto represents an attempt by hawks to break out of the post-Iraq doldrums and strike back at what they see as a campaign of hostile leaking by their foes in such centres of caution as the State Department or in the military top brass. Their publication, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, coincided with the latest broadside from the hawks' enemy number one, Colin Powell, the secretary of state. Though on leave recovering from a prostate cancer operation, Mr Powell summoned reporters to his bedside to hail "encouraging" signs of a "new attitude" in Iran and call for the United States to keep open the prospect of dialogue with the Teheran authorities. Such talk is anathema to hawks like Mr Perle and Mr Frum who urge Washington to shun the mullahs and work for their overthrow in concert with Iranian dissidents. It may be assumed that their instincts at least are shared by hawks inside the government, whose twin power bases are the Pentagon's civilian leadership and the office of the vice-president, Dick Cheney. Such officials prevailed over invading Afghanistan and Iraq, but have been seen as on the back foot since the autumn as their post-war visions of building a secular, free-market Iraq were scaled back in favour of compromise and a swift handover of power next June."

[We really like this Jewish journal's headline (and this is exactly as it is posted on January 25, 2004): "Jewish World: A Symbol of Global Obscenity." It's what a Freud worshipper might call a "Freudian slip." It's really a careless editor mistake -- creating a closure between an apparently ongoing column head and this particular story. And the story? Another Jewish propaganda scam, deeply hidden in an appeal to vague humanity, as usual. It's about Jewish Money sending a "suicide-bombed" bus around the world to elicit sympathy for Jewish Power and Racism. You can't as easily send demolished homes and the thousands of Palestinian dead in a Jewish Propaganda Box. The strategy below, you'll note, is to disguise the expressly Jewish root to this demand for sympathy. Alas, there is an appeal here against many countries' "terrorism," but no mention of Israeli STATE "terrorism," which is the dominant "obscenity."]
Jewish World: A Symbol of Global Obscenity,
by Sheli Teitelbaum, Jerusalem Report, February 9, 2004
"With a bombed Israeli bus as its centerpiece, two LA brothers prepare a traveling exhibit designed to emphasize that terrorism, wherever and for whatever cause, can neverbe justified On March 5, 2003, Egged bus No. 37, of the Moriah St. route in Haifa, was blown up by a suicide bomber, killing 17 and injuring dozens more, mostly school kids. In July, its roof blown out and door side blown open, the grotesquely disfigured vehicle was secured for travel, and carted off to the Haifa docks for its journey to California. Footing the bill -- $1,500 to Egged in payment for the bus as scrap and another $50,000 for shipping -- was Endworldterror.com, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization headed by Los Angeles-based social entrepreneur Bernie Massey, and his brother Ed, an artist and designer of international repute. The Masseys, and a core group of supporters, intend to feature the bus as the centerpiece for a traveling tour and campaign slated to hit the highways of the U.S. and Canada in April. The group hopes to use the exhibit to challenge, reject and discredit those who accept or justify the spreading use of terror as a tactic for one political cause or another. The twisted hulk of burned and blasted metal, fabric and plastic that was Bus No. 37 arrived in Los Angeles in August, where it was subjected to an unprecedented three-week inspection by the Customs Department, which had never, The Report was told, encountered such an unlikely cargo. Released after dirt specimens from the tires proved benign, the wreck was trucked up to an industrial section of the San Fernando Valley, where it took up a berth in the back lot of a shipping company. There, a team of workmen set about bracketing, cabling, bracing, wiring and gluing it together to render it safe for public display and fortified for travel atop a flatbed truck. A multimedia display replete with large outdoor-screens is now being designed and will follow on another flatbed vehicle. This exhibit will present a running, graphic depiction of the horrors over 200 acts of terror have caused in countries as disparate as India, Russia, Turkey and Colombia. The display will profile incidents and incidence of terror through video presentations and multimedia exhibits, and will also be tied to the Web. A yellow license plate and a torn banner advertisement in Hebrew running parallel to its sheared-off roof attest to the red-and-white Mercedes bus’s Israeli origins. A closer look will reveal various unclaimed personal belongings found on the bus -- a shoe, a pen, a homework assignment -- scattered randomly about the torched steel carcass, and glued into place. According to Massey, however, the bus’s nationality, while not entirely incidental given the wave of bus bombings endured by the Jewish state since 2000, did not figure as the clinching factor in its selection. The campaign opposes terror -- any premeditated attack for political, religious or nationalistic aims in which the intended primary target is civilian -- in all of its manifestations. Although Israel has suffered disproportionately in this regard, Sri Lanka, for instance, has been subjected to a similar spate of attacks, and public buses have also been targeted in India, Pakistan and the Philippines. When the Massey brothers conceived the project over a year ago, they scoured hundreds of photos of terror-attacked buses from around the world to see if any had the right physical measurements required for the traveling exhibition. None did from other countries, and the few from Israel that qualified had already been picked of whatever seats, engine parts, electrical components and other pieces that could be transplanted into other buses, and then hauled off to rust in peace in the Egged bus graveyard in the northern town of Kiryat Ata. The shattered No. 37 proved close to ideal as the centerpiece for the campaign. Its physical dimensions met the brothers’ specs for safety and travel, while the blown-out stern side of the bus provided a roadside view of the carnage within ... Whether viewers are pro-Israel, anti-Israel, or uninterested in Israel, the Masseys hope the bus will render close and personal the universal horrors of terror for those throughout the world who only know it as an abstraction. As artist Ed Massey observes, "the inanimate bus structure is so powerful visually and emotionally [that] it is visceral for the viewer. It is galvanizing. This bus speaks stunningly to the actual brutality of terror. It is raw and it is real" ... The Masseys are not your typical California do-gooders. They know the world can be a rough and nasty place. There are many causes, they say in their statement, which deserve attention and resolution, not only through political action and popular opposition but, according to international law, when all else fails, through disobedience, resistance and violence against military targets. They are (secular) Jews, to be sure. But they regard terrorism as a broad international human rights problem, with consequences for the entire world. ... The Masseys and the Endworldterror team anticipate that this project will be provocative. But they are undaunted by the pockets of resistance they will assuredly encounter on the road. They are encouraged, moreover, by support received directly from three of the fathers who lost children on Bus 37, and who are spokesmen for the 17 families who lost loved ones: Yossi Mendelevitch whose son Yuval was 13; Yossi Zur, whose son Assaf was 17, and Ron Kehrmann, whose daughter Tal was also 17."

