Posted on 05/17/2002 6:45:49 AM PDT by Who is George Salt?
Was affair linked to investigation of global trafficking controlled by Israelis?
Six months after a flurry of reports that US authorities had rounded up and quietly deported some 120 young Israelis, most of them posing as "art students" while apparently spying on US government agencies before and after Sept. 11, their activities remain shrouded in mystery. There has been speculation they were part of an espionage operation by Israel against its strategic ally, but it has never been explained what the purpose of that supposed mission might have been or whether it was related in some way to the suicide attacks in which more than 3,000 people perished. US authorities insist there was no spying involved, that the young Israeli men and women were deported because of visa problems, even though a security report by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in June 2001, leaked to the media in December 2001, concluded that they were involved in "organized intelligence-gathering activity."
The mainstream US media has been uncharacteristically silent on this bizarre episode, as it has been in earlier instances when there were suspicions that Israeli intelligence agencies were engaged in clandestine operations in the US. This is even more unsettling since several government agencies have said unequivocally over the years that Israel "aggressively" conducts such operations in America. But suspicion that the young Israeli "art students" were indeed involved in espionage has not dissipated. And it’s not hard to see why. Some of them were serving in the military one was identified as the son of a two-star general at the time they were first detected by US security authorities in at least 42 cities and towns across the country in January 2001, or had been assigned to intelligence branches during their military service
Most failed polygraph tests when questioned about their activities. All said they were students at the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem or the "University of Jerusalem" (presumably the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which is known as the Hebrew University), but no record of the identities they admitted to were enrolled at either institution, now or in the past.
Some dogged and independent US journalists have not been deterred by the bland denials issued by the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other government agencies and have continued to investigate this puzzling and increasingly sinister affair. While they suspect a government cover-up to avoid an espionage scandal that could damage relations with Israel (and antagonize the powerful pro-Israel lobby), they have also postulated some alternative theories as to what it was all about.
Christopher Ketcham, a freelance journalist based in New York, reported in a lengthy online article this month that one scenario is that the whole affair was linked to a major DEA investigation into a global drug-trafficking operation controlled by Israelis. Whether or not that theory has any validity is open to question and Ketcham, who quotes several DEA and US intelligence sources in his article, expresses some skepticism about what he calls "the art student/drug dealer conspiracy." But this is worth examining because it leads from the expanding activities of Israel’s crime syndicates in the US to a trail of clandestine operations by serving or former Israeli military men in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s with right-wing paramilitary forces and the drug cartels with whom they shared an enmity toward left-wing guerrilla organizations. Some of these operations were carried out on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency. Viewed through this prism, Ketcham’s "art student/drug dealer conspiracy" starts to intersect with the murky world of espionage, covert arms deals and terrorism.
One of the primary targets of the "art students," according to the DEA report, was the DEA itself and individual agents. Several of the "students" were found seeking access to buildings housing DEA and other federal agencies. The group apparently had links to an Israeli electronics company in the US that deals with government departments, including providing wiretapping equipment to the FBI. At the time, the DEA was investigating the activities of an Israeli organized crime syndicate that controls the multibillion-dollar trade in "ecstasy," an amphetamine derivative that is sold in pill form. The US is a major market and in 2000 the Customs Service seized some 7 million ecstasy tablets. In May 2001, the Israeli mastermind of this operation, Oded Tuito, was arrested by Spanish police in Castelldefels outside Barcelona. His capture triggered a plethora of extradition requests from around the world, including the Unioted States, and on Aug. 15, 2001, a federal grand jury in Los Angeles indicted him and 11 alleged associates for running an international drug trafficking ring that smuggled an estimated 100,000 pills a month into that city.
He has been indicted on similar charges in New York and Pittsburgh. Two other Israelis, identified as Michel Elkaiam and Simon Itach, believed to be Tuito’s top lieutenants, were also arrested in Barcelona later.
In November, police in Britain, Germany, Israel, Australia and the Netherlands arrested 17 people, including two other Israelis held in Amsterdam, who were believed to be key figures in the ring. In other swoops around the same time, 1.6 million ecstasy pills weighing 400 kilograms were seized in Lubeck, Germany, hidden in a shipment of dried flowers bound for Australia, where another Israeli was arrested. Another 40 kilograms were intercepted in London and 4 kilograms in the the Dutch city of Haarlem.
