BREAKING NEWS: ISRAELI ART STUDENTS: NEW INFO!!!!

JUST IN TIME TO GIVE FITZGERALD AND MCNULTY A LITTLE HELPING HAND.....66 pages.... www.waynemadsenreport.com DON'T MISS IT......this may be the smoking gun....

THE ISRAELI ART STUDENTS AND MOVERS STORY

By Wayne Madsen

The presence in the United States of a number of young Israelis, most of whom had specialized military and intelligence backgrounds, in the months prior to 911 is a subject that has received inadequate attention from the major U.S. media and government investigators. The activities of the Israelis fell into two main areas: the casing of the offices and homes of Federal law enforcement officials, U.S. military bases, and other sensitive sites by Israeli “art students” during 2000 and 2001 and the unusual activities of Israeli “movers” around sensitive areas during and after 911. These incidents occurred in tandem with the suspiscious activities of other former Israeli military and intelligence officials in neighboring countries, including Canada and Mexico, after 911. In addition, a number of Israeli intelligence agents were apprehended abroad for passport violations and other illegal activities.

The possibility that the suspicious Israeli activity was linked to the movements of Al Qaeda cells cannot be brushed aside as merely coincidental. For example, a number of the Israelis arrested for suspicious activities involving selling bogus Israeli art and driving moving vans were concentrated in some of the same neighborhoods where a number of the 911 Saudi and other Arab hijackers lived and trained at flight schools.

Two internal U.S. government documents revealed that among the 120 Israeli “art students” who attempted to penetrate the security of dozens of Federal office buildings and who visited the homes of scores of U.S. law enforcement personnel during 2000 and 2001 were some who used addresses and mail drops in southern Florida and Texas near those used by a number of the 911 hijackers. The information came from a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Report drafted in June 2001 on the activities of the art students and a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) list of the hijackers and other terrorist suspects, accidentally released in early October 2001 on a Finnish government web site. The DEA memo specifically stated that the Israelis may have had ties to an “Islamic fundamentalist group.”

As a journalist, it has become increasingly difficult since the 911 terrorist attacks to cover the more secretive aspects of the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities. Many government officials have readopted the famous World War II missive of “Loose Lips Sink Ships,” in refusing comment on anything deemed sensitive. Journalists who rely on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain copies of documents also face unprecedented challenges. After 911, Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a memorandum that states his Justice Department will use its enormous legal might to defend any refusal by any government agencies to withhold information requested under the FOIA.

Coming into possession of a sensitive Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) report on the activities of Israeli “art students” was, therefore, a welcome surprise. DEA, the chief agency that investigates drug cartels, dangerous work under any circumstance, is traditionally very secretive about its investigations. However, some members of the agency, frustrated that their concerns were not being taken seriously by senior officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Justice Department, apparently decided to leak the report. Their decision was supported by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), another agency involved with the DEA in the joint task force set up to investigate the Israeli “students.”

Being presented with a document such as the DEA report, titled “Suspicious Activities Involving Israeli Art Students at DEA Facilities,” posed unique problems in itself. For example, the document had to be verified as authentic and not a hoax. Many times, government agencies will merely state they “can neither confirm nor deny” the genuineness of leaked documents. However, in the case of the DEA report, confirmation of its genuineness came from the DEA in relatively quick fashion.

One amazing element of the story was the fact that a number of DEA, INS, and FBI agents had discovered, as had I, that several of the known addresses of the Israeli students were very close to those of the Al Qaeda terrorists and their supporters. These included addresses in Hollywood, Florida; Miami, Florida; and Irving, Texas. Speaking off-the-record, some of the agents told me that the fact that the Israelis and Al Qaeda were living in the same neighborhoods at the same time--January through May 2001--led the agents to believe the real mission of the Israelis was not to sell art at federal facilities but to spy on the Al Qaeda members.