Israeli Not Allowed Out in Nuclear Detonator Case,
By Robert Boczkiewicz, Reuters, January 15, 2004
"An Israeli citizen accused of illegally conspiring to send 200 U.S.-made nuclear weapons detonators to Pakistan was ordered on Thursday to remain in custody while a Washington D.C. judge takes over his case and decides whether he can be freed on bail. Asher Karni, 50, was arrested on Jan. 1 at Denver International Airport after he arrived for a ski vacation on charges being made by federal prosecutors in Washington. On Monday, Denver U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael Watanabe ordered him freed on a $75,000 bail provided he remained at a rabbi's home in Maryland while his case proceeds in Washington ... Federal prosecutors want Karni, who lives in South Africa, to remain in custody because they consider him a flight risk. Prosecutors said there was "undisputed proof that Karni, using an American broker, acquired nuclear triggering devices from their manufacturer in Massachusetts, after falsely representing that they were destined for a hospital in South Africa." The device, a spark gap that can send a synchronized electronic pulse to detonate a nuclear weapon, is also used by hospitals to destroy kidney stones. "Instead, after the goods arrived in South Africa, Karni re-exported them to Pakistan. By structuring the transaction in this manner he avoided the requirement of obtaining an export license for the products," the motion said."

Dozens protest bombings by 'Jewish underground' in Haifa,
By Yair Ettinger, Haaretz, January 27, 2004
"Dozens of Haifa residents demonstrated on Tuesday in front of the municipal building against a "Jewish underground" terror group operating in the city which, according to suspicions, planted five bombs in the city's Halisa neighborhood during the past two-and-a-half years. Members of the terror group set the bombs under the cars and next to the homes of Arab residents in Haifa. Two Haifa residents were lightly wounded by the exploding bombs, but most of them were discovered and safely neutralized by police sappers. Two Fridays ago, a bomb was placed under the car belonging to Halisa resident Issa Ghnaim, who succeeded in disconnecting and moving the device before it exploded. Police have not succeeded in drawing connections between the incidents, but they do appear to be racially or nationalistically motivated."