But these successes barely dented a criminal enterprise, largely controlled by Israeli syndicates, involving what Interpol says is now the world’s most popular illegal drug. Officials estimate that more than 500 million ecstasy pills are consumed every year.
One DEA official called Tuito "the most notorious ecstasy trafficker known to law enforcement authorities in Europe, Israel and the US." He cornered the market a couple of years ago by buying up the entire output of pills manufactured in clandestine laboratories in the Netherlands, the main producer. The dozens of Dutch labs are believed to supply 80 percent of the world market. According to DEA officials, Tuito bought the pills at 50 cents apiece and sold them at $28.
The flamboyant Tuito allegedly stamped his pills with the Star of David and a Tweety Bird logo, apparently because it amused him that it sounded so much like his own name.
US authorities believe Tuito has been seeking to form alliances with US crime families, but in an equally sinister development the United Nations Narcotics Control Board reported in February that Colombian drug cartels were now shipping cocaine to Europe to exchange it for ecstasy which was smuggled into the US through Latin America.
Israel has a long history of involvement with the Colombian and other cartels in Latin America. Former Israeli Army and intelligence officers supplied the drug barons with weapons and trained their private armies, including special assassination squads, throughout the 1980s.
One of the more notorious of these Israelis, a lieutenant colonel in the army reserve named Yair Klein, was convicted by an Israeli court in 1991 for illegally exporting arms to the Colombian cartels. He was fined $40,000. In 1998, Klein, a balding ex-paratrooper, was indicted in Bogota on charges of training Colombian paramilitaries in terrorist tactics in the 1987-89. He was allegedly one of four Israelis hired by Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, one of the Medellin cartel’s most violent bosses, who was later assassinated.
Klein turned up in war-torn Sierra Leone running guns to rebels. He was arrested there in January 1999 and freed 16 months later. His current whereabouts are unknown, but Israeli arms dealers are still working with Colombian paramilitaries.
On May 7, Nicaraguan and Panamanian authorities launched an investigation into how 3,000 AK-47 assault rifles and 5 million rounds of ammunition shipped from Nicaragua by two Israeli-owned arms companies to Colombia on Nov. 10, 2001, and wound up in the hands of the United Defense Forces of Colombia, a group the US government has branded as terrorist.
There’s another bizarre twist to this tale. According to US law enforcement officials, Tuito, who used such diverse couriers as New York strippers and Spanish grandmothers to smuggle pills to the US, also employed a group of young ultra-Orthodox Hassidic Jews from New York on the premise that their obvious religious aura would get them through customs inspections without trouble.
In the 1980s, with Israelis deeply involved in Latin America’s political turmoil, US and British investigations found that New York’s Hassidic community was being used to launder as much as $200 million a year in drug cartel profits. One such operation was linked to David Marcus Katz, who controlled much of Israel’s arms dealings in Central America from his base in Mexico City throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
A 1992 report by Yediot Ahronot, based in part on FBI documentation, said Israeli intelligence organizations were directing a US-based money laundering network, including those run by Hassidic Jews, and using some of the profits to finance clandestine operations.
So, all this may shed some light on this puzzling episode that the US government insists was "blown way out of proportion." Ketcham says he was told by the CIA: "We’ve just closed the book on it. And I recommend that you do the same." The mystery of the Israeli "art students" who weren’t really students at all remains unsolved, but it seems there are people in the DEA and FBI who are not prepared to leave it at that. Watch this space.
No, Herman Goebbels would be proud of you. You failed to inform us that your source was the LEBANON Daily Star. You're just a Palie propagandist.Hear hear! The "link" to Israel-based "digital recording" (the industry euphemism for telephone system monitoring gear) companies is also a total non-sequitor. Even if these companies had the goal of hacking in to U.S. wiretaps, you still have to perform the considerable feat of getting any intercept information out of a wiretap system that has been installed in the U.S. If there is no communication channel, you can't get at the data. And, with a wiretap, you produce quite a lot of data. You have to either store it and hack in to the storage, or you have to get it real-time. Both approaches can be guarded against and detected.
