9-11: The "New Pearl Harbor" of the Zionist War Plan

December 18, 2002

As a presidential candidate, George W. Bush’s inner cabal of Zionist war hawks signed a secret Middle East war plan in the summer of 2000 that recognized that America would need to experience a “new Pearl Harbor” if their drastic plans to reshape U.S. defense policy to suit Israel’s agenda were to succeed.

The cabal of war fanatics currently advising the White House secretly planned a “transformation” of defense policy years ago, calling for war against Iraq and huge increases in military spending. A “catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor” was seen as necessary to bring about the desired transformation of the U.S. military.

The huge increases in U.S. military spending that have occurred since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, were planned before President George W. Bush was elected by the same men who are pushing the administration’s “war on terrorism” and the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The huge increases in U.S. military spending that have occurred since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were planned before President George W. Bush was elected by the same men who are pushing the administration's "war on terrorism" and the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Billions of dollars in additional defense spending are but the first step in the group's long-term plan to transform the U.S. military into a global army enforcing a terroristic and bloody Pax Americana around the world.

A neo-conservative Washington-based organization known as the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), funded by three foundations closely tied to Persian Gulf oil, weapons, and defense industries, drafted the war plan for U.S. global domination through military power. One of the organization's documents clearly shows that Bush and his most senior cabinet members had already planned an attack on Iraq before he took power in January 2001.

The PNAC was founded in the spring of 1997 by the well-known Zionist neo-conservatives Robert Kagan and William Kristol of the Weekly Standard. The PNAC is part of the New Citizenship Project, whose chairman is also William Kristol, and is described as "a non-profit, educational organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership." Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush, and Paul Wolfowitz signed a Statement of Principles of the PNAC on June 3, 1997, along with many of the other current members of Bush's "war cabinet." Wolfowitz was one of the directors of PNAC until he joined the Bush administration.

The group's essential demand was for hefty increases in defense spending. "We need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces for the future," the statement's first principle reads. The increase in defense spending is to bring about two of the other principles: "to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values" and "to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles."

A subsequent PNAC plan entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century," reveals that the current members of Bush's cabinet had already planned, before the 2000 presidential election, to take military control of the Gulf region whether Saddam Hussein was in power or not. The 90-page PNAC document from September 2000 says: "The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. 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."

"Even should Saddam pass from the scene," the plan says U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain, despite domestic opposition in the Gulf states to the permanent stationing of U.S. troops. Iran, it says, "may well prove as large a threat to U.S. interests as Iraq has."

"A NEW PEARL HARBOR"

A "core mission" for the transformed U.S. military is to "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars," according to the PNAC. The strategic "transformation" of the U.S. military into an imperialistic force of global domination would require a huge increase in defense spending to "a minimum level of 3.5 to 3.8 percent of gross domestic product, adding $15 billion to $20 billion to total defense spending annually," the PNAC plan said. "The process of transformation," the plan said, "is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor."

I asked Christopher Maletz, assistant director of the PNAC about what was meant by the need for "a new Pearl Harbor." "They needed more money to up the defense budget for raises, new arms, and future capabilities," Maletz said. "Without some disaster or catastrophic event" neither the politicians nor the military would have approved, he said.

The "new Pearl Harbor," in the form of the terror attacks of 9-11, provided the necessary catalyst to put the global war plan into effect. Congress quickly allocated $40 billion to fund the "war on terrorism" shortly after 9-11. A Pentagon spokesman told me that $17.5 billion of that initial allocation went to defense. The U.S. defense budget for 2002, including a $14.5 billion supplement, came to $345.7 billion, a nearly 12 percent increase over the 2001 defense budget. Similar significant increases in defense spending are planned for 2003 (to $365 billion) and 2004 (to at least $378 billion) in line with the PNAC plan.

“TOTAL WAR”

Veteran journalist John Pilger recently wrote about one of PNAC's founding members, Richard Perle: "I interviewed Perle when he was advising Reagan, and when he spoke about 'total war,' I mistakenly dismissed him as mad," Pilger wrote. "He recently used the term again in describing America's 'war on terror.' 'No stages,' he said. 'This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq . . . this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war . . . our children will sing great songs about us years from now.' "

"This is a blueprint for U.S. world domination — a new world order of their making," Tam Dalyell, British parliamentarian and critic of the war policy from the Labor Party said. "These are the thought processes of fantasist Americans who want to control the world. This is garbage from think-tanks stuffed with chicken-hawks," Dalyell said, "men who have never seen the horror of war but are in love with the idea of war. I am appalled that a British Labor Prime Minister should have got into bed with a crew which has this moral standing."

Bin Laden Tape Exposed as Fake

December 10, 2002

The most recent Osama Bin Laden tape recording is a fake, according to Swiss voice recognition experts, who are 95 percent sure the voice in the tape is that of an impostor.

A respected Swiss institute specializing in voice recognition technology analyzed the recent tape alleged to contain the voice of Osama Bin Laden and found that the voice was most likely that of an impostor. The apparently fraudulent tape came out shortly after a 4,000 word letter allegedly written by Bin Laden appeared in Saudi Arabia.

A French television channel, France 2, commissioned the Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence (IDIAP) of Martigny, Switzerland, to analyze the tape, which was first aired on November 12 by the Arabic language television network, Al-Jazeera. The IDIAP, which is affiliated with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, specializes in speech and speaker recognition research.

The tape, which was delivered to the Qatar-based al-Jazeera, was said to provide the first concrete evidence that Bin Laden is still alive because it mentioned attacks that occurred as recently as October 28. The tape was reportedly recorded over the telephone. The voice on the tape praised recent attacks including the siege of a Moscow theatre by Chechen rebels, the bombing of a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen, and the Bali bombing.

Voice analysis tests done of the tape indicated the speaker was an impostor, according to Hervé Boulard, the institute's director. Boulard, told France 2 that he was 95 per cent certain that "it has not been recorded by Bin Laden." Boulard, who previously worked with the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, said there was a 5 percent risk of error in the institute's conclusion that the latest tape is a fake.

Regarding the poor sound quality of the recent tape, Boulard said: "Many of our 20 [test] recordings were also of poor quality. Some were very good, some very bad, but our results were all positive except in one case."

France 2 provided IDIAP with one hour of authenticated videotape recordings of Bin Laden. IDIAP created a computerized model of Bin Laden's voice from the authentic recordings. To verify the reliability, scientists tested that model with recordings from Bin Laden and others that were not. IDIAP compared the voice on the tape with 20 authentic recordings of Bin Laden. Boulard concluded that all the voices except that on the tape in question belonged to the same person, noting the statistical software he used has a margin of error of around five percent, France 2 reported.

While Boulard says the tape does not appear to be the voice of Osama Bin Laden, the margin of error precludes absolutely certainty. "In order to have an irrefutable conclusion, you would need around 100 recordings of Bin Laden," IDIAP's researcher Samy Bengio told Swiss radio.

The IDIAP study concluded: "It is difficult to agree with some US officials saying that it is 100 percent sure that it is Bin Laden. When addressing a problem with a scientific perspective (as opposed to a political approach), one has to be ready to also accept the uncertainty of the results." The Swiss results challenged U.S. intelligence agency reports that the voice on the tape was Bin Laden's.

I asked Pentagon spokesman Dave Lapan if U.S. intelligence agencies believe the latest Bin Laden tape is genuine. Lapan said, "Although it could not be confirmed with 100 percent certainty, the assessment from the intelligence community is that the tape is genuine." He added that he was "not aware of a different analysis from another country."

A French news magazine, L'Express, recently reported that Bernard Gautheron, director of the phonetic testing laboratory in Paris, had concluded there was a "very strong probability" that the Al Jazeera tape was genuine.

Qatar, the home of Al Jazeera is a small emirate in the Persian Gulf described as the "nerve center of a war against Iraq." The Emir of Qatar, who provided funding to start Al Jazeera, has also provided the U.S. military with a command center and spent more than $1 billion building the Al Udeid Air Base for U.S. warplanes. Seven hundred members of the U.S. Central Command are currently in Qatar for Exercise Internal Look, a war game to test the systems that would be used in a war against Iraq.

Legal Experts: Pre-emptive War Illegal

December 4, 2002

Bush's policy of "preemptive action" opens the door to global gangsterism. Through its words and deeds the administration of President Bush has shown its intent to disregard international law and pursue a criminal policy of "preemptive action," having adopted the Israeli term for what is otherwise known as "war of aggression."

"The president, of course, supports preemptive action," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said on Dec. 2. "The president has said that is part of America's doctrine because of the different nature of terrorism."

Fleischer was responding to a reporter who had misquoted John Howard, the Australian prime minister, by saying: "Australia intended to take preemptive military action to fight terrorists in the wake of the Bali attack." The reporter then asked: "Does the president support the preemptive military action against terrorists in Asia?"

Howard's contentious remarks about preemptive action were taken out of context and resulted in a flurry of protest from a host of Asian states. Howard had said that the UN charter on self defense needed to be amended to allow states to use preemptive action against threats of terrorism.

The UN Charter is a treaty binding upon the United and other member states. The UN Charter prohibits the use of force by a state that is not subject to an armed attack. Article 2 stipulates the states renounce "the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state."

Speaking about "non-state terrorism," Howard said: "All I'm saying - I think many people are saying - is that maybe the body of international law has to catch up with the new reality."

I asked Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois, about the legal questions. Boyle said: "Howard said that the UN charter has to be amended to allow for preemptive strikes to be legal."

Calls to the White House were not returned.

As the judgment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945 noted, "resort to a war of aggression is not merely illegal, but is criminal."

"To initiate a war of aggression," the tribunal declared in its judgment, "is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

UN Security Resolution1441, which sent the weapons inspectors back to Iraq, does not authorize any use of force against Iraq, Boyle said. Secretary of State Colin Powell tried, and failed to get language into the resolution allowing the use of force, Boyle said.