Mossad & 911,
The Konformist (from United Press International), September 26, 2001
"The retired Pakistani general who is closest to the Taliban and Osama bin Laden contends the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington were the work of renegade U.S. Air Force elements working with the Israelis. Gen. Hameed Gul led Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence during the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Gul serves as an adviser to Pakistan's extremist religious political parties, which oppose their government's decision to support the United States in any action against Afghanistan's Taliban regime. Gul contends bin Laden had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, saying instead that they were the work of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service -- a version of events that has been endorsed by Islamic fundamentalist clerics and is widely accepted by Muslims throughout the Arab world. Here is the transcript of the exclusive interview Gul gave to Arnaud de Borchgrave, United Press International editor at large:
De Borchgrave: So who did Black Sept. 11?
Gul: Mossad and its accomplices. The U.S. spends $40 billion a year on its 11 intelligence agencies. That's $400 billion in 10 years. Yet the Bush Administration says it was taken by surprise. I don't believe it. Within 10 minutes of the second twin tower being hit in the World Trade Center CNN said Osama bin Laden had done it. That was a planned piece of disinformation by the real perpetrators. It created an instant mindset and put public opinion into a trance, which prevented even intelligent people from thinking for themselves.
Q: So you're already convinced bin Laden didn't do it?
A: I know bin Laden and his associates. I've been with them here, in Europe and the Middle East. They are graduates of the best universities and are highly intelligent with impressive degrees and speak impeccable English. These are people who have rediscovered fundamental Islamic values. Many come from the Gulf countries where ruling royal families have generated hatred by the way they flout divine law, wasting billions on gratifying their whims, jetting around in large private jets by themselves, and sailing the Mediterranean in big private boats for weeks on end. Osama's best recruits come from feudal areas that are U.S. protectorates and where millions of poor people are seeking human dignity. I have even visited a Christian convent school in Murree, 60 miles from here, where my 13-year-old daughter is studying. The young girls there have told me Osama is their hero. Osama's followers identify with Mujahideen freedom fighters wherever they are defending Islam and its values.
Q: So what makes you think Osama wasn't behind Sept. 11?
A: From a cave inside a mountain or a peasant's hovel? Let's be serious. Osama inspires countless millions by standing up for Islam against American and Israeli imperialism. He doesn't have the means for such a sophisticated operation.
Q: Why Mossad?
A: Mossad and its American associates are the obvious culprits. Who benefits from the crime? The attacks against the twin towers started at 8:45 a.m. and four flights are diverted from their assigned air space and no air traffic controller sounds the alarm. And no Air Force jets scramble until 10 a.m. That also smacks of a small scale Air Force rebellion, a coup against the Pentagon perhaps? Radars are jammed, transponders fail. No IFF -- friend or foe identification -- challenge. In Pakistan, if there is no response to IFF, jets are instantly scrambled and the aircraft is shot down with no further questions asked. This was clearly an inside job. Bush was afraid and rushed to the shelter of a nuclear bunker. He clearly feared a nuclear situation. Who could that have been? Will that also be hushed up in the investigation, like the Warren report after the Kennedy assassination?
Q: At this point, someone might be asking what you've been smoking. What is Israel's interest in such a monstrous plot, which, of course, no one believes except Islamist extremists who concocted this piece of disinformation in the first place, presumably to detract from the real culprits?
A: Jews never agreed to Bush 41 (George H.W. Bush, the 41st president) or 43 (his son George W. Bush, the 43rd president). They made sure Bush senior didn't get a second term. His land-for-peace pressure in Palestine didn't suit Israel. They were also against the young Bush because he was considered too close to oil interests and the Gulf countries. Bush senior and Jim Baker had raised $150 million for Bush junior, much of it from Mideast sources or their American go-betweens. Bush 41 and Baker, as private citizens, had also facilitated the new strategic relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran. I have this from sources in both countries. So clearly the prospect of a Bush 43 was a potential danger to Israel. Jews were stunned by the way Bush stole the election in Florida. They had put big money on Al Gore. Israel has given its imperialist guardian parent opportunities to turn disaster into a pretext for imposing an all-encompassing military, political and economic agenda to further the cause of global capitalism. While Colin Powell is cautious and others are reckless and want to make up for their failure to defeat Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War 10 years ago, the global agenda is the same. Israel knows it has a short shelf-life before it is overwhelmed by demographics. It is a state that was born in terrorism that terrorized Palestinians into the exile of refugee camps, where they have now subsisted in squalid refugee camps, and is now very much afraid of Pakistan's nuclear capability. Israel has now handed the Bush family the opportunity it has been waiting for to consolidate America's imperial grip on the Gulf and acquire control of the Caspian basin by extending its military presence in Central Asia. Bush conveniently overlooks -- or is not told -- the fact that Islamic fundamentalists got their big boost in the modern age as CIA assets in the covert campaign I was also involved with to force the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Bush senior was vice president during that entire campaign. And no sooner did he become president on Jan. 20, 1989, than he summoned an inter-agency intelligence meeting and issued an order, among several others, to clip the wings of ISI (Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence) that had been coordinating the entire operation in Afghanistan. I know this firsthand as I was DGISI at the time (director general, ISI)."

[This is a little older article, but it's worth a look. Some further context to this: Israel's Jerusalem Post noted, in a 1996 article, Jewish creep into the CIA during the Clinton administration: "Jews fill top positions in the U.S. intelligence community. In the CIA alone, intelligence sources say, Jews fill four of the CIA's seven directorates and the agency is headed by John Deutch, a director described by one Israeli intelligence source as being so traditional in his Jewish outlook that he practically wears a kippa [traditional Jewish skullcap.]" [RODAN, p. 20] What's the Judeocentric base in the CIA today? We don't know. But, given the dominance of Jews in American foreign policy, what do you think? An interview with Andreas von Buelow, former German government minister, can be found here.]
Was 9/11 a U.S. Plot? No, but Such Wild Theories Gain Surprising Attention in Europe,
By Ian Johnson, Wall Street Journal [The Classroom Edition], December 2003
"How’s this for a theory? A German named Andreas von Bulow argues in a new book that the U.S. government staged the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington to justify wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is a tentative theory, Mr. von Bulow admits, based mostly on his doubt that Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorist group launched the attacks. Is Mr. von Bulow some kind of crackpot? A conspiracy theorist who believes that Elvis lives and the CIA murdered Kennedy? Not exactly. Actually, he is a former German government official whose book, a bestseller in Germany, comes from one of the country’s most prestigious publishing houses and who lectures at well-known public institutions. And he’s not alone: In recent months, Germany’s leading broadcaster, ARD, ran a purported documentary making similar claims, while several other German authors have published like-minded books ... Conspiracy theories have long been part of the discourse in some parts of the globe, especially in places where a muzzled press and political repression warp public debate. But over the past two years, improbable theories about the Sept. 11 attacks have attracted serious attention in some Western countries, often in direct proportion to the sinking credibility given to the U.S. and its motives in international affairs. In Britain, cabinet minister Michael Meacher, who resigned in the fall, published a blistering attack in the Guardian newspaper, implying that the U.S. government was involved in the attacks to justify a more-interventionist foreign policy. In France, Italy and Spain, authors have hit the bestseller charts over the past year by claiming that the U.S. is hiding the truth about 9/11. In most European countries, conspiracy theories have remained the domain of a fringe minority. In Germany, however, the theories have had legs, and over the past few months, waves of improbable and outrageous assertions have received serious hearings. A recent opinion poll by one of Germany’s leading polling organizations found that one in five Germans believes “the U.S. government ordered the attacks itself.”

