Posted on 06/21/2002 6:42:36 PM PDT by RCW2001
 U.S. officials spent months investigating five Israelis to determine whether they were working in America as spies for Israel. (ABCNEWS.com) |
The White Van
Were Israelis Detained on Sept. 11 Spies?  June 21
— Millions saw the horrific images of the World Trade Center attacks, and those who saw them won't forget them. But a New Jersey homemaker saw something that morning that prompted an investigation into five young Israelis and their possible connection to Israeli intelligence.
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She grabbed her binoculars and watched the destruction unfolding in lower Manhattan. 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. "They seemed to be taking a movie," Maria said. 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. Around 4 p.m. on Sept. 11, the van was spotted on a service road off Route 3, near New Jersey's Giants Stadium. 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.
‘We Are Not Your Problem’ According to the police report, one of the passengers told the officers they had been on the West Side Highway in Manhattan "during the incident" — referring to the World Trade Center attack. 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.
‘A Scary Situation’ Steven Gordon, the attorney for the five Israeli detainees, acknowledged that his clients' actions on Sept. 11 would easily have aroused suspicions. "You got a group of guys that are taking pictures, on top of a roof, of the World Trade Center. They're speaking in a foreign language. They got two passports on 'em. One's got a wad of cash on him, and they got box cutters. Now that's a scary situation." But Gordon insisted that his clients were just five young men who had come to America for a vacation, ended up working for a moving company, and were taking pictures of the event. 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.
'Plenty of Speculation' 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 Connection? According to Cannistraro, many people in the U.S. intelligence community believed that some of the men arrested were working for Israeli intelligence. Cannistraro said there was speculation as to whether Urban Moving had been "set up or exploited for the purpose of launching an intelligence operation against radical Islamists in the area, particularly in the New Jersey-New York area." Under this scenario, the alleged spying operation was not aimed against the United States, but at penetrating or monitoring radical fund-raising and support networks in Muslim communities like Paterson, N.J., which was one of the places where several of the hijackers lived in the months prior to Sept. 11. 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 bombings in Israel. "[The] Israeli government has been very concerned about the activity of radical Islamic groups in the United States that could be a support apparatus to Hamas and Islamic Jihad," Cannistraro said. The men denied that they had been working for Israeli intelligence out of the New Jersey moving company, and Ram Horvitz, their Israeli attorney, dismissed the allegations as "stupid and ridiculous." Mark Regev, the spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, goes even further, asserting the issue was never even discussed with U.S. officials. "These five men were not involved in any intelligence operation in the United States, and the American intelligence authorities have never raised this issue with us," Regev said. "The story is simply false."
No ‘Pre-Knowledge’ 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. But the FBI told ABCNEWS, "To date, this investigation has not identified anybody who in this country had pre-knowledge of the events of 9/11." 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. The investigation, at the end of the day, after all the polygraphs, all of the field work, all the cross-checking, the intelligence work, concluded that they probably did not have advance knowledge of 9/11," Cannistraro noted. As to what they were doing on the van, they say they read about the attack on the Internet, couldn't see it from their offices and went to the parking lot for a better view. 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. Both the lawyers for the young men and the Israeli Embassy chalk it up to immature conduct. According to ABCNEWS sources, Israeli and U.S. government officials worked out a deal — and after 71 days, the five Israelis were taken out of jail, put on a plane, and deported back home. While the former detainees refused to answer ABCNEWS' questions about their detention and what they were doing on Sept. 11, several of the detainees discussed their experience in America on an Israeli talk show after their return home. Said one of the men, denying that they were laughing or happy on the morning of Sept. 11, "The fact of the matter is we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event." ABCNEWS' Chris Isham, John Miller, Glenn Silber and Chris Vlasto contributed to this report. |
Sure was..it's called admitting it but denying it while it's true.
As for hating Jews, that would mean I would have to hate the entire staff of Antiwar.com and a good part of the Board of Directors.
It is absolutely disgusting that the FR "administrative monitors" permit trolls like you to drive the best elements of the old FR away -- while apologists for a foreign power like yourself are given free rein.
Good points. I agree that this is altogether suspicious, but there's just not enough here to explain what was going on, let alone prove it. There is obviously much, much more to this story than this article presents. The quotes from named sources, like Vince Cannistraro and Paul Kurzberg's lawyers (semi-named) are helpful, but there are a lot of red flags, like copious quotes from anonymous sources, that demand circumspection.
If these guys actually were Israeli spies tasked with "launching an intelligence operation against radical Islamists in the area, particularly in the New Jersey-New York area", Israel must be running out of talent, because real Israeli agents tend to be pretty good at staying out of the limelight, would not be stupid enough to attract attention to themselves on 9/11 (an extraordinary feat of stupidity unto itself) and would sure as hell have had a better cover story or means of evasion if discovered. Also, these guys don't seem to have handled their arrests and detainment very professionally.