Zionist 'Prince of Darkness' Craves War

November 27, 2002



The Pentagon's top civilian security adviser told an assembly of British politicians that the United States would attack Iraq even if UN inspectors fail to find weapons of mass destruction.

Richard Perle, President Bush's hawkish adviser known as "The Prince of Darkness," "stunned" British parliamentarians (MP) by saying a "clean bill of health" from UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix would not prevent a U.S. and British invasion of Iraq. The provocative comments by Perle, who has been a lobbyist for an Israeli arms manufacturer, were reported in an article titled "War, Whatever" in the Mirror, a British journal, on Nov. 20.

Former British Defense Minister and Labour Party MP Peter Kilfoyle said: "America is duping the world into believing it supports these inspections." President Bush intends to go to war even if inspectors find nothing. This makes a mockery of the whole process and exposes America's real determination to bomb Iraq," Kilfoyle said.

The Iraqi regime is in the difficult position of having to prove a negative - that it doesn't possess banned weapons. As Perle told the MPs: "I cannot see how Hans Blix can state more than he can know. All he can know is the results of his own investigations. And that does not prove Saddam does not have weapons of mass destruction."

Perle, who chairs a Pentagon advisory board said: "Suppose we are able to find someone who has been involved in the development of weapons and he says there are stores of nerve agents. But you cannot find them because they are so well hidden. Do you actually have to take possession of the nerve agents to convince? We are not dealing with a situation where you can expect cooperation."

Kilfoyle said: "Because Saddam is so hated in Iraq, it would be easy to find someone to say they witnessed weapons building. Perle says the Americans would be satisfied with such claims even if no real evidence was produced. That's a terrifying prospect."

Spy Agency's 9-11 Drill Exposes Government Lies

November 1, 2002

On 11 September 2001, a key U.S. intelligence agency was running a drill in which a plane hits a government building. While U.S. spy satellites could easily observe what actually happened in New York City and Washington, this "bizarre coincidence" sent the people who operate America's "eye in the sky" home.

On the very day that planes struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the "super-secret" intelligence agency that "designs, builds, and operates U.S. reconnaissance satellites" had planned to conduct an emergency drill in which a simulated plane from the nearby Dulles International Airport would have crashed into their building. When reality intruded in New York and Washington, the exercise was cancelled and nearly all of NRO's three thousand employees, the people who operate the nation's "eye in the sky," were sent home.

The NRO, which works closely with the Dept. of Defense and CIA, had planned a simulated exercise in which a small jet "crashes" into one of the four towers at the agency's headquarters on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. The government said it was a "bizarre coincidence" that one of the most important U.S. intelligence agencies had planned a mock plane-into-building crash on Sept. 11, according to the Associated Press who reported the story on August 22. NRO headquarters are in Chantilly, Virginia, about 4 miles from the runways of Dulles airport.

The secretive NRO was created in 1960 and oversees the nation's spy satellites for reconnaissance and defense purposes. For the first 32 years the U.S. government even denied its existence. The NRO recruits personnel from the military and the Central Intelligence Agency and has a budget that is estimated to equal the combined budgets of both the CIA and the National Security Agency.

The director of the NRO (DNRO) reports directly to the Secretary of Defense and the director of the CIA. On 11 September 2001 the NRO director was Keith R. Hall, who had headed the agency since 1996. As DNRO, Hall was responsible for the acquisition and operation of all United States space-based reconnaissance and intelligence systems. Hall also served as Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space until December 8, 2001 when Peter B. Teets replaced Hall in both positions.

Hall had joined the Pentagon during the administration of George H.W. Bush, as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence and security, where he remained into the Clinton administration, until then CIA Director John M. Deutch brought him to the CIA. Hall crafted Deutch's plan to create a new spy bureaucracy in the Pentagon, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) by merging the CIA's center for interpreting spy satellite imagery with the Defense Mapping Agency.

"As Director, NRO, I have responsibility for the design, acquisition, and operations of all the nation's reconnaissance satellites, reporting to the Secretary of Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence," Hall told the Senate subcommittee on strategic forces in 1999.

The fact that the NRO had planned a scenario on 9-11 that was remarkably similar to what actually happened exposes the lie by some senior administration officials who claimed the events of 9/11 had not been foreseen. The "bizarre co-incidence" between the planned exercise and the grim reality suggests that the "game" was hijacked by unknown agents who overlaid it with a lethal scheme in the same way that former Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated during what was meant to be a security exercise.

The existence of the NRO's pre-planned plane-attack simulation was first revealed in an announcement of a recent National Law Enforcement and Security Institute conference in Chicago. In a promotion for speaker John Fulton, a CIA officer assigned as chief of NRO's strategic gaming division, the announcement read: "On the morning of September 11th 2001, Mr. Fulton and his team ... were running a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building. Little did they know that the scenario would come true in a dramatic way that day."

It was American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 767, which took off from Dulles at 8:10 a.m., 50 minutes before the NRO exercise was to begin, that reportedly struck the Pentagon on Sept. 11. The Pentagon was hit between 9:30 and 9:40 a.m. with 125 deaths on the ground and 64 reported on the plane.

The NRO scenario was planned to test employees' ability to respond to a disaster, according to Art Haubold, spokesman for the agency. No actual plane was to be involved. To simulate the damage from the crash, some stairwells and exits were to be closed off, forcing employees to find other ways to evacuate the building. Haubold told me that is was meant to be a "make believe" drill, "like the fire drills we did as kids in school."

I asked Haubold why NRO's staff was sent home when there was no apparent imminent danger. Haubold said NRO employees had been sent home as federal workers in Washington had. A spokesperson at NIMA in Bethesda, Md., however, said that NIMA personnel had remained on the job on 9-11. NIMA is headed by Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper (USAF Ret.).

Asked about how many people at the Dept. of Defense and CIA had been made aware of the planned exercise, Haubold said that the Pentagon and the CIA were aware of the drill, which he called a "contingency response" test. Pentagon spokesman Ken McClellan could not say whether Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was aware of the exercise at NRO. However, regarding the threat of an airplane attack at the Pentagon or the World Trade Center, McClellan said, "people were prescient."

"It was just an incredible coincidence that this happened to involve an aircraft crashing into our facility," Haubold told the AP. "As soon as the real world events began, we canceled the exercise."

While the story of the "bizarre coincidence" is of obvious interest, it has been removed from news websites where it appeared in late August. CNN and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for example, have both removed the story.

On Sept. 11, almost all of the 3,000 people who work at NRO headquarters were sent home, according to Art Haubold, NRO spokesman. Haubold said that after 10:30 a.m. the only people who remained at the agency were "mission essential" personnel.

The Death of a Senator and 9-11: The Uncanny Connections

November 1, 2002

The untimely death of Minnesota's populist senator in a suspicious plane crash 11 days before Election Day reveals several bizarre and uncanny connections to 9/11.

The mysterious plane crash that took the life of U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone, the populist Democrat from Minnesota known for his opposition to waging war in Iraq, immediately raised suspicions of foul play in the North Star state. A poster hanging in Minneapolis asked: "Who killed Paul Wellstone?" Since the crash, uncanny links have surfaced connecting the World Trade Center attack, the co-pilot of Wellstone's plane, and the "elite" FBI Evidence Response Team that investigated the wreck.

On Friday, October 25, the plane carrying the incumbent Sen. Wellstone, his wife, daughter, and three campaign workers, crashed into the woods after veering 2 miles off course on its approach to the Eveleth-Virginia municipal airport in the remoteness of the Iron Range north of Duluth, Minnesota. Eleven days before the election Wellstone was reported to be leading 47-41 in the polls and gaining over his Republican challenger, Norm Coleman. There has been no explanation given for why the chartered twin engine Beech King Air A100 with a pilot and a co-pilot, veered sharply to the south as it approached the runway from the east. Although the plane was carrying a U.S. senator, it had neither a cockpit voice nor a flight data recorder.

At 10:22 in the morning, as the King Air A100 approached Eveleth airport, visibility was between 3 and 4.5 miles with overcast cloud ceiling at 700 feet. Winds were calm and the temperature was 1-2 degrees C. There was light snow falling but flying conditions were generally good, according to local pilots.

I spoke with Gary Ulman, professional pilot and assistant manager of the Eveleth airport. Ulman heard radio reports that a plane was missing and took off about 10:55 to look. He said that while he saw "light bluish-grayish smoke" coming up from the trees 2.1 miles south of the airport, he didn't think that it could be the plane because "that was way too far off course."

I asked Ulman several times to clarify the color of the smoke because his description of "light blue" smoke coming from the crash site is different from the expected thick black smoke that is usually seen coming from fires in which aviation fuel is the primary substance burning. Ulman flew over the smoke and said that he saw a "hot and intense fire" consuming the plane's fuselage on the ground. He returned to the airport and took the local fire chief up to survey the crash site and determine how to access the wreck from the ground. Ulman said that on this flight, at about 11:15 a.m., he saw that the burning fuselage had nearly "disintegrated." The plane's tail and wings had been detached from the body of the plane, he said. It is important to note that the King Air's fuel tanks are located in the wings of the plane; there is no fuel tank in the fuselage.

While some reports suggested that icing on the plane caused the crash, Ulman and other pilots doubt that ice played a role. Frank Matthews, a local pilot, said that the King Air is "a great all weather plane" that has "an outstanding safety record." Ulman said that if icing were a factor it would have caused problems at least 10 minutes earlier as the plane descended from 14,000 feet. FAA spokeswoman, Elizabeth Isham Cory, said there didn't appear to be any sign of distress coming from the plane's crew on its final approach to the airport.

