Posted on 12/06/2003 8:16:08 PM PST by FairOpinion
Edited on 04/29/2004 2:03:32 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- An al Qaeda video, which appeared this week on an al Qaeda-affiliated Web site, shows the September 11, 2001, attack on New York's World Trade Center as filmed from an angle sources in Washington said they had not seen before.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Before Bush, the cost of helping bring the United States down wasn't that high. Lots of jealous petty dictators wanting to puff up could throw in money or arms to al Qaeda. But the cost has gotten high. Shock and awe ended delusions. We go after the top. The big shots. The _iss ant dictators themselves, and their sons, and flacks.
Al Qaeda might make a last stand, and they might hurt us, but the war is over. They've lost.
Seriously? Yikes. If confirmed, this should get distributed far and wide.
We could be talking about this footage:
http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:7s7dB-LC4IwJ:www.praguepost.com/P03/2003/Art/0918/news1.php+%22Pavel+Hlava%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
(Kinda like the scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen, annoyed by jerk in a theatre line pulls Marshall McLuhan, himself, out of nowhere, who promptly corrects the pompous a-s and backs up Allen in his interpretation of his theories).No, I'm JohnathanRGalt. And, I'm not 'stealing' anything. I'm honouring the memory of Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand was a JEW and she deeply loved Israel.
We all need to spend time at: The Ayn Rand Institute's In Moral Defense of Israel Web page which was created to explain why Israel has a moral right to exist and to defend itself against attack, and why the United States should unequivocally support Israel.__________
Those attacking Israel, by contrast, are terrorist organizations, theocracies, dictatorships and would-be dictators. (and not to mention leftists, liberals, pseudo-libertarians, Islamo-fascists, skinheads, and neonazis). They do not recognize the individual rights of their own subjects, much less those of the citizens of Israel. They initiate force indiscriminately in order to retain and expand their power. In contrast to the state of Israel, such organizations and regimes have no moral right to exist.
Least we forget -- This pamphlet was BLOCKED by Canadian Customs last year as hate literature because it said that Israel has a right to exist.
... In addition to the story of the 4,000 Israelis/Jews absent from the World Trade Center, another conspiracy theory that circulates widely involves five so-called Israeli "spies" caught videotaping and celebrating the destruction of the Twin Towers. In the days after the attacks, the mainstream media was filled with reports of five Middle Eastern-looking men who were seen documenting and celebrating the burning Twin Towers either from their van or the roof of a building in New Jersey, depending on the source. According to these reports, onlookers reported the incident to the police, who later arrested the men. Part of these accounts is factual: five men, who later turned out to be Israelis, were indeed arrested after they drove their van toward Manhattan hours after the World Trade Center attack. Inside the van, police reportedly found multiple passports, box cutters and a large amount of cash. In addition, one of the men had a camera that contained newly taken photos of the men standing and allegedly smiling as the Twin Towers burned in the background. As reported, the incident was mysterious, at the very least. For conspiracy theorists, the fact that five Israelis were arrested for allegedly documenting and celebrating the WTC attack became yet more "proof" of Israel's involvement in the attack. The incident was widely reported in the Arab/Muslim press and in far-right publications.
A few weeks after the arrests of the Israelis was reported, the FBI announced that it had investigated but found no connection between the five men and the World Trade Center attack. Authorities did discover, however, that all of them had worked illegally for a moving van company, Urban Moving Systems, and had violated their tourist visas. According to various newspapers, including The New York Times and the Forward, after being held in prison for over two months all five signed papers acknowledging their immigration violations and were then deported back to Israel. The FBI also cleared them of any involvement in the terrorist attacks. Nonetheless, far-right publications continued to promote the story, or exaggerated versions of it, as evidence of a greater plot.
The American Free Press was one of the most energetic exploiters of this theory. Writer Christopher Bollyn reported that, according to New Jersey and New York newspapers, "At least three different groups of Israelis -- some of whom may have ties to Israels intelligence agency, the Mossad -- were taken into custody after eyewitnesses reported seeing them celebrating in several locations across the river from lower Manhattan in New Jersey." Bollyn, basing his article on a report in the Bergen, New Jersey-based Record, also reported that the five Israelis arrested "were found carrying maps linking them to the blasts," and that "bomb-sniffing dogs reacted as if they had detected explosives," although none were found, according to unnamed sources "close to the investigation." Even though the information in The Record and Bollyn's article was later debunked, months after the Israelis deportation, Michael Collins Piper of the American Free Press was still promoting the theory: Piper said that the Forward, "America's oldest and most prestigious Jewish newspaper," had reported that the FBI "came to the conclusion... 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." The Forward claimed, according to Piper, that while the FBI considered two of the five Israelis to be Mossad operatives who had been spying on local Arabs, they were allowed to leave because they knew nothing about the 9/11 attacks. Piper said the Forward also reported that "the names of two of the five Israelis showed up on a CIA-FBI database of foreign intelligence operatives." In fact, Mark Perelman, writing for the Forward in March 2002, did indeed make the claims that Piper reported to his readers. Perelman based his information on talks with an unnamed "former high-ranking American intelligence official." Because the Forward reported the story, people on the far right asserted that it had to be true because the Forward was a paper of record in the Jewish community.
In June 2002, ABC News picked up the story of the five Israelis again via an investigative report on its newsmagazine show, "20/20." According to Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of operations for counterterrorism with the CIA and later a consultant for ABC, the FBI and CIA allegedly believed that the men were part of an Israeli intelligence operation. The "20/20" report stated that after the FBI questioned the owner of Urban Moving Systems, he quickly fled the U.S. and went back to Israel, leaving behind phones, equipment, and clients furniture, thus implying he had something to hide. Even though "20/20" made a case that the men were probably spies, the show also stated admitted that "there was no evidence to conclude they had advanced [sic] knowledge of the terrorist attacks of 9/11."
These stories in the mainstream press media gave legitimacy to the claim that the five men were spies, although the deported Israelis continue to deny it, as do both the Israeli and U.S. governments, and no one involved in the investigation has connected them in any way to the events of 9/11. Yet, anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists seized on the press accounts as validation for their theories of Israeli involvement in the attacks. The various rumors of espionage surrounding the five Israelis deepened the conviction of many anti-Semites that Jews were behind the 9/11 tragedy, reinforcing the canard that Jews are innately treacherous and evil.
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