2 men arrested for posing as terror victims,
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS, Jerusalem Post, Febraury 3, 2004
"Two Jewish residents of Jerusalem who disguised themselves as terror victims in order to receive monetary donations from a Christian group in the city were under arrest Tuesday, police said. Jerusalem police's fraud squad began investigating the scam around a month ago after receiving information that a number of people had arrived at the central Jerusalem offices of the organization, 'Christian Friends of Israel,' bandaged - and sometimes in wheelchairs - asking for money for medical treatment for their terror-related 'injuries.' Police then installed cameras opposite the organization's offices, which filmed a man bandaged from head-to-toe coming into the office. The man claimed that he had been injured in Thursday's suicide bombing on a Jerusalem bus, and asked for monetary assistance. As soon as he left the building, the suspect took off his bandages and began counting the several thousand shekel donation he received. Police suspect that as many as 11 people may have been involved in the scam, which, in all, defrauded the organization of tens of thousands of shekels. The two men detained in the case so far, scam ringleader David Deri, 22, and Avshalom Nagar,21, were remanded in custody Tuesday for one to two days by the Jerusalem Magistrate's court, after which time they will be placed under house arrest, police said. The Christian organization exploited in the scam refused to comment Monday. Police said that more arrests are expected in the case in the coming days."

Arrest of Jew for terror plots sends shock waves throughout Israel,
by Dan Baron, Virtual Jerusalem (from Jewish Telegraphic Agency)
"Just as Jews prepared to celebrate Purim, whose story culminates in the Jews’ slaying of their enemies, one Israeli Jew was quietly planning to slay the people he saw as his own enemies. Eliran Golan, a 22-year-old from Haifa, is under arrest for a three-year-long bombing campaign against Israeli Arabs, including a bombing against a member of Knesset. Only one person was hurt in nine attacks attributed to Golan, suggesting that he is inept with explosives. But police said Thursday that more than 30 homemade devices had been found in Golan’s room when he was arrested, suggesting that Golan had the makings of a major terrorist. At his arraignment in Haifa District Court, Golan pleaded guilty to nine counts of politically motivated violence. “He declares himself a member of the ideological far right, and made this clear during interrogation — that he was active against Arab targets, that he hated of Arabs,” a chief police investigator, Effi Paz, told Army Radio. Golan’s father, Meir, a civilian who works for the Israel Defense Forces, also is under arrest on suspicion of knowing about the bombings and not telling authorities about them. He denies the charges. The arrests were made public Thursday after a gag order was lifted, and they sent shock waves through a nation used to equating Jewish terrorism with fringe settler groups in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Last September, three Jewish settlers were jailed for 12 to 15 years for trying to bomb an Arab girls school in Jerusalem. Police and the Shin Bet still are searching for the perpetrators of drive-by shootings in the West Bank that killed at least eight Palestinians in the current intifada. The fact that Golan was from Haifa, renowned as a haven of Jewish-Arab coexistence, made the arrest even more unsettling for some Israelis. According to media reports, Golan allegedly tried to bomb the homes of Jews who socialized with Arabs in the picturesque port city. Issam Mahoul, the Arab lawmaker from the pro-Communist Hadash Party who survived unscathed a bomb attack on his car last year, said Golan’s arrest hardly puts him at ease. “If truth be told, I am not yet calm,” he said. “I welcome the police efforts, but I think they have only uncovered the tip of the iceberg.” “Jewish terrorism is alive and well,” he said."

AP: Rumsfeld, FBI Official Kept 9-11 Items,
Earthlink (from Associated Press), March 12, 2004
"The Justice Department investigation that criticized FBI agents for taking souvenirs from the World Trade Center site also found that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and a high-ranking FBI official kept items from the Sept. 11 attack scenes. The final investigatory report said the Justice Department inspector general confirmed Rumsfeld "has a piece of the airplane that flew into the Pentago' ... The Justice Department investigation also collected testimony that Pasquale D'Amuro, FBI Director Robert Mueller's executive assistant director for terrorism until last summer, asked a supervisory agent to "obtain a half dozen items from the WTC debris so the items could be given to dignitaries' ... The report also divulged that FBI agents' removal of items like a Tiffany crystal globe from the World Trade Center rubble gutted a criminal case the bureau was building against a Minnesota contractor that had taken a fire truck door from the same rubble. Prosecutors told the FBI they "might not indict the crime regarding the fire truck door due to government misconduct involving the Tiffany globe," the report said. Surviving family members were surprised by the latest news. "Unbelievable," said William Doyle, whose son was killed in the World Trade Center ... The Justice Department's report has not been officially released, but heavily deleted versions of the report began circulating around Washington last month showing 13 FBI agents had taken rubble, debris and items such as flags and a Tiffany crystal globe paperweight. The bureau announced it was banning agents from taking items from crimes scenes, but no agents were being charged with crimes because the bureau did not have such a policy during the Sept. 11 investigation. The full report obtained by the AP divulges some senior FBI managers were among those cited for having authorized or asked for mementos from the World Trade Center site. In addition to D'Amuro, the report stated the now-retired head of the New York FBI office, Barry Mawn, asked and received an American flag and a piece of marble from the debris before his retirement. The report also states the special agent in charge of the FBI's office in Knoxville, Tenn., Joe Clark, contacted FBI officials in New York requesting a piece of debris to display in an exhibit dealing with hate crimes ... One New York agent who worked on the evidence recovery team "stated it was a ghoulish prospect that anyone would want things from a crime scene where people have died," the report said ... Investigators also stated that they found evidence that the agent who ran the recovery effort at the landfill, Richard Marx of Philadelphia, gave "inconsistent" answers during the investigation after several colleagues claimed he had given them permission to take items. Last summer, Marx was subjected to a lie detector test in which he said he did not recall giving items to Mawn, did not recall giving permission for evidence recovery agents to take items and insisted he was completely true when he gave an affidavit to the investigation. "The results of the examination indicated that Marx was deceptive in his responses to all three questions," the Justice report said. FBI officials declined to comment about Marx's conduct."