Daily Star Oneonta, New York
Daily Star Hammond, Louisiana
Daily Star Tucson, Arizona
Really? That remains to be seen ;).
In the meantime, there's no difference between you and Arafat, you and any random palie homicide bomber, you and any palie "breeder-of-human-bombs", you and any random nazi or aryan nation vermin.
Based on your posts, of course.
And the relevance of this babble to the issue at hand, the interesting links between Israeli intelligence and organized crime syndicates is ...????"
And you have resorted to nothing other than ad hominem attacks on the source of this story, and myself. Your own actions "define the terms" far better than I ever could.
Well, the spirits of dead Nazis seem to be swimming in the current zeitgeist of a certain little Socialist Sparta.
First, Ha'aretz (note to Catspaw - that's an Israeli paper) published on 25 January 2002 an interesting article by Amir Oren, "At the Gates of Yassergrad":
"In order to prepare properly for the next campaign, one of the Israeli officers in the territories said not long ago, it's justified and in fact essential to learn from every possible source. If the mission will be to seize a densely populated refugee camp, or take over the casbah in Nablus, and if the commander's obligation is to try to execute the mission without casualties on either side, then he must first analyze and internalize the lessons of earlier battles - even, however shocking it may sound, even how the German army fought in the Warsaw ghetto."
Then there are the numbers marked by the Israelis on the hands and foreheads of Palestinian prisoners.
Take your Palie propaganda and go back to Sam Francis.
Oh, wait--Sam had to shut down his boards. Cachie, where are the Palie sympathizers and neo-Nazis hanging around these days?
The new schtick of the anti-Israel gang. Comparing Israel to Germany, which is a form of Holocaust denial.
I once went to a dance bar and they marked my hand with Magic Marker, as the Israelis did to Palestinian baddies. Took me 3 days to wash the darn stuff off. You should learn the difference between having numbers burned into skin, never to be removed, and crayons.
Lol. That's an easy one. The refugees from SamFran are holed up on Polinco.com and Libertyforum.org. Also partly on Original Dissent, although they don't like it too much - the owner doesn't seem to let them post all they want to from National Alliance, for example.
Of course, if they knew who the owner really was and who they have given their precious personal info to, they'd probably sh*t bricks and go hide under their beds for a year or so. If they dig around a little I believe they'll have a sudden understanding why OD prefers not to run too hot :))).
Pretty soon you'll be posting that the blood of gentiles is used in the making of Purim pastries.
No, just articles that examine the interesting links between Israeli intelligence and drug-running crime syndicates.
Complete Jew-hating dumbass.
Okay. Israel has its criminals like every other nation. If they were indeed drug runners, then possibly they were lucky to be rounded up right after Sept. 11 when law enforcement resources were stretched to the limit looking for foreign terrorists.
Don't think the next Israeli drug smuggler to get caught will be so lucky. But at this point, I'm going to wait and see what the DEA and FBI come up with.
Now, of course there are criminals of every religion: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, atheist, agnostic, etc etc. So it is not just a problem with Israel, of course. To believe such is idiotic and myopic. However, the same can be said of those who see no evil in a person just because they are Jewish, Christian, Muslim, etc. "Oh, he's a Christian/Jew/Hindu, he couldn't possibly be a criminal!"
Now, it is true that these Hassidic Jewish boys in New York City were paid to smuggle many many ecstacy pills into the US, I believe it was from Amsterdam, where a very very large percentage of these pills are turned from liquid to pill form. It is certainly not a far stretch to find proof that it was choreographed from inside Israel by Israeli citizens.
I would not be surprised to learn that they were Russian mob... those animals would pull the teeth out of their own grandmothers mouths for the gold, and would pimp their own 12 year old sisters if they could turn them for $5.
so yes, maybe he should have linked the article as "The Lebanese Daily Star". There certainly are a lot of Muslims in Lebanon. But aren't there a large number of Christians as well? I certainly don't think that just because this article accuses some Israelis of being criminals makes the poster part of some anti-Semetic conspiracy.
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