I spoke with Rick Wahlberg, sheriff of St. Louis County, who said that local police and FBI agents reached the remote crash site "at about 12" [noon]. Paul McCabe, special agent and spokesman for the FBI's Minneapolis division, told me that the FBI's Evidence Response Team (ERT) drove to the site from the Twin Cities and arrived at the crash scene about 3 p.m. on Oct. 25.

McCabe said that the FBI was treating the site as a "crime scene" but that there were "no indications of any criminal activity" causing the crash. The ERT worked at the scene all day before a team of National Traffic Safety Board (NTSB) investigators arrived from Washington that night.

Agents from the FBI's Minneapolis Evidence Response Team have been accused of stealing evidence from the site of the World Trade Center, where they had been sent to investigate. The stolen evidence was a valuable Tiffany crystal paperweight taken from a WTC evidence bag. FBI agent Jane Turner, assigned to the Minneapolis field office, reported the suspected theft. Turner decided to blow the whistle after FBI officials declined to investigate the matter.

Turner first wrote Inspector General Glenn Fine on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks that an elite FBI "evidence response team" from Minneapolis may have stolen a Tiffany crystal globe from the ruins of the World Trade Center. She said she spotted the globe, worth more than $5,000, sitting on a secretary's desk. Citing the ongoing investigation of her allegations, FBI officials have declined to discuss the circumstances under which the globe was taken or to explain why an allegedly stolen item would be displayed so prominently in a law enforcement office.

Turner, a 24-year FBI veteran, was investigating a company in the theft of several items from ground zero when she discovered that Minneapolis agents assigned to an Evidence Response Team (ERT) at the World Trade Center had taken the globe.

"The ERT is supposed to secure and collect evidence at a crime scene. Their job is to preserve the integrity of a crime scene, not take from it and disrupt it," Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, said about the accusations, which he said had been referred to the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General. "I think it's outrageous," Grassley said. "Maybe some people who work at these scenes think that taking something is OK, like it's a trophy for their hard work. "This makes me wonder what else these agents stole, if they were generous enough to give an expensive crystal globe to a secretary," he said.

Turner is the second Minneapolis agent to accuse bureau personnel of wrongdoing. Earlier this year, FBI Agent Coleen Rowley accused officials at FBI headquarters of mishandling information developed in Minneapolis concerning 9-11 suspect Zacharias Moussaoui. The FBI has since taken steps toward firing Turner. Turner, a 24-year veteran, has been on probation for much of the last year and was recently told during a job evaluation that her performance is "not acceptable."

Grassley said the action "looks like retaliation against a whistle-blower who followed her conscience and exposed wrongdoing, even though it embarrassed the FBI. If there are plans to fire her, the FBI is making a big mistake, and I want the people behind this retaliation held accountable."

"PROGRESSIVE POPULIST"

Wellstone, described as "the most progressive populist in the Senate" had recently voted against giving President George W. Bush's "flexibility" to attack Iraq. Wellstone also opposed U.S. military action in Iraq in 1990. Wellstone was the only Democrat senator who was running for re-election to vote against the recent war resolution.

Wellstone's opposition to the war had given him a boost in the polls. The headline of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune on the Sunday before he died read: "Wellstone edges into lead in U.S. Senate race." The paper's latest poll had found the two-term liberal Democratic senator to be leading by a 47-41 margin.

The White House had recruited former St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman to run against Wellstone. "Republicans made ousting Wellstone a priority because of his vocal opposition to most of what George W. Bush stands for," the Center for Voting and Democracy said in July. The senate race in Minnesota was seen as crucial for the White House. Bush's political director Karl Rove is said to have personally selected Coleman to challenge Wellstone in the November 5 election. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney frequently visited Minnesota to support Coleman.

A mysterious Alexandria, Virginia-based outfit, calling itself Americans for Job Security (AJS), with ties to big business and the Republican congressional leadership had spent more than $1 million on an anti-Wellstone ad campaign in Minnesota before the election. AJS has a record of intervening in close political races around the country on behalf of conservative candidates. The organization, headed by Michael Dubke, was founded with $1 million from the American Insurance Association. In order to maintain the secrecy of its donors, AJS is registered as a "nonpolitical trade organization."

Dubke said there is no contradiction between the group's ads and its nonpolitical legal status. He said AJS, which had advertised against Wellstone since June, had no desire to influence the outcome of the Minnesota race. Asked by the Star-Tribune whether the anti-Wellstone commercials were "intended to influence the election," Dubke replied, "Absolutely not."

Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, which advocates campaign finance changes, said it is "dead wrong to spend large amounts of money in elections and refuse to disclose where it's coming from."

MOUSSAOUI & THE CO-PILOT

The co-pilot who flew with Wellstone had known Zacharias Moussaoui, the accused Sept. 11 conspirator who had attended an Eagan (Minn.) flight school. Co-pilot Michael Guess, 30, had met the flying student Moussaoui at the Pan Am International Flight Academy where Guess worked last year. Guess had reportedly "inadvertently" given Moussaoui unattended access to a computer program on flying a 747 jumbo jet.

An ex-manager of Pan Am told the FBI that Guess had placed a CD-ROM containing the 747 software at a workstation before one of Moussaoui's training sessions. After Moussaoui was arrested, the FBI searched his belongings and found the proprietary program copied on his laptop computer, the ex-manager said. Guess had recently been laid off at the flight academy, where he had hoped to become a flight instructor.

"At Executive Aviation in Eden Prairie, where Guess had been employed as a pilot since June 2001, a spokesman said colleagues remembered Guess telling them he had played a more significant role regarding the suspicions concerning Moussaoui," the Star Tribune reported. Dave Mona, a spokesman for Executive Aviation, said Guess' colleagues had said HE had described himself as "at least a role player" in the detection of Moussaoui. Mona said Guess had told his colleagues that "he and the receptionist . . . thought what [Moussaoui] was requesting was unusual" and had raised the issue with others.

9-11 Evidence Hidden from Public

October 23, 2002

The continuing secrecy surrounding the events of Sept.11 makes the work of independent investigators and publishers all the more essential to understanding what really happened.

"The most detailed analysis of how and why the World Trade Center collapsed could be forever kept from the public," the Associated Press reported Sept. 30. The evidence being withheld includes "rare photos and videos" that have been "collected," documentary evidence, maps of the debris piles, and three-dimensional computerized images of the fallen towers, according to the New York Times.

The evidence that is locked away, and may be permanently sealed, has been "gathered largely in secret" by experts who are forbidden by confidential agreements from discussing their findings, except with federal investigators, said Gerald McKelvey, a spokesman for Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder of the office space in the twin towers.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the Trade Center complex, said in a statement that access to documents would be decided on a "case-by-case basis consistent with applicable law and policy."

Silverstein obtained control of the World Trade Center property a mere six weeks before the terror attacks by securing the 99-year lease with an initial payment of $100 million, most of which was reported to be borrowed funds. Silverstein is currently seeking to win some $7 billion on his relatively minuscule investment by suing the insurance companies and claiming that the WTC attacks constituted "two separate occurrences," rather than one.

The secret "expert analysis" is considered more authoritative than the investigation conducted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which "suffered from too few resources and a lack of access to critical information," according to AP. The secrecy surrounding Sept.11 has succeeded in keeping the American public in the dark about what truly caused the collapse of the twin towers, as well as the 47-story WTC-7, built by Silverstein in 1987. WTC-7 mysteriously collapsed in the late afternoon.

Serious questions also abound about what actually struck the Pentagon and why no evidence of a commercial jet was found at the site. I have worked with a number of independent investigators to uncover the most important information about the attacks. One American author, Eric Hufschmid, has written a book about 9-11, Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th Attack, which presents compelling evidence that the attacks were "a scam of immense proportions."

He says that explosives were used to take down the towers and WTC-7 and that the Arab "terrorists" were mere patsies, like Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination of President John Kennedy. It is a well-written and illustrated book that contains rare photos of great importance, some of which are certain to be among those the government is trying to hide. The high-quality large-format photos provide important evidence about what caused the collapses at the World Trade Center, WTC-7, and the Pentagon. The book presents photographic evidence to support the theory that the twin towers of the World trade center were brought down using radio-controlled explosives. He says the emergency command center, a hardened bunker on the 23rd floor of WTC-7, was the actual control center for the attack, and that the two airplanes that hit the towers appear to have been guided by a homing signal coming from the bunker.

WTC-7 was a most unusual building. While the hardened bunker on the 23rd floor had its own air and water supply, it had no accommodations for sleeping, which raises the obvious question about what kind of emergency it was designed for. The WTC-7 building was subsequently destroyed by controlled demolition that lasted 18 seconds according to seismic data, yet the actual collapse took less that 10 seconds in the late afternoon. The other powerful blasts were to destroy the evidence from the hardened bunker, according to the author.

The remarkable photos in Painful Questions show the top 30 floors of the South Tower tipping and falling in one piece, yet solid pieces of this section never hit the ground.

How can it be, Painful Questions asks, that the towers collapsed floor-by-floor as quickly as free-falling debris fell through the open air? The video and seismic evidence show that the towers collapsed in 8 to 10 seconds, which is how long a falling object dropped from the top of the tower would take to hit the ground. The resistance of the undamaged base of the tower would have significantly slowed the collapse of the towers. For 110 floors to shatter in about nine seconds, each floor would have shattered in the blink of an eye. he says, "There should have been a thump, thump, thump and the collapsing rubble impacted the floor below, but the video shows that the floors did not encounter any resistance as they fell."

Painful Questions explains how explosives could accomplish this trick. Photos of debris being spewed horizontally hundreds of feet raise further questions about whether it was precision-timed explosions or "compression" which caused the towers to disintegrate, sending pulverized concrete and bits of steel flying over lower Manhattan.