A hero of 9/11 cleanup under fire A Phila. FBI agent lauded for his work is accused of taking mementos. A supervisor said the items were for agency use,
By Larry Fish, Philadelphia Inquirer, March 13, 2004
"The Philadelphia FBI agent who was hailed as a hero for his work with the rubble of the World Trade Center now has a U.S. senator demanding to know if he will be punished. Special Agent Richard Marx, 36, who spent nearly a year away from home overseeing the search through 1.5 million tons of debris for the smallest body parts or personal mementos, improperly took things from the work site and lied to investigators about it, according to a Justice Department report. In a letter to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller 3d that surfaced late last month, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) criticized Marx and other FBI agents for taking 9/11 souvenirs from Fresh Kills, the Staten Island landfill that holds the twin towers' remains. Virtually all those who worked with him - other FBI agents, New York city police, families of victims - say the accusations are absurd and insulting ... " The FBI's Philadelphia office said that Marx was "training in service" at an undisclosed location and would not help in setting up an interview with him. Grassley, who has frequently criticized the FBI, had obtained a copy of a then-secret report from the U.S. Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General ... Fresh Kills, about 10 miles from Lower Manhattan, was where countless barges and trucks arrived bearing the wreckage of the twin towers. Marx was there from Sept. 12, 2001, until work there ended about 11 months later. Sharing responsibility with New York City Police Detective James Luongo, Marx guided the unprecedented task of sifting through millions of tons of debris, from steel girders to tiny fragments of bone. Victims' families said they were impressed by the dignity and the sensitivity Marx and the others showed them, treating the smallest piece of DNA as if it were a human body and carefully guarding driver's licenses or pieces of mail. "Anything that they felt could be linked to a person was set aside," Cartier said. But according to Grassley's letter, "agents, including supervisors, participated in or condoned what I can only describe as grave-robbing." The inspector general's report said Marx took "a significant number of WTC artifacts," including an elevator wheel, airplane spare tires, a fire truck door, four police cruiser doors, melted guns, airplane pieces, lamp posts, a street sign, eight American flags, and a World Trade Center observation deck plate. The report also said Marx took a polygraph regarding, among other things, whether he told other agents they could remove items from Fresh Kills. Marx "was deceptive in his responses" to questions about whether he gave colleagues permission to take items, the report said. Grassley asked Mueller to "please state what discipline, if any at this point, has been imposed... . If the FBI decides not to discipline these persons, please explain and justify the decision." But Michael W. Thompson, recently retired but then the supervisor in charge of the evidence-response team at Fresh Kills, said that Marx was setting aside items for the FBI's own public tour displays."

The Unmentionable Source of Terrorism,
by John Pilger, antiwar.com, Mardh 20, 2004
"The current threat of attacks in countries whose governments have close alliances with Washington is the latest stage in a long struggle against the empires of the west, their rapacious crusades and domination. The motivation of those who plant bombs in railway carriages derives directly from this truth. What is different today is that the weak have learned how to attack the strong, and the western crusaders' most recent colonial terrorism exposes "us" to retaliation. The source of much of this danger is Israel. A creation, then guardian of the west's empire in the Middle East, the Zionist state remains the cause of more regional grievance and sheer terror than all the Muslim states combined. Read the melancholy Palestinian Monitor on the Internet; it chronicles the equivalent of Madrid's horror week after week, month after month, in occupied Palestine. No front pages in the West acknowledge this enduring bloodbath, let alone mourn its victims. Moreover, the Israeli army, a terrorist organisation by any reasonable measure, is protected and rewarded in the west. In its current human rights report, the Foreign Office criticises Israel for its "worrying disregard for human rights" and "the impact that the continuing Israeli occupation and the associated military occupations have had on the lives of ordinary Palestinians." Yet the Blair government has secretly authorised the sale of vast quantities of arms and terror equipment to Israel. These include leg-irons, electric shock belts and chemical and biological agents. No matter that Israel has defied more United Nations resolutions than any other state since the founding of the world body. Last October, the UN General Assembly voted by 144 to four to condemn the wall that Israel has cut through the heart of the West Bank, annexing the best agricultural land, including the aquifer system that provides most of the Palestinians' water. Israel, as usual, ignored the world. Israel is the guard dog of America's plans for the Middle East. The former CIA analysts Kathleen and Bill Christison have described how "two strains of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism have dovetailed into an agenda for a vast imperial project to restructure the Middle East, all further reinforced by the happy coincidence of great oil resources up for grabs and a president and vice-president heavily invested in oil." The "neoconservatives" who run the Bush regime all have close ties with the Likud government in Tel Aviv and the Zionist lobby groups in Washington. In 1997, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa) declared: "Jinsa has been working closely with Iraqi National Council leader Dr Ahmad Chalabi to promote Saddam Hussein's removal from office..." Chalabi is the CIA-backed stooge and convicted embezzler at present organising the next "democratic" government in Baghdad. Until recently, a group of Zionists ran their own intelligence service inside the Pentagon. This was known as the Office of Special Plans, and was overseen by Douglas Feith, an under-secretary of defence, extreme Zionist and opponent of any negotiated peace with the Palestinians. It was the Office of Special Plans that supplied Downing Street with much of its scuttlebutt about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction; more often than not, the original source was Israel. Israel can also claim responsibility for the law passed by Congress that imposes sanctions on Syria and in effect threatens it with the same fate as Iraq unless it agrees to the demands of Tel Aviv. Israel is the guiding hand behind Bush's bellicose campaign against the "nuclear threat" posed by Iran. Today, in occupied Iraq, Israeli special forces are teaching the Americans how to "wall in" a hostile population, in the same way that Israel has walled in the Palestinians in pursuit of the Zionist dream of an apartheid state. The author David Hirst describes the "Israelisation of US foreign policy" as being "now operational as well as ideological." In understanding Israel's enduring colonial role in the Middle East, it is too simple to see the outrages of Ariel Sharon as an aberrant version of a democracy that lost its way. The myths that abound in middle-class Jewish homes in Britain about Israel's heroic, noble birth have long been reinforced by a "liberal" or "left-wing" Zionism as virulent and essentially destructive as the Likud strain. In recent years, the truth has come from Israel's own "new historians," who have revealed that the Zionist "idealists" of 1948 had no intention of treating justly or even humanely the Palestinians, who instead were systematically and often murderously driven from their homes. The most courageous of these historians is Ilan Pappe, an Israeli-born professor at Haifa University, who, with the publication of each of his ground-breaking books, has been both acclaimed and smeared. The latest is A History of Modern Palestine, in which he documents the expulsion of Palestinians as an orchestrated crime of ethnic cleansing that tore apart Jews and Arabs coexisting peacefully. As for the modern "peace process," he describes the Oslo Accords of 1993 as a plan by liberal Zionists in the Israeli Labour Party to corral Palestinians in South African-style bantustans."