As rock solid as the story about the true nature of the art students remains--it has had to face another, even more insurmountable problem than getting federal agents to talk. Immediately after the story appeared in Intelligence Online, Le Monde, and the Associated Press, the sizeable pro-Israeli lobby in the United States began to gear up for a counter punch. They had been through this in December 2001 when the Fox News Network, in a four part series by Carl Cameron, referred to Israelis being arrested and detained in the United States for espionage. Cameron also stated, “Evidence linking these Israelis to 911 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.” No sooner had Fox put the story on its web site it was pulled down without explanation. A similar story on Houston’s CBS affiliate, KHOU-TV, provided the following introduction:

“10/02/2001 - Fifteen People Arrested in March in Dallas, Suspected of Casing Federal Buildings. 11News reported how people claiming to be “Israeli art students” might be trying to sneak into federal buildings and defense sites, and even doing surveillance. In Dallas, the so-called students hit early this year at the city’s FBI building, the Drug Enforcement Administration and at the Earle Cabell Federal building, where guards found one student wandering the halls with a floor plan of the building.”[1]

When trying to access the full story on the TV station’s web site, one receives the following message: “The page you requested could not be found.” However, Channel 11 News’ terrorism expert and former Defense Department analyst Ron Hatchett said the Israeli activity was “obvious surveillance” and “not a bunch of kids selling artwork.” A Federal Protective Service memo, obtained by KHOU after Israelis were seen casing the Leland Federal office building in Houston, stated, “Federal sites have experienced an inundation of art solicitations at office buildings by students claiming to be selling Israeli art.”[2]

Federal agents in Dallas were also concerned that the Israeli art students had other intentions. The office manager for a Plano physician reported that after being told to leave, the Israelis kept returning to her building, which had a no soliciting policy. Channel 8 in Dallas reported that a number of Israelis were caught casing Federal buildings in Dallas and being involved in suspicious behavior in north Texas.[3]

The author’s own colleagues reported that aggressive Israeli art students paid visits during late 2000 and early 2001 to the offices of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, DC and the headquarters of the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) in Arlington, Virginia.

Other suspected Israeli intelligence activity surrounding 911, including the arrest by New Jersey police near Giants Stadium of five Israelis who were seen celebrating, high-fiving, jumping up and down, and videotaping the collapse of the World Trade Center, was reported by the media. A New Jersey apartment resident named Maria, who declined to give her last name, told ABC News about several Israelis she saw celebrating the attack on the Twin Towers in her parking lot. The Israelis were later linked to an Israeli-owned office moving company called Urban Moving Systems headquartered in Weehawken, New Jersey at 3 West 18th Street. Another Urban Moving office was located on West 50th Street in Manhattan. Urban Moving’s owner, Dominik Otto Suter, fled to Israel shortly before he was to be re-questioned by the FBI. [4] One of the five Israelis had a ticket for Bangkok and was due to fly out on September 13.[5] The New York Department of Transportation revoked Urban Moving Systems’ license after it was discovered that its Manhattan business address was merely a post office box.

At 3:31 P.M. the FBI issued a nationwide alert called “Be On Lookout” or “BOLO” for the Israelis. Drafted by Special Agent Dave O’Brien, it read:

“Vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack. White, 2000 Chevrolet van with New Jersey registration (JYJ 13Y) with ‘Urban Moving Systems’ sign on back seen at Liberty State Park. Jersey City, NJ, at the time of the first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center.”[6]

According to FBI sources, Urban Moving Systems and the activities of its employees on 911 did not sit too well with one member of the FBI’s New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, Special Agent Michael Dicks. He pursued the Israeli angle but soon found himself transferred to Karachi, Pakistan to help rescue Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl who had been kidnapped by Al Qaeda functionaries. There was one hitch. The FBI was already aware that Pearl had been brutally murdered by his captors.

Urban Moving Systems Weehawken, NJ bomb making and anthrax storage warehouse.

Moments after Maria felt the ground shake from the impact of the first plane into the World Trade Center and she received a phone call from a neighbor to look out her window at the southern Manhattan skyline, she noticed a white Chevy van parked in the lower parking lot with three of the five men in the van jumping on the roof of the vehicle and videotaping each other with the carnage in the background. Maria was also shocked that the men were celebrating the horrific scenes across the Hudson River. After writing down the license plate number of the van, Maria and her husband Pat phoned the police.[7]

