Posted on 12/16/2001 10:32:01 AM PST by veronica
In a deeply flawed report aired December 11th on Brit Hume’s Special Report, Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron alleged, without naming a single source, that some of the roughly 60 Israelis arrested in law enforcement sweeps since the September terror attacks are suspected of being intelligence operatives engaged, among other things, in spying on Arabs living in the United States.
Cameron also alleged that US intelligence officials believe some of the plotters involved in the September 11 attacks were based in California and were being watched there by Israeli agents, and that Israel therefore “must have known” of their plans, but nonetheless failed to issue any warnings to the US.
These charges are arrant nonsense unworthy of the usually reliable Fox News. This is especially true because Cameron was well aware that similar allegations against detained Israelis have been shot down as baseless by no less an authority than Attorney General John Ashcroft.
As noted by the New York Times (Nov. 21), the Washington Post (Nov. 23), and most recently the Jerusalem Post(Dec. 7), of the roughly 60 Israelis arrested, none have been criminally charged, and most have been released and deported back to Israel. The eight still being held are expected to be “released and deported later this month,” according to the Jerusalem Post article. Since spying is illegal, and none of the detained Israelis had diplomatic immunity, why, if they were spies, did the US release and deport them? Rather than answering this clearly crucial question, Cameron instead keeps from viewers that most of the Israelis have been, or will soon be, released.
In addition, the Times and Washington Post reports noted that an Ohio immigration judge criticized the government’s continued detention of Israelis there. Judge Elizabeth Hacker found that the government “failed to submit any evidence of terrorist activity or of a threat to national security. There is no evidence of the risk of harm to the community.”
In another deceptive omission, Cameron neglected to mention the judge’s finding, instead portraying the young Israelis – who were working in mall kiosks selling cheap wind-up helicopter toys – as nefarious Mossad spies.
After press reports that kiosk workers were being detained, most of the Israelis quite reasonably abandoned their jobs(leaving the pushcart company with no workers) and tried to keep a low profile, the better to avoid detention for working illegally. Cameron however, claimed that “investigators” believed the kiosk jobs to be “fronts,” and darkly portrayed the disappearance of the Israeli workers as proof that they were actually spies.
Fox News’s Carl Cameron Recycles More Rubbish December 13, 2001
Fox News has once again leveled baseless charges against Israel in the second report of its four-part series on alleged Israeli spying against America.
This time reporter Carl Cameron focused on the company Amdocs, which he wrongly described as an “Israeli-based private telecommunications company.” In fact, Amdocs is not private, or as Cameron tried to imply, mysterious – it is a publicly held company that trades on the New York Stock Exchange with the symbol DOX. Unfortunately, the rest of Cameron’s report was just as ill-informed as his opening description of Amdocs.
According to Cameron, Amdocs handles “most directory assistance calls and virtually all call records and billing in the United States,” and the supposed fear of once more unnamed “investigators” is that, as Brit Hume put it, “certain suspects in the September 11th attacks may have managed to stay ahead of them by knowing who and when investigators are calling on the telephone.”
While Fox does not allege that Amdocs provided such information to anyone, the network does claim, based on nothing but innuendo and more unnamed sources, that the information collected by the company may have somehow “fallen into the wrong hands and impeded the investigation.”
Cameron presents absolutely no evidence to substantiate this charge. But to make his allegations seem plausible, Cameron tells viewers that “In recent years, the FBI and other government agencies have investigated Amdocs more than once. The firm has repeatedly and adamantly denied any security breaches or wrongdoing.”
In fact, Cameron reported these earlier investigations into Amdocs during a May 5th, 2000 broadcast on Fox, describing an “alleged penetration of U.S. government phone systems.” Only towards the end of his overheated report did Cameron admit that “there are no targeted suspects under investigation because there is no information to suggest a phone breach.” But then, apparently realizing he had just shot down his own report, the reporter immediately contradicted himself, claiming, “There is clearly a breach here, some sort of threat.”
In fact, the investigations Cameron reported turned up absolutely no evidence whatsoever of spying or any other improper activities. Indeed, the New York Times headlined its story on the probe “Israeli Spy Inquiry Finds Nothing, Officials Say.” According to the Times report, datelined May 5th:
The federal authorities conducted a highly classified espionage investigation into whether Israeli intelligence agents used a software company in Missouri to intercept telephone conversations from the White House, State Department and other agencies, government officials said today.
The counterintelligence inquiry did not find evidence that government telephone systems were penetrated, the officials said. The investigation focused on the Amdocs Corporation, a publicly traded corporation founded by Israelis, but failed to unearth evidence that anyone at the company or connected to it had tried to listen to government communications illegally, the officials said.
“There just weren’t any facts to support a penetration,” said a government official who closely followed the inquiry.
The existence of the inquiry emerged today after Insight Magazine, which is published by The Washington Times, reported that the investigation had uncovered a security breach in the White House telephone system. Other news organizations quickly spread the story over their Web sites, but the accusation of a major espionage problem collapsed almost immediately. ...
Since Cameron obviously knew that the earlier investigations of Amdocs had found nothing, and that the accusations had “collapsed almost immediately,” why did he repeat the empty allegations in his report on December 12th? It seems that for Cameron any anti-Israel charge is true no matter how many times it is disproved, discredited or disavowed.
Cameron’s technique is by now transparent: Dig up an old bogus charge against Israel, dig up some unnamed “source” somewhere who is willing, for whatever reason, to support it, and then go on the air claiming that “Fox News has learned ... (fill in the blank with baseless anti-Israel allegations).
The pity is that Fox News would risk its reputation by allowing such dubious reporting.
That was the telling point. Everyone knows that real Mossad agents sell hot pretzels at malls.
LOL!!! Yeah, I bet they did, right quick like, too.
Another erroneous report filed.
Interesting that Carl Cameron was the reporter to whom the story of GWB's DUI was slipped the weekend before the election. And he chose to report it. In that case the story was factual but the timing STUNK.
Perhaps the innacuracies and mere innuendo in this story is the reason no other outlet has picked up on it.
Let's see how this Fox story plays out. So far, as I said, other outlets have chosen to ignore it. And it appears some fudging was done.
Surprise? No. I'm not surprised about anything negative I read about FoxNews since Roger Ailes hired "Jerald Rivers."
Sheesh
You can believe I take everything they report with a grain of salt, just like all the rest of the mainstream media. So much for believing that they were somehow different.
Are you sure? I've read in many sources that he was arrested by the FBI. What makes you think it's erroneous?
They were black helicopters, that got Cameron's attention.
It was READ this article. The Wash. Post and others did report it. That is the point. Cameron appears to have ignored those reports, which pointed up that many of the Israelis were cleared and have gone home.
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