EU to Israel: Don't kill terrorists, or else,
Jerusalem Newswire, April 2, 2004
"European lawmakers Thursday accused Israel of perpetrating state terrorism, and threatened to suspend the current Israel-EU trade agreement if any more "Palestinian" terrorist leaders were vaporized by IAF helicopter gun ships. A resolution presented to the European Parliament called for the immediate suspension of Israel's Association Agreement in response to the execution of blood-soaked Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin. It failed to gain majority support. Two compromise articles were passed, however, the first of which called on the body to fully suspend the trade agreement, which elevates the Israel's trade status with Europe, should Jerusalem carried out any more "extra-judicial" killings. The second accused Israel of engaging in "acts of terror" by launching anti-terror military operations that on occasion result in collateral damage among the largely terror-supporting "Palestinian" population."

[More evidence for the planned "defense" of Israel in the Middle East? You know, the surprise 9-11 attack that has been an Israeli Godsend.]
'I saw papers that show US knew al-Qa'ida would attack cities with aeroplanes' Whistleblower the White House wants to silence speaks to The Independent,
By Andrew Buncombe, The Independent (UK), April 2, 2004
"A former translator for the FBI with top-secret security clearance says she has provided information to the panel investigating the 11 September attacks which proves senior officials knew of al-Qa'ida's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened. She said the claim by the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no such information was "an outrageous lie". Sibel Edmonds said she spent more than three hours in a closed session with the commission's investigators providing information that was circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001 suggesting that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists were in place. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has sought to silence her and has obtained a gagging order from a court by citing the rarely used "state secrets privilege". She told The Independent yesterday: "I gave [the commission] details of specific investigation files, the specific dates, specific target information, specific managers in charge of the investigation. I gave them everything so that they could go back and follow up. This is not hearsay. These are things that are documented. These things can be established very easily." She added: "There was general information about the time-frame, about methods to be used ­ but not specifically about how they would be used ­ and about people being in place and who was ordering these sorts of terror attacks. There were other cities that were mentioned. Major cities ­ with skyscrapers." The accusations from Mrs Edmonds, 33, a Turkish-American who speaks Azerbaijani, Farsi, Turkish and English, will reignite the controversy over whether the administration ignored warnings about al-Qa'ida. That controversy was sparked most recently by Richard Clarke, a former counter-terrorism official, who has accused the administration of ignoring his warnings. The issue ­ what the administration knew and when ­ is central to the investigation by the 9/11 Commission, which has been hearing testimony in public and private from government officials, intelligence officials and secret sources. Earlier this week, the White House made a U-turn when it said that Ms Rice would appear in public before the commission to answer questions. Mr Bush and his deputy, Dick Cheney, will also be questioned in a closed-door session. Mrs Edmonds, 33, says she gave her evidence to the commission in a specially constructed "secure" room at its offices in Washington on 11 February. She was hired as a translator for the FBI's Washington field office on 13 September 2001, just two days after the al-Qa'ida attacks. Her job was to translate documents and recordings from FBI wire-taps. She said said it was clear there was sufficient information during the spring and summer of 2001 to indicate terrorists were planning an attack. "Most of what I told the commission ­ 90 per cent of it ­ related to the investigations that I was involved in or just from working in the department. Two hundred translators side by side, you get to see and hear a lot of other things as well." "President Bush said they had no specific information about 11 September and that is accurate but only because he said 11 September," she said. There was, however, general information about the use of airplanes and that an attack was just months away."