John Iannarelli of the FBI's national press office told me the bureau has "no evidence" of explosions at the WTC and that "compression" pulverized the concrete and sent steel beams flying horizontally for hundreds of feet. Others say this is evidence that explosives were used. While the Pentagon attack has been largely obscured by the collapses at the World Trade center, there are as many unanswered questions about what actually happened at the Pentagon.

In October, two books about 9/11 by French author Thierry Meyssan arrived in the United States. Meyssan focused on the Pentagon attack on his books, which have been translated from French, 9-11: the Big Lie and Pentagate. The publisher, Patrick Pasin, said the television show "60 Minutes" was coming to France to interview Meyssan and that the author is now willing to travel the United states to discuss his work.

Meyssan presents photographic evidence that challenges the claim that a large passenger jet struck the Pentagon. He posits that an air-launched cruise missile, painted to look like a commercial jet, struck the Pentagon. I have repeatedly asked the Pentagon, American Airlines, and the FBI for basic information about the 9-11 attack, in particular about the unexplained pieces of debris, assumed to be a piece of an American Airlines jet, that was photographed on the Pentagon lawn. After numerous requests for clarification about the status of the large piece of debris, Lt. Col. David Lapan, spokesman for the Department of defense, finally said, "It's not a Pentagon issue."

As American Airlines routinely forwards all 9-11 information requests to the FBI, I turned to FBI headquarters in Washington. The FBI's Iannarelli said: "It is no secret that an airplane hit the Pentagon."

However, the object that bored a smooth seven-foot round hole through six-reinforced concrete walls in the three rings of the Pentagon left no traces of itself behind. "The plane that struck the Pentagon was pulverized," Iannarelli said. "Never was any large piece of anything recovered at the Pentagon crash site," he said.

Asked whether the dense steel landing gear, which had carried right on through the WTC twin towers and landed blocks away, had been found at the Pentagon, Iannarelli said, "nothing that was recognizable" as coming from an airplane was found.

There are no clear seismic signals, which can be associated with the crash of a 100-ton airplane into the Pentagon, according to seismologists. I asked Maryland-based seismologist Gerald Baum about the lack of seismic evidence from the Pentagon crash. If a large jet aircraft traveling 400 miles per hour struck the Pentagon, why did it not result in any recorded seismic shock waves?

Baum said that that although the seismometers near the Pentagon are "state-of-the-art," the fact that the Pentagon was built on swampland on a base that is "all fill" means the impact is less likely to have resulted in seismic shock waves because the building "is not anchored to the bedrock."

Readers of Gen. Ben Partin's investigation of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma city have concluded that Tim McVeigh was a patsy. Hufschmid says he "soon realized what AFP readers have known for long time; namely, that a lot of critical information is being hidden by our corrupt media and government."

El Al Crash Exposes Israel's Chemical Weapons Arsenal

October 9, 2002

Israel's huge arsenal of weapons of mass destruction—not Iraq's—poses the most serious threat to peace in the Middle East and endangers global health. While the controlled U.S. press remains fixated on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, it ignores the grave danger of the more sophisticated and lethal arsenal of weapons of mass destruction being developed and stored in Israel—with the support of the U.S.

Ten years ago, on Oct. 4, 1992, an Israeli cargo jet carrying three of the four components of the nerve gas Sarin, as well as other hazardous materials, crashed into an apartment building in Holland. The known facts of the crash of El Al Flight 1862, the worst air disaster in Dutch history, reveal that Holland's government engaged in a "huge cover-up" and lied to its citizens to help conceal Israel's unlawful chemical weapons arsenal and the international network that supports it.

The Israeli cargo plane, a Boeing 747-200F, with three crewmen, one non-paying passenger and 114 tons of freight, left Amsterdam's Schiphol airport at 6:21 p.m. en route to Tel Aviv. Seven minutes later, both starboard engines ripped loose from the wing. The pilot circled back to attempt an emergency landing and crashed into a high-rise apartment complex in Bijlmer, 10 miles east of Schiphol.

While only four people died on the plane, the crash of El Al Flight 1862 became the worst air disaster in Dutch history because it killed scores of people on the ground and destroyed the health of thousands of others by exposing them to the toxic chemicals on the plane. The exact number of dead is still not known.

In the immediate aftermath of the crash, Dutch government officials lied to the public saying the plane was only transporting flowers and perfume. It took six years before the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad revealed the true contents of the crashed plane and their destination. "The cargo documents show that the aircraft carried dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP) and two other substances needed to make the deadly nerve gas Sarin. The DMPP was destined for the Israeli Institute for Biological Research (IIBR)," the paper reported in October 1998.

Mouin Rabbani, writing in Middle East International, describes the IIBR, located at Nes Zion near Tel Aviv, as "the Israeli military and intelligence community's front organization for the development, testing and production of chemical and biological weapons."

I interviewed Pierre Heijboer, a senior editor with the Dutch Volkskrant newspaper, who lives a mile from Bijlmer and was one of the first reporters on the scene. "I was in Biafra and Vietnam, but I never saw anything like that crash. It was like looking into a steel smelter," Heijboer said. "The concrete of the flats was glowing red."

Heijboer despises the cover-up: "I just get angry that they lied. It wasn't that the Israelis were flying cargoes of ugly stuff above my head. What angers me is that my government lies to its citizens." Tapes of phone conversations between El Al and Schiphol Air Traffic Control (SATC) reveal collusion to conceal the plane's contents.

In one tape, recorded minutes after the crash and hidden in a safe for more than six years, an El Al employee tells an SATC employee: "There is poison on board: ammunition and flammable liquids." The SATC official responded: "We will keep these things under the lid."

Dutch authorities sent workers to clean up the contaminated area without the benefit of protective clothing. Even Holland's Queen Beatrix, despite being a long-time Bilderberg participant, was not informed of the danger when she made a visit to the crash site the next day. "For the government and authorities of the Netherlands the safety of its own citizens is less important than the security of El Al military cargo planes," Heijboer said.

Heijboer's new exposé on the crash, Doomed Flight, was released Sept. 21, and quickly became a best seller.

Heijboer says 30 eyewitnesses saw Israeli agents in white chemical outfits at the crash scene, sifting through the debris and removing critical evidence. A 1998 Dutch police report says officers on the scene recognized the men in white suits who absconded with evidence as Israeli agents. "As they came near, I thought I recognized them. They looked just like the young men from the Israeli security service who regularly practice shooting at our police school," one officer said. "I've often said to people: 'Mossad was there first.'"

Another officer said: "We started to unroll a red and white ribbon to seal off the area. The 10 men ignored this and, when I managed to grab one by his arm, he said, 'We're from El Al.' Oh well, must be okay then I thought. They must have been in radio contact with the crew. How else could they have gotten here so fast?"

A fireman, Carel Boer, said: "We had to stand aside while people in astronaut-like suits carried away a kind of box. I couldn't see what it was since it was covered with a blanket." The plane's "black box" flight recorder was never recovered, and El Al refused to reveal the cargo manifest.

An estimated 3,000 Dutch residents suffer health problems as a result of the chemical and radioactive poisoning that occurred when El Al 1862 crashed. Today there is growing awareness in Holland of Israel's privileged and unregulated use of Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport to transport dangerous military cargo, a practice that clearly puts the health of the Dutch people at risk.

"El Al has its own security force at Schiphol," Heijboer said. "But they don't work for El Al -- they are all from Shin Bet (Israeli secret service) and are paid by the Israeli embassy. The Israelis run the airport like a little Haifa." Dutch Attorney General Vrakking testified on Jan. 29, 1999, that the El Al security detachment at Schiphol was a branch of Mossad.

"Schiphol has become a hub for secret weapons transfers," charged Henk van der Belt, an investigator working with the Bijlmer survivors. "Dutch authorities have no jurisdiction over Israeli activities at the airport." A TV Amsterdam (TVA) report identified Schiphol as one of several European airports that allows El Al to transfer cargo without supervision.

TVA said Belgian politicians now fear that "a disaster like the crash in Holland in 1992 is possible at [Belgium's] Zaaventem. This airport is, like Schiphol, under control by the secret police of Israel."

The Dutch press reported that security officials had been waiving Israeli air cargo through Schiphol, El Al's European hub, since the 1950s. "Of course it continues," Heijboer said. "There are rules, but there is an exception—El Al is allowed to ignore the rules."

A Dutch Air Guidance Organization employee told a parliamentary hearing that "policy" since 1973 was to keep quiet about all El Al activities. Schiphol workers testified that customs or the Dutch Flight Safety Board never inspected El Al planes.

A parliamentary committee discovered that every Sunday evening a mysterious El Al cargo flight routinely touched down at Schiphol en route from New York to Tel Aviv. These flights did not appear on airport arrival monitors, the cargo was never checked, and the documentation for the flights was processed in a special, unmarked room.

Shipping precursors of chemical weapons, such as those aboard 1862, is a violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which the U.S. is party to. Solkatronic Chemicals of Morrisville, Pa., had sold the DMMP. The chemical is a Schedule 2 precursor for Sarin under the CWC and its export is strictly controlled by the U.S. government. In spite of this, the Department of Commerce repeatedly granted Solkatronic a license to ship DMMP to IIBR. Spokesmen at the Dept. of Commerce were unable to say whether such shipments would continue.

I asked the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the Hague about Israel's use of Schiphol to transport components for chemical weapons.

Peter Kaiser, spokesman for OPCW, was not familiar with the details of flight 1862 but said that Israel, as a non-member, which has signed but not ratified the treaty, was obliged to "respect the convention."

Israel has never admitted producing chemical or biological weapons and, because it is not a member state of the CWC, is not required to divulge what chemical weapons it has or accept inspectors. However, a member state, such as the United States, is proscribed from providing a non-member state like Israel chemical weapons or precursor chemicals such as DMMP.