Subsequently, Information Spectrum, Inc. (ISI) of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a subsidiary of the Fairfax, Virginia-based defense contractor, Anteon, took over the operation of the Jersey City police computer system that handled all incoming emergency phone calls on September 11. The system had been maintained by Larimore Associates, a company that specializes in archiving police emergency calls. However, Larimore’s contract was abruptly canceled by Jersey City authorities and awarded to Information Spectrum after the sudden death from a heart attack of Jersey City’s first African-American mayor, Democrat, Glenn D. Cunningham, himself a former Jersey City police officer. According to Jersey City Police officials, after the emergency call system was changed from a Wang to a Windows environment, 8000 emergency 911 system calls registered on September 11 were scrubbed from the archives. In fact, archives dating back to 1989, including those dealing with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, were similarly affected. Information Spectrum’s running of the computer system resulted in a number of server crashes. When Larimore volunteered to help recover the lost data, there was no response from the police department.[8] Some Jersey City police sources speculated the change from Larimore to ISI/Anteon was prompted by orders from Trenton and the administration of Governor James McGreevey. They termed the changeover as “political.” Governor McGreevey resigned in 2004 after it was discovered he had an alleged gay relationship with his chief of Homeland Security, Golan Cipel. An Israeli citizen, Cipel, a former diplomat assigned to Israel’s Consulate General in New York City, was thought by many intelligence experts to be a junior Mossad case officer who lured McGreevey into a “honey trap.”

Jersey City was a major base of operations for the 1993 World Trade Center attack. The Ryder van used in that attack was rented from a Jersey City rental agency. As for the 911 attacks on the World Trade Center, there were no records of a call by Maria or any other witness to the Israeli activity in Maria’s building parking lot or at Liberty State Park. The only call remaining in the system was a late night call on September 11 about a suspicious vagrant in a south Jersey City neighborhood.[9]

However, there was a call placed to the Jersey City Police Department that claimed “Palestinians” in Arab clothes were seen celebrating the attacks. Although the Jersey City Police discovered their 911 system tapes on September 11, 2001 disappeared from their servers and achives after ISI took over the contract, some tapes implicating “Arabs” found their way into the hands of WNBC-TV in New York in June 2002. WNBC played transcripts of 911 calls from the Jersey City Police:

Dispatcher: Jersey City police.
Caller: Yes, we have a white van, 2 or 3 guys in there, they look like Palestinians and going around a building.
Caller: There’s a minivan heading toward the Holland tunnel, I see the guy by Newark Airport mixing some junk and he has those sheikh uniform.
Dispatcher: He has what?
Caller: He’s dressed like an Arab.[10]

It is clear that the Jersey City Police Department’s 911 call tapes were manipulated to delete any calls that might implicate the Israelis. The one call provided to WNBC was cleatly an attempt at a “false flag” operation implicating “Palestinians” wearing “sheik uniforms” as the culprits in at least one of the white vans driven by Israeli “movers” on the morning of September 11.

After the van was traced to the Israeli moving company, the BOLO went out for the arrest of the vehicle’s driver and passengers. An East Rutherford policeman directing traffic away from the closed Lincoln Tunnel on Route 3 East noticed the van was driving slowly on the service road towards the tunnel. The tag of the vehicle was only off by one letter from what was contained in the BOLO (JRJ 13Y) and the front New Jersey plate had been removed. It is very possible that to confuse the police, the Israelis were using NJ plate JRJ 13Y as the rear tag on two white vans – the one sighted in Liberty State Park and the other in Maria’s apartment building parking lot. In fact, local police reported a number of white van sightings during September 11, with a number of them phoned into the police. Maria told ABC News she phoned tag number JRJ 13Y to the Jersey City Police after seeing the Israelis driving in a white van celebrating the first plane’s impact, while Liberty State Park witnesses said the same tag number -- JRJ 13Y -- had been passed to the police and FBI after a white van with “celebrating Arabs” had been chased from the park by the park’s chief ranger after the first plane impact.[11] It was clear that officials of New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection in Trenton, which has authority over the state’s parks, ordered Liberty State Park officials not to talk to the media about September 11 and the Israeli van.[12]

The East Rutherford Police report on the Israeli van states:

“Officer assigned to Special Detail on Route 3 was rerouting traffic on Highway 3 East to Hwy 120 and 3 West. Lincoln Tunnel was shut down and officer was diverting traffic. Officer notified by dispatch of a National Broadcast to be on lookout for 2000 Chevy Van White, NJ tag JYJ 13Y. 3 to 4 occupants. Officer noticed van traveling at slow speed east towards Lincoln Tunnel on the Service Road with 2 occupants visible. Officer informed sergeant of possible match. No front license plate but JRJ 13Y tag may have one letter off from National Broadcast. Sergeant told officer to stop vehicle because van seen in Liberty State Park