The 10,000-Pound Elephant in the Room,
by Michael Saba, Arab News, March 27, 2004
"Richard Clarke is all over the news these days. The author of “Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror” had his book released this week, the same week that he appeared as a key witness at the blue ribbon Sept. 11 Commission meeting which focused on what went wrong with America’s intelligence leading up to that fateful day. Clarke, who retired from government service about a year ago, served 30 years under 7 US presidents, 5 of them Republican, as a national security expert. Clarke has made all the major TV talk shows and appeared on all of the TV networks chastizing Bush and his administration for mistakes prior to Sept. 11 and criticizing President Bush and his key officials for their obsession to go to war with Iraq rather than focusing on Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. Yet with all of this talk and criticism, something was missing. There was a 10,000-pound elephant in the room and, although everybody could see it, nobody wanted to mention it. That 10,000-pound elephant is Israel. Clarke laid the blame and the Bush administration fought back. The Sept. 11Commission also got into the act when Clarke testified. Everyone was blaming everyone else but no one mentioned Israel as a possible participant in the equation. And Clarke, although he was taking on the neoconservatives, normally ardent supporters of Israel, seemed to be avoiding the mention of the Jewish state like the plague. Some courageous political pundits such as Pat Buchanan, have consistently pointed out the role of Israel and the pro-Israeli lobby in driving the United States toward war with Iraq. Then recollections of Clarke’s earlier career came to mind. Clarke served in both the Bush 1 and Clinton administrations. From 1989 to 1992 during Bush 1, Clarke served as the assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs overseeing sensitive US technology transfers. In a March 1992 report, State Department Inspector General Sherman Funk stated “alleged Israeli violations of US laws cited and supported by reliable intelligence information show a systematic and growing pattern of unauthorized transfers...dating back to about 1982.” According to other US officials at that time, those Israeli violations date back to the early 1970s. Many of those alleged violations during the Reagan era include Israel’s illegal transfers of American technology to China. The Funk Report heavily criticized State’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs for ignoring scores of intelligence reports on apparent violations of retransfer restrictions and other restrictions and for not reporting them to senior officials and Congress, as required by law. The report also recommended that the then Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Richard Clarke be disciplined for his lack of oversight on Israel. Clarke was reprimanded and eventually lost his job. However Clarke, a consummate bureaucratic survivor, reappeared shortly after that on the National Security Council staff in the Clinton administration. When the Funk Report was issued and Clarke was removed from his State Department position, Funk allegedly received threatening phone calls at his home. Funk was summoned to closed-door hearings in the US House of Representatives and was allegedly accused by Representative Tom Lantos of California of harming Israel while others reportedly joined in a verbal assault of Funk’s positions on Israel. At that same time the Jerusalem Post reported, “It appears the bureaucratic target (of the Funk Report) was Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Richard Clarke. US officials reportedly say Clarke is being removed from his position for negligence.” The Jerusalem Post goes on to quote a pro-Israeli activist as saying, “Clarke was a friend of Israel in an administration where they do not necessarily grow on trees. Somebody was out there to get him.” Also defending Clarke at that time in the Jerusalem Post were neoconservative, pro-Israeli advocates Michael Ledeen and Stephen Bryen claiming that there was “lack of proof that Israel had violated any agreements.” Interestingly, both Ledeen and Bryen served in the Reagan administration at the same time as Clarke. Bryen was also reprimanded during that period for alleged improprieties regarding technology transfer to Israel. Bryen and Ledeen now serve on the US China Commission which oversees American technology transfers to China. Clarke himself was quoted in a 1990 article in the Syracuse(NY) Post-Standard as saying, “The US benefits in a lot of ways from its strategic relationship with Israel” and went on to say that Israel could serve as a “war reserve stockpile” in expanding American military capabilities. In Clarke’s book, he makes positive references to his friend, Richard Perle. The pro-Israeli Perle, known as the “Prince of Darkness” is widely credited as one of the architects of Bush’s attack Iraq policy. And Clarke is quoted in the official biography of Steven Emerson as saying, “I think of Steve as the Paul Revere of terrorism...(Clarke) credits Emerson with repeatedly warning of Al-Qaeda sleeper cells in the United States. He adds that he would attend Emerson’s speeches whenever possible because ‘we’d always learn things we weren’t hearing from the FBI or CIA, things which almost always proved to be true.” Emerson is one of the strongest pro-Likud, pro-Israeli advocates in the United States and is often cited for blaming the Arabs and Muslims for most of the acts of terrorism around the world."

Jewish underground defendant cleared of terrorism charges,
By Yuval Yoaz, Haaretz (Israel), April 5, 2004
"A panel of District Court Judges yesterday found Zuriel Amior innocent of charges in the case of the Jewish underground, and an attempt by extreme paramilitaries to bomb an Arab girl's school in Jerusalem in 2002. "An analysis of the evidence and the difficulty of the defense in presenting explanations on the fingerprints found, raised suspicions against the accused and justified bringing charges against him," wrote the judges. "However, while the state has evidence that embroils the defendant, it is not possible to establish with the certainty necessary in a criminal court that the accused was the one who prepared the bomb." The prosecution and Shin Bet General Security Services expressed bitter disappointment at yesterday's verdict. "It was not enough for the judges that we brought them fingerprints of Zuriel Amior on the bomb for them to convict him with preparing the bomb," they said. "It appears that even if we had delivered Amior's finger taped to the bomb, it would not have been enough for a conviction," they noted."

Jeweler pleads guilty in missile sale case,
Focal Point Publications (from CNN), March 30, 2004
"A New York jeweler and money remitter pleaded guilty Tuesday to his role in the transfer of $30,000 used -- without his knowledge -- as the down payment on the sale of a shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile, the U.S. attorney's office said. Yehuda Abraham, 76, also admitted before U.S. District Judge Katharine S. Hayden that he was prepared to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars more from the same contacts involved in the missile sale in a separate deal. Abraham said that in both instances he did not know, and did not ask, what the money was to be used for. He pleaded guilty to running an unlicensed money transfer company. At his sentencing July 19, Abraham faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Prosecutors said Abraham handled funds for the initial missile purchase by Hemant Lakhani, 68, of London. Lakhani is alleged to have told an investigator that the shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles being imported into the United states "could be used most effectively in terrorist attacks against commercial aircraft in the United States if 10 to 15 commercial aircraft were shot down simultaneously at different locations throughout the country," according to the indictment against him. In September, U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie said Lakhani waived his Miranda rights and confessed at length to an FBI agent on the day of his arrest."