The Israeli government was finally compelled to admit that the jet had been carrying 190 liters of DMPP, a crucial component of Sarin. Sarin, 20 times as lethal as cyanide, kills by crippling the nervous system and was used in a terror attack on the Tokyo underground system that killed six passengers and injured more than 3,000.

In 1992, any revelation that the U.S. was supplying Israel with the components to make chemical weapons was played down, because alleged Iraqi development of chemical weapons has been used for propaganda purposes to justify U.S. aggression against Iraq. Jan Medema, a chemical weapons inspector from the toxic substances division at the Dutch Defense Research Institute in The Hague, said the quantity of Sarin components on the plane was sufficient to generate more than a quarter of a ton of the deadly nerve gas.

Heijboer said this was the third known shipment of these chemicals to the IIBR. The fact that the IIBR was the destination of the cargo indicates to Medema that this shipment was to create a large amount of Sarin.

"We have been trying to think what possible research purposes you would need this compound in such large quantities for," Medema said. "The likelihood has to be that it was for Sarin. Either they had some special plan for an experiment or they needed a quantity of Sarin for some special purpose. This raises many questions."

Uzi Mahnaimi of the Times said that Israeli assault aircraft crews had been trained to fit an "active chemical or biological weapon within minutes of receiving the command to attack. The weapons are manufactured at the Institute for Biological Research in a suburb of Nes Zion."

The Big Lie Banned in America

September 7, 2002

The books by the French author Thierry Meyssan, which "challenge the official version of the Sept. 11 attacks," have been best-sellers in Europe. Their reception may be different in the United States, however, where they have been banned for being "anti-American."

Meyssan's two best-selling books, 9/11 – The Big Lie and Pentagate, refute "the entire official version of the Sept. 11 attacks," and will soon be available in the United States. The books have been extremely successful in Europe, selling more than 200,000 copies in France, but strong resistance and censorship suggest a different fate may await them in America.

I spoke with Patrick Pasin, the French publisher, who said that 70,000 copies have been printed and shipped to the United States. The books should be available by the end of September, he said. The on-line book store Amazon.com is already offering the books promising delivery in "three to five weeks".

Meyssan's books claim that a military faction in the U.S. government used remote control to guide two aircraft into the twin towers and that a U.S. cruise missile - not an American Airlines jet - smashed into the Pentagon. While thousands of articles about Meyssan's theories can be found on the Internet, only 2 articles have appeared in the U.S. mainstream media, and these have avoided engaging the substance of his arguments.

The cover of 9/11 – The Big Lie says the book "is based exclusively on documents published by the White House and the U.S. Dept. of Defense, as well as statements by American civilian and military leaders to the international press."

Pasin, the founder and director of the Carnot publishing house, said that while the books should be available to American readers by the end of September, many bookstores have said they will not carry the books because they are "anti-American." Even Amazon.com, the on-line book dealer, was criticized in the U.S. media with an article, "Amazon to sell anti-U.S. 911 book," Pasin said. While one of the English translations was ready in April, Pasin said he held off on releasing the books in America until after the anniversary of Sept. 11 because he "considered it was too early."

"We had to wait some time," Pasin said. "We don't want to provoke people. There is a lot of pain in many families - I share their pain."

Meyssan's controversial theories first appeared in March in a website in which he presented the video footage from a security camera at the Pentagon which shows an unidentified object striking the Pentagon and exploding in a white hot flash. Meyssan's site suggests that this object is a cruise missile, precisely as one eyewitness described it: "a cruise missile with wings", and challenges the viewers to examine the photos to "Find the Boeing."

The photos from the security camera are problematic because the object appears to be much smaller than the Boeing and the white hot flash seems to be more indicative of the impact of an explosive warhead - rather than a civilian aircraft - according to independent investigators.

"DISGUSTING" BOOKS

Pentagon spokesperson, Victoria Clarke, called Meyssan's books "disgusting." "There is no question," Clarke said, "there is no doubt what happened that day. And I think it's appalling that anyone might try to put out that kind of myth. I think it's also appalling for anyone to continue to give those sorts of people any kind of publicity."

FACTS, the largest Swiss-German news magazine, recently featured Meyssan's arguments and evidence in a cover story titled, "The Evil sits in the Pentagon." While a spokesman for FACTS said the article was "quite critical" of Meyssan's theories, the way in which the photographs and text are presented must raise serious questions in the mind of the reader.

I contacted Lt. Col. David Lapan at the Pentagon to ask about the photographs found in the FACTS article. Lapan said that the photos came from a Pentagon security camera video which CNN had "unofficially obtained." The photos had been "snuck out" of the Dept. of Defense and "leaked" to CNN, Lapan said. When asked to comment on the images, Lapan balked and requested that the photos be sent by e-mail. I promptly sent the images, easily obtained from the websites of CNN and other news networks, with relevant questions about what can be discerned from the images, their origin, and whether CNN had been reprimanded for divulging information that had been "unofficially obtained" from the Dept. of Defense.

"DoD did not release the security camera video," Lapan said, "contrary to what CNN claimed in their story. Video images related to the terrorist attack on the Pentagon had been turned over to law enforcement agencies as part of their investigation, he said, but the Pentagon is "not engaged in trying to determine who leaked the video/photos, nor has there been a reprimand."

While the events at the World Trade Center received greater attention than the crash in Washington, Meyssan focuses on attack on the Pentagon. While the official explanation is that the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 with its 64 passengers flew into the Pentagon, Meyssan says the object was a military cruise missile. The white-hot blast seen in the photographs, he says, indicates that the object striking the Pentagon resulted in a "detonation" of a high-explosive, rather than the less intense "deflagration" one would expect to see from a kerosene-laden jetliner striking the wall of a building.

Dorothea Hahn, the author of the article in FACTS, said that Meyssan "asks the right questions" but added that he is "very categorical" and selective about the information that he presents in order "to prove his theory." Although more than 200,000 copies of his book have been sold in France, the French media is "extremely critical of him," Hahn said.

"If Meyssan's theory is true, there must be hundreds of people involved in the conspiracy," Hahn said. "They would have started to talk by know." Hahn added that Flight 77 must have been destroyed somewhere else if it didn't crash into the Pentagon.

"WE NEED TO KNOW"

"We need to know what really happened," Hahn said. "What has been explained by the officials has too many contradictions and irregularities. Without a proper investigation, these conspiracy theories flourish."

"What I hope is that there will be a debate on what really happened and that opinion in the United States and the rest of the world is alerted," Meyssan said. "The U.S. government has chosen its scapegoats…But we cannot allow those who are really guilty to go unpunished and the innocent to be bombed."

Pasin wrote in a recent letter to Amazon, "As the publisher, from the beginning I had in mind all these innocent victims. For their memory, we must know; we cannot accept that the culprits remain unpunished, whoever they are. The books of Mr. Meyssan are our contribution, and I can assure you that I never felt anti-U.S. at all. On the contrary: we need a strong democracy in the United States of America."

The Seismic Evidence & Molten Iron in the Rubble

August 27, 2002

Two unexplained "spikes" in the seismic record from 9-11 indicate huge bursts of energy shook the ground beneath the World Trade Center's twin towers immediately prior to the collapse.

I have learned of pools of "molten steel" found at the base of the collapsed twin towers weeks after the collapse. Although the energy source for these incredibly hot areas has yet to be explained, New York seismometers recorded huge bursts of energy, which caused unexplained seismic "spikes" at the beginning of each collapse. These spikes suggest that massive underground explosions may have literally knocked the towers off their foundations, causing them to collapse.

In the basements of the collapsed towers, where the 47 central support columns connected with the bedrock, hot spots of "literally molten steel" were discovered more than a month after the collapse. Such persistent and intense residual heat, 70 feet below the surface, in an oxygen starved environment, could explain how these crucial structural supports failed.

Peter Tully, president of Tully Construction of Flushing, N.Y., told me that he saw pools of "literally molten steel" at the World Trade Center. Tully was contracted after 9-11 to remove the debris from the site. Tully called Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI) of Phoenix, Md., for consultation about removing the debris. CDI calls itself "the innovator and global leader in the controlled demolition and implosion of structures."

Loizeaux, who cleaned up the bombed Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, arrived at the WTC site two days later and wrote the clean-up plan for the entire operation. I asked Loizeaux about the report of molten steel on the site.

"Yes," he said, "hot spots of molten steel in the basements." These incredibly hot areas were found "at the bottoms of the elevator shafts of the main towers, down seven [basement] levels," Loizeaux said. The molten steel was found "three, four, and five weeks later, when the rubble was being removed," Loizeaux said. He said molten steel was also found at WTC 7, which collapsed mysteriously in the late afternoon. Construction steel has an extremely high melting point of about 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Asked what could have caused such extreme heat, Tully said, "Think of the jet fuel." Loizeaux said the steel-melting fires were fueled by "paper, carpet and other combustibles packed down the elevator shafts by the tower floors as they 'pancaked' into the basement."

However, some independent investigators dispute this claim, saying kerosene-based jet fuel, paper, or the other combustibles normally found in the towers, cannot generate the heat required to melt steel, especially in an oxygen-poor environment like a deep basement. Due to the lack of oxygen, paper and other combustibles packed down at the bottom of elevator shafts would probably be a smoky smoldering pile.

Experts disagree that jet-fuel or paper could generate such heat. This is impossible, they say, because the maximum temperature that can be reached by hydrocarbons like jet-fuel burning in air is 1,520 degrees F. Because the WTC fires were fuel rich, as evidenced by the thick black smoke, it is argued that they did not reach this upper limit. The hottest spots at the surface of the rubble, where abundant oxygen was available, were much cooler than the molten steel found in the basements.

