Maybe Tarun has been right all along?

[Gauracandra]

???weird???

 

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.

Maria, who asked us not to use her last name, had a view of the World Trade Center from her New Jersey apartment building. She remembers a neighbor calling her shortly after the first plane hit the towers.

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."

[Guest guest]

No Tarun has not been right.

That article mentions the actions of a few possible israeli agents.

 

They were filming the collapse site,so what?

 

It is no secret that many countries have intelligence agents in America all the time,they engage in industrial espionage,surveillence of suspected radicals etc.

 

This does not prove that they are involved in some wild conspiracy .

 

The U.S. has agents from 20 different agencies all over the world spying on everything imaginable,should we expect any different behavior from others?

 

The confused speculations of conspiracy theorist attempt to simplify world wide activity into a mass conspiracy conducted by a handfull of Jews,nobility,banking dynasties,etc.

 

This is hardly the case.

 

The reality is much more complex,think about it,have you ever met any children of the ultra rich?

 

I have ,devotees i know,they are all without exception non intelligent ,and hardly capable of any grand conspiracy,wealth causes idolence and aversion to learning and austerity in youth,producing offspring incapable of any intelligent complex action,i've seen this up close.

 

The world is full of various parties attempting to grab a slice of the pie,they fight each other for scraps,no one group is dominant.

 

 

 

[This message has been edited by shiva (edited 06-25-2002).]

[Tarun]

Zivaji: Perfect crime means what?

It's not perfect unless & until what?

Unless & until u can pin it on someone else.

And the quicker the better.

Have former Mayor Kroch + other nickel-dime fools lined up ready & waiting behind CNN's closed doors, ready to testify against those not allowed to speak even one word.

Justice the good ole Amerikan way.

Blind justice as in Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant.

Anyway "adho gacchanti tamasaH" = all those cheating others using 84 lakh methods descend in their next lives; care to join them?

[Gauracandra]

Heres the thing. True there are many operatives I'm sure from other countries in the U.S. And I suppose it is possible such operatives say from the Mossad would be filming the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. But to me the most important point is that they found a box cutter in this van. Think about this. I don't even think I know what a box cutter looks like. When I need to cut a box I use a knife. And it just so happens these Israeli agents have the weapon of choice of the terrorists in their possession? Come on. I do think Muslim terrorist perpetrated the attacks. But now I wouldn't be surprised if they received atleast some underground support from the Mossad (logistics, financing etc...). Probably they felt it would push the U.S. towards support of Israel if Muslims carried out such attacks and so they helped them carry out such an attack. If this is true I hope it is exposed and the backlash from the American public is so strong that we drop Israel to fend for itself.

[theist]

Gauracandra,

 

The best reason to assume the Isreali's were not involved is made perfectly in your last sentence.

 

If this is true I hope it is exposed and the backlash from the American public is so strong that we drop Israel to fend for itself.

They would never risk such a thing.If not for the US the Arabs would have declared all out war on them again and again.

 

Bin Laden and co. planned it and financed it.We should hunt down these Islamic terrorists and kill them where we find them.

[Guest guest]

 

Whether the box cutters are signifant or not,still it is only the actions of a few.

 

The reality is that God is in control of everything.

 

The so called controllers in this world are

nothing more then puppets,this vision is needed to appreciate what is really behind all actions.

[Tarun]

Gauracandra's logic is right on the money, directly on target.

Lily White NyAya

Before u do or plan anything criminal, illegal or sinful to enhance your own position, make sure u can publicly pin it on someone else both before and/or after u get caught.

If u don't get caught, fine.

If u do, have your alibi & cleanly pressed 3 piece suit handy.

BhAgavatam's dvi-pada pazu description is no exaggeration.

[sha]

THE LIE WON’T STAND

 

Bush Administration Explanations for Pre-9-11 Warnings Fail the Smell Test

 

Warnings Received From Heads of State, Allied Intelligence Services Specifically Warned of Attacks by Hijackers

 

Insider Trading Also Clearly Warned of Attacks

 

by Michael C. Ruppert

 

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/cgi-bin/MasterPFP.cgi?doc=http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/051602_liewontstand.html

[theist]

Yeah right.I heard Ariel Sharron even called Bush on the 10th and told him what was coming.Those Jews and Republicans, what will they think of next?

[theist]

Originally posted by Tarun:

Gauracandra's logic is right on the money, directly on target.

Lily White NyAya

Before u do or plan anything criminal, illegal or sinful to enhance your own position, make sure u can publicly pin it on someone else both before and/or after u get caught.

If u don't get caught, fine.

If u do, have your alibi & cleanly pressed 3 piece suit handy.

BhAgavatam's dvi-pada pazu description is no exaggeration.

Anybody see the Manchurian Candidate?Same thing here but on bigger scale.Actually the Jews hynotized Osama Bin Laden and the other Al-Qaeda fanatics into plotting all these attacks against the US.In their hearts they really love us but those damn Jews got to them and programed them to think we are the great Satan.

 

LOL!!You boys been reading too much saloon.com

 

The real problem is the Clinton administrations neglect of the problem for the 8 years preceeding Bushes presidency.

 

 

[Tarun]

Real problem is our dependency on imported oil (even olive) no matter who's squatting 1600 Penn.

If Gaudiya VaiSNavas controlled petroleum production & US Military was ergo stationed in & around Puri, NavadvIp & MathurA-mandala...

Compare THAT!

Let's begin from the beginning => level playing field

Never heard of saloon.com - have u posted there?

[theist]

Tarun,

 

Now I'm with you 100% on the oil dependency.That is where the problem really lies.Just think where we would be in that regard if Jimmy Carter's push towards solar energy hadn't been torpedoed by the Reagan administration.

 

saloon.com was a joke.There is a salon magazine that is hard left and I had noticed their web site had been quoted by someone on this forum before.