Whenever espionage is involved, it is often difficult for journalists to nail anything down. Sometimes unidentified "sources" are absolutely truthful, sometimes they are flat out lying, and sometimes they are made up by unscrupulous writers looking for a scoop.
I agree that common sense (as uncommon as it is) is a valuable tool for analysis, and definitely should be applied here. Common sense precludes jumping to conclusions based on speculation and innuendo, both of which are abundant in this article.
Hopefully, this 20/20 piece will cause more details to shake out, and perhaps some corroboration -- ideally the videotape -- might follow as well.
Imal
So the lady in the upstairs apartment peered out with her binoculars looking for Jews to turn in to the cops. OK. That makes sense. Wonder if she sits up there everyday reporting Jews to the police or if this was a one time thing.
Thanks -- it's necessary that people stand up, or other people will let themselves be silenced. And much of the time, most of us are "other people," whether we want to admit it or not.
Remember that Justina is a legend in her own mind.
If I were ever in danger of forgetting that, he'd remind me.
Have you shared your opinion of the moderators with them? I can do that for you, if you prefer.
For my part, I hope throwing threats of "legal action" around and posting childish countdown posts on threads wasn't a part of the "old FR". If it was, good riddance!
Imal
That is what got my attention. Before that, I rarely replied on threads about Israel.
The fierce reaction to the story is as interesting as the story itself.
Hypocrite, moi? Show where I frothed at the mouth about homosexuality. You can't, because I didn't. All I did was point out that Oscar Wilde sued someone for telling the truth.
As for hating Jews, that would mean I would have to hate the entire staff of Antiwar.com and a good part of the Board of Directors.
So some of your best friends are Jews. That and $2.00 will get you on the NYC subway ($1.50 + .50 b.s. surcharge). I know lots of Jewish anti-Semites -- quite a few of them are relatives of mine! (I don't know if any of them are at antiwar.com.) Lew Rockwell loves to publish essays by Jewish anti-Semites arguing that any time a Jew calls anyone an anti-Semite, it's just a smear, and can be safely ignored.
It is absolutely disgusting that the FR "administrative monitors" permit trolls like you to drive the best elements of the old FR away -- while apologists for a foreign power like yourself are given free rein.
Troll? For whom? And there you go, with the classic "the Jews (the ones who aren't anti-Semites) suffer from dual loyalty" canard. If anyone suffers from disloyalty, it is the would-be America Firsters who have been sucking up to our Arab enemies.
As for your veiled call on the moderators to censor and boot me, didn't you used to try to pass yourself off as a libertarian?
So the lady in the upstairs apartment peered out with her binoculars looking for Jews to turn in to the cops. OK. That makes sense. Wonder if she sits up there everyday reporting Jews to the police or if this was a one time thing.
Larry, you don't know exactly what the lady saw, and neither do I. I don't doubt they were filming the WTC -- I would too, if I had a camcorder and was in the right place at the time. Many people did just that. But she insists they were celebrating the carnage; before accepting her story, I'd like to see the videotape. The poster I responded to claimed that the Jews doing the filming had to have had all kinds of information, as in being accomplices, in order to have been where they were, which is ludicrous.
As for the lady's habits, I suspect that she does a lot of things with those binoculars that she shouldn't be doing, and I'll bet the venetian blinds the local cops know who she is, and joke about her all the time. But on 911, she called the FBI.
Very good question. I believe the answer is yes.
Yes, yes, anyone who disagrees with you is an "anti-Semite." How convenient. And really quite tiresome. For that just ends the discussion, doesn't it? I mean, why even talk about issues like this if, by definition, one side is the Nazis and the other side is "mr rustow" and his Legions of Political Correctness? Why listen to anyone else, why bother with evidence, or links, or anything having to do with facts, when even the recognition of certain facts -- the laughing Urban Movers, the Israeli "art students" who visited government officials at their homes and tried to enter government offices, some of them unmarked, and how the latest scandal involving Mossad recruitment in the FBI's wiretap translation division -- is to take a stand?
That's why political correctness -- left or right -- makes for a BORING website. It makes real discussion impossible.
Here we go, put the witness on trial.
Sleazy Criminal Defense Lawyer Tactic #1.
"An employee of Urban Moving Systems, who would not give his name, said the majority of his co-workers are Israelis and were joking on the day of the attacks.
"‘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.’"
Naturally, a fanatic like yourself -- whose first loyalty is to a country other than the US -- finds this rationale perfectly convincing. You'll have to forgive the rest of us if we fail to follow you over that particular cliff....
This is a stone lie but who is really surprised by your lies by now? Israel commiserated plenty with the United States while Palestinians and other Arabs cheered 9-11 attack.
Of course none were Arab Israelis. So it was on to other misdirections: The sources were not credible. People who believed this were crazy. It was an "urban myth." Antisemitism was the motive of those who reported this.
Hhahhaha .... Froth sure is one overused word by you. Try expanding your vocab.
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