Five days after the collapse, on Sept. 16, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) used an Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) to locate and measure the site's hot spots. Dozens of hot spots were mapped, the hottest being in the east corner of the South Tower where a temperature of 1,377 degrees F. was recorded. This is, however, less than half as hot at the molten steel in the basement.

The foundations of the twin towers were 70 feet deep. At that level, 47 huge box columns, connected to the bedrock, supported the entire gravity load of the structures. The steel walls of these lower box columns were four inches thick. Videos of the North Tower collapse show its communication mast falling first, indicating that the central support columns must have failed at the very beginning of the collapse. "Everything went simultaneously," Loizeaux said.

"At 10:29 the entire top section of the North Tower had been severed from the base and began falling down," he writes. "If the first event was the falling of a floor, how did that progress to the severing of hundreds of columns?"

Asked if the vertical support columns gave way before the connections between the floors and the columns, Ron Hamburger, a structural engineer with the FEMA assessment team said, "That's the $64,000 question."

Loizeaux said, "If I were to bring the towers down, I would put explosives in the basement to get the weight of the building to help collapse the structure."

SEISMIC 'SPIKES'

Seismographs at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., 21 miles north of the WTC, recorded strange seismic activity on Sept. 11 that has still not been explained. While the aircraft crashes caused minimal earth shaking, significant earthquakes with unusual spikes occurred at the beginning of each collapse.

The Palisades seismic data recorded a 2.1 magnitude earthquake during the 10-second collapse of the South Tower at 9:59:04 and a 2.3 quake during the 8-second collapse of the North Tower at 10:28:31. However, the Palisades seismic record shows that—as the collapses began—a huge seismic "spike" marked the moment the greatest energy went into the ground. The strongest jolts were all registered at the beginning of the collapses, well before the falling debris struck the Earth.

These unexplained "spikes" in the seismic data lend credence to the theory that massive explosions at the base of the towers caused the collapses. A "sharp spike of short duration" is how seismologist Thorne Lay of University of California at Santa Cruz said an underground nuclear explosion appears on a seismograph.

The two unexplained spikes are more than 20 times the amplitude of the other seismic waves associated with the collapses and occurred in the East-West seismic recording as the buildings began to fall. Experts cannot explain why the seismic waves peaked before the towers actually hit the ground.

Asked about these spikes, seismologist Arthur Lerner-Lam, director of Columbia University's Center for Hazards and Risk Research said, "This is an element of current research and discussion. It is still being investigated." Lerner-Lam said that a 10-fold increase in wave amplitude indicates a 100-fold increase in energy released. These "short-period surface waves," reflect "the interaction between the ground and the building foundation," according to a report from Columbia Earth Institute.

"The seismic effects of the collapses are comparable to the explosions at a gasoline tank farm near Newark on Jan. 7, 1983," the Palisades Seismology Group reported on Sept. 14, 2001. One of the seismologists, Won-Young Kim, told me that the Palisades seismographs register daily underground explosions from a quarry 20 miles away. These blasts are caused by 80,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate and cause local earthquakes between Magnitude 1 and 2.

Kim said the 1993 truck-bomb at the WTC did not register on the seismographs because it was "not coupled" to the ground. "Only a small fraction of the energy from the collapsing towers was converted into ground motion," Lerner-Lam said. "The ground shaking that resulted from the collapse of the towers was extremely small."

Last November, Lerner-Lam said: "During the collapse, most of the energy of the falling debris was absorbed by the towers and the neighboring structures, converting them into rubble and dust or causing other damage—but not causing significant ground shaking." Evidently, the energy source that shook the ground beneath the towers was many times more powerful than the total potential energy released by the falling mass of the towers. The question is: What was that energy source?

While steel is often tested for evidence of explosions, despite numerous eyewitness reports of explosions in the towers, the engineers involved in the FEMA-sponsored building assessment did no such tests. Dr. W. Gene Corley, who investigated for the government the cause of the fire at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing, headed the FEMA-sponsored engineering assessment of the WTC collapse.

Corley told me that while some tests had been done on the 80 pieces of steel saved from the site, he said he did not know about tests that show if an explosion had affected the steel. "I am not a metallurgist," Corley said.

Much of the structural steel from the WTC was sold to Alan D. Ratner of Metal Management of Newark, N.J., and the New York-based company Hugo Neu Schnitzer East. Ratner, who heads the New Jersey branch of the Chicago-based company, sold the WTC steel to overseas companies, reportedly selling more than 50,000 tons of steel to a Shanghai steel company known as Baosteel for $120 per ton. Ratner paid about $70 per ton for the steel. Other shipments of steel from the WTC went to India and other Asian ports. Ratner came to Metal Management after spending years with a metal trading firm known as SimsMetal based out of Sydney, Australia.

Open Letter to 9-11 Investigators

August 24, 2002

The evidence is now compelling — the twin towers were blown off their feet. The plane crashes and fires were but secondary distractions to the main event. The towers were literally "blasted" off their footings at the beginning, and during the first phase, of their respective collapses. The fact that the towers were seen "jumping" immediately before the collapse is documented on film by a helicopter camera that witnessed that event.

Massive explosions deep in the basements of the WTC towers clearly lifted — and dropped — the massive structures from their bases 70 feet below the surface. The basement explosions that detached the central support columns from the bedrock, and dropped the towers, left extremely hot pools of molten steel (1535+ degrees Celsius), which persisted for days in the lowest basements (-7 level), and clear seismic tracks — that have yet to be explained.

However, the seismic evidence is quite clear: There were massive (and unexplained) releases of energy causing 2.1 and 2.3 magnitude earthquakes before any debris even hit the ground. Furthermore, seismologists agree that the falling rubble would only cause minimal seismic disturbances, which is what the seismic record clearly shows it did (e.g., Columbia University's Arthur Lerner-Lam's reports).

As a matter of fact, the impact of the "rubble" (we can no longer speak of large pieces) caused only relatively minor seismic shock wave signatures compared to what rocked the Earth (2.1 and 2.3 earthquakes) at the towers' base from the beginning of the collapse until about 5 seconds into the 8- and 10-second collapses.

The massive seismic wave "spike", which occurred at about 4-5 seconds into the 8-second collapse of the North Tower was many times larger than the waves that marked the moment of impact when the "rubble" finally hit the ground.

DROP THE COVER-UP

Investigators: The cat is out of the bag. The game is up. The evidence is now overwhelming and compelling. Scientists who continue to obfuscate and refuse to investigate the clear evidence of explosions in the towers will undoubtedly be considered by honest investigators, the public, and history to be part of the cover-up. The steel evidence must be tested for signs of "twinning", the tracks left in steel of exposure to high-energy explosions. All steel from the basements must be tested for such twinning as well as for radioactivity.

I, for one, would not want to be in the position of being involved in the criminal cover-up of this horrendous mass murder. Those investigators who participate in the cover-up, whether actively or passively, whether by action or inaction, should expect to find themselves branded as quislings, of both their nation and their science.

The only sure path is to pursue the truth, wherever it may lead.

Foreign Firms Destroyed Crucial Evidence

August 14, 2002

Why did a foreign company - headed by a knight of the British Empire - manage the controversial "clean-up" of the rubble at the World Trade center and the Pentagon? Although the terror attacks of 9-11 were clearly criminal acts of mass murder, no effort was made to preserve the integrity of the crime scenes and the essential evidence was disposed of like garbage.

The editor-in-chief of Fire Engineering magazine, William A. Manning, issued an urgent "call to action" to America's firefighters at the end of 2001, calling for a forensic investigation and demanding that the steel from the site be preserved to allow investigators to determine what caused the collapse. "Such destruction of evidence," Manning said, "shows the astounding ignorance of government officials to the value of a thorough, scientific investigation of the largest fire-induced collapse in world history."

"I have combed through our national standard for fire investigation, NFPA 921, but nowhere does one find an exemption allowing the destruction of evidence for buildings over 10 stories tall," Manning said. "Clearly, there are burning questions that need answers. Based on the incident's magnitude alone, a full-throttle, fully resourced, forensic investigation is imperative."

Three months later, the Science Committee of the House of Representatives reported that the WTC investigation was "hampered" by the destruction of crucial evidence. The committee report of March 6 says, "Some of the critical pieces of steel...were gone before the first investigator ever reached the site." The investigation Manning called for never happened and never will, because the essential evidence is now destroyed.

"The FEMA-sponsored building performance assessment currently being conducted of the World Trade Center is just that: an assessment, not an investigation," Prof. Glenn Corbett of John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City told the Science Committee in March. Corbett had previously called the FEMA-led investigation "uncoordinated" and "superficial." "You would think we would have the largest fire investigation in world history. You would be wrong," Corbett wrote. "We are literally treating the steel removed from the site like garbage, not like crucial fire scene evidence."

WHO'S IN CHARGE?

The New York Times was unable to find out who was behind the destruction of evidence. On Dec. 25, 2001, the Times reported, "Officials in the mayor's office declined to reply to written and oral requests for comment over a three-day period about who decided to recycle the steel and the concern that the decision might he handicapping the investigation."

"I must say that the current investigation - some would argue that 'review' is the more appropriate word - seems to be shrouded in excessive secrecy," said Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.). "There are no clear lines of authority," he said. "No one is in charge."

Before the dust had settled on Sept.11, the mayor of New York City, Rudolph Giuliani, and Kenneth Holden of the city's Dept. of Design and Construction (DDC), contracted 4 major construction management companies to begin the removal of the debris from the World Trade Center. Three of the four major companies involved in the clean-up were foreign owned: AMEC, Bovis Lend Lease, both headquartered in London; and Turner, a subsidiary of Germany's Hochtief. Only Tully Construction of Flushing, N.Y., is a truly American-owned company.

Peter Tully, president of the company, was the only contractor willing to speak openly with me about his work at the WTC site. "I was there every day," Tully said. "The mayor's office and DDC called us on Sept. 11...on the site we had at least three meetings a day with Ken Holden and Mike Burton."