Israel behind 9/11, speaker tells York event,
By ANNA MORGAN, Canadian Jewish News, April 8, 2004
"The Mossad and the CIA infiltrated “Islamic combatant groups” in Afghanistan and were the forces behind the attack on Sept. 11 in New York and Washington, D.C., Imam Mohamed al-Asi said at York University last week. The “Israeli Zionists” and the “neo-cons in Washington, D.C.,” are to blame for leading the CIA into protecting Israeli interests and undermining Islamic self determination, al-Asi told an evening program in Founders Assembly Hall attended by more than 200 people, who received him warmly. The host introduced al-Asi as the imam who was expelled from the Islamic Centre in Washington, D.C., due to the fiery nature of his sermons. For the past 20 years, al-Asi has been delivering his speeches from the sidewalk in front of the centre. “The Jewish lobby in the United States, and I say Jewish lobby, preferring to say Zionist lobby, but the fact of the matter is that the Jews themselves refer to it as the Jewish lobby… was very disturbed that Muslims were beginning to stand up and their voice was beginning to be heard. Something had to be done about this,” al-Asi said at York. “If they can’t criminalize the Muslim community, there must be some major cataclysmic type of criminal activity… so they need something that would jolt public opinion into perceiving everything that is Islamic as terrorist. Without Sept. 11, they wouldn’t have been able to do that,” he said. “Sept. 11 was used by the Israeli Zionists, who by now had their representatives in those sectors of people called neo-conservatives [who were] all steering American policy to protect Israeli Zionist interests.” Al-Asi was part of an event titled “From Ground Zero to Islamophobia: Who Are the Victims?” that was hosted by seven different campus organizations, including the Muslim Action Network, the Muslim Student Association, the Middle Eastern Student Association, the Pakistani Student Association and the Pakistani Student Federation. According to the Anti-Defamation League, al-Asi has also accused Israel of carrying out the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center after the United States refused Israel’s request to have the Americans suppress the Palestinian intifadah."

Full text: 'Bin Laden tape'. An audiotape purported to be from Osama Bin Laden has been broadcast by the pan-Arab al-Arabiya and al-Jazeera satellite channels. In the tape the voice offers conditional reconciliation with Europe. The following is the text of the tape as broadcast by al-Arabiya,
BBC (UK), April 15, 2004
"[W]e would like to inform you that labelling us and our acts as terrorism is also a description of you and of your acts. Reaction comes at the same level as the original action. Our acts are reaction to your own acts, which are represented by the destruction and killing of our kinfolk in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. The act that horrified the world; that is, the killing of the old, handicapped [Hamas spiritual leader] Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, may God have mercy on him, is sufficient evidence. We pledge to God that we will punish America for him, God willing. Which religion considers your killed ones innocent and our killed ones worthless? And which principle considers your blood real blood and our blood water? Reciprocal treatment is fair and the one who starts injustice bears greater blame. 'Bloodsuckers' As for your politicians and those who have followed their path, who insist on ignoring the real problem of occupying the entirety of Palestine and exaggerate lies and falsification regarding our right in defence and resistance, they do not respect themselves. They also disdain the blood and minds of peoples. This is because their falsification increases the shedding of your blood instead of sparing it. Moreover, the examining of the developments that have been taking place, in terms of killings in our countries and your countries, will make clear an important fact; namely, that injustice is inflicted on us and on you by your politicians, who send your sons - although you are opposed to this - to our countries to kill and be killed. Therefore, it is in both sides' interest to curb the plans of those who shed the blood of peoples for their narrow personal interest and subservience to the White House gang. We must take into consideration that this war brings billions of dollars in profit to the major companies, whether it be those that produce weapons or those that contribute to reconstruction, such as the Halliburton Company, its sisters and daughters. Based on this, it is very clear who is the one benefiting from igniting this war and from the shedding of blood. It is the warlords, the bloodsuckers, who are steering the world policy from behind a curtain. As for President Bush, the leaders who are revolving in his orbit, the leading media companies and the United Nations, which makes laws for relations between the masters of veto and the slaves of the General Assembly, these are only some of the tools used to deceive and exploit peoples. All these pose a fatal threat to the whole world. The Zionist lobby is one of the most dangerous and most difficult figures of this group. God willing, we are determined to fight them. 'Reconciliation initiative' Based on the above, and in order to deny war merchants a chance and in response to the positive interaction shown by recent events and opinion polls, which indicate that most European peoples want peace, I ask honest people, especially ulema, preachers and merchants, to form a permanent committee to enlighten European peoples of the justice of our causes, above all Palestine. They can make use of the huge potential of the media. The door of reconciliation is open for three months of the date of announcing this statement. I also offer a reconciliation initiative to them, whose essence is our commitment to stopping operations against every country that commits itself to not attacking Muslims or interfering in their affairs - including the US conspiracy on the greater Muslim worl ... A rational person does not relinquish his security, money and children to please the liar of the White House. Had he been truthful about his claim for peace, he would not describe the person who ripped open pregnant women in Sabra and Shatila [reference to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon] and the destroyer of the capitulation process [reference to the Palestinian-Israeli peace process] as a man of peace."