The WTC site was initially divided into four quadrants and Tully Construction was assigned to Quadrant 3. Tully said his company had worked on the South Tower, WTC 4 and 5, and the 425,000 square foot underground retail mall.

'EVERYTHING WAS PULVERIZED'

"Think of the thousands of file cabinets, computers, and telephones in those towers - I never saw one - everything was pulverized," he said. "Everything that was above grade - above the 6th and 7th floor - disintegrated...it was like an explosion." Tully Construction specializes in concrete. I asked Mr. Tully if he had ever seen concrete pulverized as it was at the WTC.

"No - never," he said.

Tully said that there were hot spots where he observed "literally molten steel." Asked about what could have caused such intense heat, Tully said, "Think about the jet fuel."

BRITISH MANAGEMENT

The London-based firm AMEC, ranked by Engineering News-Record magazine as "the world's largest firm," oversaw the actual management of the debris removal at both the Pentagon and the WTC. "AMEC was the only construction company working at both disaster sites," the company's web site says. "AMEC is managing Hudson River barging operations to transport the rubble from the entire WTC site to a landfill on Staten Island and to steel recycling operations in New Jersey."

AMEC had just finished the renovation at the Pentagon when it was called to manage the removal of debris there and at the World Trade Center. "AMEC was placed in charge by the City of New York of organizing and engineering the around-the-clock clean up operation in the northwest sector," the web site says, which included the North Tower and WTC 6 (U.S. Customs House). The company also cleaned up the 47-story WTC 7, which mysteriously collapsed late in the afternoon of 9-11.

AMEC co-managed the WTC site with another London-based firm, Bovis Lend Lease, from January 2002. Bovis was a somewhat troubled construction subsidiary of Britain's P&O. Bovis was acquired by Australia's Lend Lease Corp in 1999. Bovis is headed by Sir Frank Lampl, a Czechoslovakian who immigrated to England at age 42. Lampl, who claims to have been imprisoned in Auschwitz and Dachau during the Nazi era, has become a British knight.

I spoke with Mary Costello, spokesperson for Bovis in New York. Costello said the company had assumed "overall responsibility" for the WTC site on Jan 4. She didn't want to discuss what buildings Bovis had worked on and said, "You should not be contacting us. You should be speaking to DDC." Calls to DDC public affairs department are neither answered nor returned.

Turner Construction, the third foreign firm, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hochtief AG, headquartered in Essen, Germany.

AMEC & THE PENTAGON

AMEC is an "informal acronym" for Asset Management and Engineering Consultancy, according to the firm's communications director David Paterson. Paterson told me that oil and gas extraction provides 25 percent of the company's revenue. AMEC operates the North Sea oil rigs for Shell and British Petroleum, he said.

AMEC had just completed a project to strengthen and renovate a section of the Pentagon. Wedge 1, when the building was attacked. The damaged area is between Wedges 1 and 2. Marcella Diaz, communication director for the firm's U.S. subsidiary, AMEC Construction Management, told me that the company's work in the Pentagon had been completed on the Friday just before Tuesday, Sept. 11.

Paterson said that AMEC is the "prime contractor for the U.S. Dept of Defense on environmental work." The firm was paid some $752 million for its 2-year renovation and clean-up at the Pentagon, according to Rachel Decker, spokesperson for the Pentagon's renovation entity known as PENREN. The fact that a British firm had been given the contract to renovate the Pentagon was "not a problem," Decker said.

Asked about who was in charge of the clean-up at the WTC, Paterson said, "The City of New York was the project manager." The director of DDC, Kenneth Holden, was named as the person in charge at the site according to Paterson. AMEC is in line for further construction work at both the Pentagon and the World Trade Center according to the Daily Mail, a British newspaper.

The company's London-based chief executive, Sir Peter Mason, said about the Pentagon clean-up: "The target is to have it reopened for business by Sept. 11, 2003, as a point of principle." Mason is a knight of the British Empire.

The former mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, who gave the management of the WTC site to the two British firms, AMEC and Bovis Lend Lease, received an honorary knighthood in the Order of the British Empire from Queen Elizabeth II on 13 February 2002. When Giuliani was made a knight of the British Empire he joined an exclusive club which includes George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Colin Powell, Wesley Clark, Norman Schwarzkopf, and Steven Spielberg. Bush and Reagan are also both knights in the Order of the Bath.

Firefighters' Final Words Debunk Fire Collapse Theory

August 7, 2002

Evidence that debunks the official explanation for the collapse of the World Trade Center is being kept secret by the Department of Justice on a flimsy pretext. The Department of Justice has ordered secrecy measures to keep the contents of a "lost tape" of firefighters' voices at the World Trade Center from being made public. The 78-minute audiotape evidently debunks the accepted explanation that intense jet fuel fires melted the towers' steel beams and caused the collapses.

The New York Times recently revealed the existence of the tape of radio transmissions between firefighters of the New York Fire Department (NYFD), which proves that "at least two men" had reached the 78th floor Sky Lobby of the South Tower. The firefighters had reported about the fires and casualties they encountered and had begun evacuating the survivors. The article said that firefighters "reached the crash zone on the 78th floor, where they went to the aid of grievously injured people trapped in a sprawl of destruction." While the article raises as many questions as it answers, it points to a reason for the secrecy: "Once they got there," the article says, "they had a coherent plan for putting out the fires they could see and helping victims who survived."

The report names two of the firefighters who were at the crash site: Battalion Chief Orio J. Palmer, who was organizing the evacuation of injured people, and Fire Marshal Ronald P. Bucca. Both were among the 343 firefighters who perished. The voices of the firefighters "showed no panic, no sense that events were racing beyond their control," the Times wrote. "At that point, the building would be standing for just a few more minutes, as the fire was weakening the structure on the floors above him. Even so, Chief Palmer could see only two pockets of fire, and called for a pair of engine companies to fight them."

The fact that veteran firefighters had "a coherent plan for putting out" the "two pockets of fire" indicates they judged the blazes to be manageable. These reports from the scene of the crash provide crucial evidence debunking the government's claim that a raging steel-melting inferno led to the tower's collapse. As the FEMA "Building Performance Assessment" report says, "Temperatures may have been as high as 900-1,100 degrees Celsius (1,700-2,000 Fahrenheit) in some areas."

"If FEMA's temperature estimates are correct, the interiors of the towers were furnaces capable of casting aluminum and glazing pottery," Eric Hufschmid, author of the book Painful Questions writes. Yet the voices on the tape prove that several firefighters were able to work "without fear" for an extended period at the point of the crash, and that the fires they encountered there were neither intense nor large.

The South Tower disintegrated in less than an hour after being hit by a plane, which impacted between its 78th and 84th floors. "Fire has never caused a steel building to collapse," he writes. "So how did a 56-minute fire bring down a steel building as strong as the South Tower?" His forthcoming book presents compelling evidence that explosives caused the towers to collapse.

Pointing to the Meridian Plaza fire in Philadelphia in 1991, he wrote, "The Meridian Plaza fire was extreme, but it did not cause the building to collapse. The fire in the South Tower seems insignificant by comparison to both the Meridian Plaza fire and the fire in the North Tower. How could the tiny fire in the South Tower cause the entire structure to shatter into dust after 56 minutes while much more extreme fires did not cause the Meridian Plaza building to even crack into two pieces?"

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PA), the bi-state authority and owner of the World Trade Center, retrieved the "lost tape." A spokesman for the authority, Greg Trevor, told me that the tape was found in PA police offices at 5 WTC, "two or three weeks" after 9-11. The PA police monitored radio transmissions from the WTC. Because of an unexplained delay in producing the tape, it was believed "for months" that firefighters had gone no higher than about the 50th floor in each tower. The delay, Trevor said, was due to the time required to transfer the voice data to "encrypted CDs."

In January or February, the PA offered a copy of the tape to NYFD officials, who reportedly declined the offer because they did not want to sign the confidentiality agreement as demanded by the PA. The Independent (U.K.) added that the PA "held back from sharing it with police and only relinquished it on condition that a confidentiality agreement was signed."

"That's not correct," Trevor said, regarding the allegation that the PA had withheld the tape from the police. The PA had only handled the tape "under the instruction of the U.S. attorney's office," he said.

Spokesman Bernard Gifford said NYPD had not pursued a criminal investigation of 9-11, having "turned it over" to the FBI. Gifford wouldn't say when this occurred, although Joe Valiquette of the New York office of the FBI told me that the federal bureau had run the investigation "from the moment it happened."

On Aug. 2 the relatives of the 16 firefighters whose voices were identified on the tape were allowed to hear their last words in a New York City hotel. The families were first required to sign a statement prepared by lawyers that they would not disclose what was said on the tape. Despite the fact that the contents of the tape are being kept secret, the Times article says, "Only now, nearly a year after the attacks, are the efforts of Chief Palmer, Mr. Bucca and others becoming public. City fire officials simply delayed listening to a 78-minute tape that is the only known recording of firefighters inside the towers."

While Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said he had not known the tape existed until "very recently," both the Times and CNN err in claiming that the NYFD is the agency behind the extreme secrecy. "The Fire Department has forbidden anyone to discuss the contents publicly on the ground that the tape might be evidence in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the man accused of plotting with the hijackers," the Times said.

When I asked the NYFD why the only conversations between firefighters engaged at the scene of the crash had to be kept secret because of Moussaoui, who was in prison in Minnesota at the time, the spokesman replied, "Take it up with the Department of Justice."

Asked about the numerous reports by eyewitnesses, including firefighters, of explosions inside the towers before they collapsed, Mike Logrin, spokesman for the NYFD, said, "We're pretty sure there weren't bombs in the building."

On Sept. 11 the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) interviewed one of its New York-based reporters, Steve Evans, who was in the second tower when it was hit. "I was at the base of the second tower, the second tower that was hit," Evans said. "There was an explosion—I didn't think it was an explosion—but the base of the building shook. I felt it shake . . . then when we were outside, the second explosion happened and then there was a series of explosions. . . . We can only wonder at the kind of damage—the kind of human damage—which was caused by those explosions—those series of explosions," he said.

Evans is a professional journalist and although his observations of explosions in the second tower should be taken into account, they are not. Numerous eyewitnesses reported also seeing or hearing explosions. Valiquette of the FBI told me that he had not "heard anything" about reports of explosions in the building and that he had "never heard any discussion of it" in the FBI's New York office.

9-11 Terror Suspect Hiding in Israel

July 31, 2002

The Israeli owner of the Mossad "front" company who fled to Israel after his "movers" were caught filming the World Trade Center attacks remains at large although the FBI, which has an office in Tel Aviv, has his name on its terror suspect list.

A leaked "FBI Suspect List" circulated among financial institutions in Italy shows that Dominik Suter, the Israeli owner of Urban Moving Systems who fled in haste to Israel after 9-11, is among those suspected of being behind the terror attacks. Despite the presence of an FBI office in Tel Aviv and the "intimate relationship" between U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies, Suter apparently remains out-of-reach. The suspect list is classified "Law Enforcement Sensitive" and is periodically updated. The list published on an Italian website was dated 22 May 2002 and was accompanied by two documents from February: an explanatory letter from the Italian state agency engaged in fighting money laundering, the Ufficio Italiano dei Cambi, and a distribution list from Assifact, an Italian association for factoring. A factoring company finances accounts of businesses. "If we deal with anybody on this list, we are obliged to notify the authorities," Liliana Corti of the Milano-based Assifact told me.

While Dominik Suter's name is on the list, oddly his Israeli nationality is not. Three addresses, two in New Jersey and one in Sherman Oaks, California, are given, as is his Social Security number. The year 1970 is provided for his date of birth. When I asked the FBI about the list, a spokeswoman said, "We're not going to validate your questions by talking about the list. You are not supposed to have it. It is not for public consumption." Asked about Israeli cooperation regarding suspects being harbored in the state of Israel, Bill Carter, Unit Chief of the FBI's National Press Office in Washington, said Israel was "under no obligation" to turn over suspects and that it did so only as a "matter of good will."

Carter told me to contact the FBI office in Tel Aviv for information regarding any extradition request for Suter. Robert Geeslin, an FBI agent, is the "deputy legal attaché" and has an office in the U.S. Embassy in Israel. Geeslin's office, however, refused to discuss the matter.

I then spoke with Mark Regev, spokesman for the Israeli government in Washington. Regev said the U.S. and Israeli authorities have "an intimate relationship" that is "excellent" and "on-going." The "close cooperation" between Israel and the U.S. includes sharing intelligence information. While I repeatedly asked Regev if Israeli authorities would cooperate by apprehending a terror suspect for questioning by the FBI, three times Regev avoided answering the question.

The first week after 9-11, I wrote about the 5 exuberant Israelis seen celebrating while filming the attacks on the World Trade Center. Although the men claimed to be movers working for the New Jersey-based Urban Moving Systems, it soon became clear that they were actually Israeli intelligence agents. One of the men later said, "Our purpose was to document the event."

Forward , a respected Jewish newspaper in New York, reported in March 2002 that the five Israelis were "conducting a Mossad surveillance mission." The men had first been observed exulting while filming the attacks on the WTC from the roof of a white moving van in the parking lot of a New Jersey apartment building across the river from lower Manhattan. "They seemed to be taking a movie," the resident who noticed them said. The men were taking video or photos of themselves with the World Trade Center burning in the background, she said. What struck her 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.

The moving van belonged to a front company called Urban Moving Systems. Around 4 p.m. on Sept. 11, the van was pulled over, and five Israelis: Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari, all Israelis between 22 and 27 years old, were arrested at gunpoint. One had $4,700 in cash hidden in his sock while another carried two foreign passports. Box cutters were found in the van. One of the Israeli agents spoke on an Israeli television show after being deported, saying, "The fact of the matter is we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event."





Yaron Shmuel Yaron Shmuel



Oded Ellner





Omer Marmari Oded EllnerOmer Marmari

The case was turned over to the FBI's Foreign Counterintelligence Section after the names of two of the five Israelis showed up on a CIA-FBI database of foreign intelligence operatives. At that point, he said, the bureau took control of the investigation and launched a Foreign Counterintelligence Investigation, or FCI, because the FBI believed Urban Moving Systems was a cover for an Israeli intelligence operation. "An FCI means not only that it was serious but also that it was handled at a very high level and very tightly," a former official told Forward. "The FBI came to the conclusion at the end of its investigation that the five Israelis arrested in New Jersey last September were conducting a Mossad surveillance mission and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, N.J., served as a front," Forward reported on March 15.

While the FBI searched the company's Weehawken, N.J., offices, removing boxes of documents and a dozen computer hard drives, the Israeli owner of the company, Dominik Otto Suter, was allowed to quickly flee the country. After one brief interview, FBI agents tried to interview Suter only to discover that he had cleared out of his New Jersey home and fled to Israel. Authorities confirmed that Urban Moving Systems was a Mossad front, whose "main office" was nothing but a mailbox address in midtown Manhattan. ABC News reporters visited the company's New Jersey warehouse saying, "It looked as if it 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 state of New Jersey seized the property and has a lawsuit pending against Urban Moving Systems and Suter, an Israeli citizen.

The Israelis had been held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, 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, however, however, FBI and CIA officials in Washington put a hold on the case. The five Israeli agents were held in detention for more than two months while some were held in solitary confinement for 40 days and given as many as seven lie-detector tests. One of the Israelis, Paul Kurzberg, refused to take a lie-detector test for 10 weeks and then failed it, according to his lawyer. After 71 days in jail, a deal was struck between Israeli and U.S. government officials and the five Israeli spies were put on a plane and deported to Israel on November 20.

What Exploded at WTC 6?

July 12, 2002



There has been some confusion about when the CNN video showing the mysterious explosion of 9-11 was filmed. In order to clarify the timing, I contacted CNN archives in Atlanta. The most senior archivist available, who could only reveal his first name, Andy, said that the footage showing the mysterious explosion had been shot as the second plane crashed into the South Tower, about 9:04 a.m.



There has been some doubt about the large amount of smoke seen around the south tower in the background. Most television viewers did not see the debris and smoke that fell around the South Tower after the plane crashed because tall buildings were in the way. A series of photos by Carmen Taylor, however, show that the amount of smoke and debris, and the way that if fell, match the image from CNN, which is taken from the opposite side of the towers.



Carmen Taylor of Lavaca, Ark., was visiting New York City and caught on film the moment United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center. Taylor was vacationing in New York when she spotted an airplane flying toward the World Trade Center, which had been struck by another plane minutes earlier. The second plane struck the Trade Center's second tower, and Taylor captured the event in an astonishing series of digital photographs that aired on the local ABC affiliate, Channel 40/29.



Taylor was just about to board the Staten Island Ferry to see the Statue of Liberty when the first explosion happened. She turned her camera on, and started shooting. As she did, she caught the explosions after the first plane struck. Then, she captured the second plane just before it hit the tower.



"There had been helicopters circling," Taylor said. "And then, this big plane comes up, and I thought 'OK, there's a plane going by.' Within seconds, it went straight into the other tower. "We were just standing, looking at the World Trade Center, and all of a sudden, it lit up like massive fireworks," she said.

What Caused the WTC 6 Crater?

July 10, 2002



Before the smoke had cleared from around the stricken South Tower, a mysterious explosion shot 550 feet into the air above the U.S. Customs House at 6 World Trade Center. This unexplained blast at the Customs House has never been investigated or reported in the mainstream media.



Despite the fact that the horrible events of September 11 occurred in broad daylight and were widely photographed, significant aspects of the attacks have been completely suppressed by a media blackout. A massive explosion, witnessed by millions of television viewers on CNN, evidently devastated WTC 6, the 8-story U.S. Customs House, although no national newspaper or media outlet has said a word about it.



The unexplained blast occurred between the burning North Tower and the 47-story Salomon Brothers Building, known as WTC 7, immediately after United Airlines Flight 175 smashed into the South Tower, at about 9:03 a.m. The explosion at WTC 6 was shown afterwards on CNN. Because it not broadcast as it happened there has been some confusion about when it actually occurred. The large amount of smoke seen cascading around the South Tower in the video led some observers to mistake the blast for a dust cloud from the subsequent collapse of the tower.



TIMING CONFIRMED



I contacted CNN to determine exactly when the footage was filmed. CNN's Public Affairs Department confirmed that the explosion shown in the footage occurred immediately after the second plane had crashed into the South Tower. When asked if the footage was taken at 9:04 a.m., the CNN archivist who could not give his last name, said, "That's correct." When asked if CNN could offer any explanation about what might have caused the blast that clearly reached 550 feet, soaring higher than the 47-story WTC 7 in the foreground, the archivist said, "We can't figure it out."



The affected space between WTC 7 and the North Tower was occupied by the 8-story U.S. Customs House building, also known as WTC 6. The building primarily housed the offices of some 760 employees of the Customs Service, a department of the U.S. Treasury. A number of other federal agencies reportedly had offices in the building, including the Departments of Commerce, Agriculture, Labor, and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms, although the agencies failed to return calls about the matter. A spokesman for the Export-Import Bank of the U.S., which had an office with 4 employees on the 6th floor of the Customs House did confirm the time of the explosion and said the employees had survived and been relocated to another location in the city. One private company, Eastco Building Services, Inc., reportedly leased space in the building.