As another 9/11 anniversary
comes and goes, many questions surrounding the events remained unanswered.
MintPress brings you a freshly updated article, originally published in May,
2019 that seeks answers to some of those questions.
NEW YORK — For nearly two decades, one of
the most overlooked and little known arrests made
in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks was that of the so-called “High
Fivers,” or the “Dancing Israelis.” However, new information released by the
FBI on May 7 has brought fresh scrutiny to the possibility that the “Dancing
Israelis,” at least two of whom were known Mossad operatives, had prior
knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center.
Shortly after 8:46 a.m. on the
day of the attacks, just minutes after the first plane struck the World Trade
Center, five men — later revealed to be Israeli nationals — had positioned
themselves in the parking lot of the Doric Apartment Complex in Union City, New
Jersey, where they were seen taking pictures and filming the attacks while also
celebrating the destruction of the towers and “high fiving” each other. At least one eyewitness interviewed
by the FBI had seen the Israelis’ van in the parking lot as early as 8:00 a.m.
that day, more than 40 minutes prior to the attack. The story received coverage in U.S. mainstream media at
the time but has since been largely forgotten.
The men — Sivan Kurzberg, Paul
Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Yaron Shimuel and Omar Marmari — were subsequently apprehended by
law enforcement and claimed to be Israeli tourists on a “working holiday” in
the United States where they were employed by a moving company, Urban Moving
Systems. Upon his arrest, Sivan Kurzberg told the arresting officer, “We are
Israeli; we are not your problem. Your problems are our problems, The
Palestinians are the problem.”
For years, the official story
has been that these individuals, while they had engaged in “immature” behavior
by celebrating and being “visibly happy” in their documenting of the attacks,
had no prior knowledge of the attack. However, newly released FBI copies
of the photos taken by the five Israelis strongly suggest
that these individuals had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade
Center. The copies of the photos were obtained via a FOIA request made by a private citizen.
According to a former
high-ranking American intelligence official who spoke to the Jewish Daily Forward in
2002, the FBI concluded in its investigation that the five Israelis arrested
“were conducting a Mossad surveillance mission and that their employer, Urban
Moving Systems of Weehawken, NJ, served as a front.” At least two of the men
arrested were determined to
have direct links to the Mossad after their names appeared in a CIA-FBI
database of foreign intelligence operatives. According to one of their lawyers,
one of the men, Paul Kurzberg, had previously worked for the Mossad in another
country prior to arriving in the United States. Another of those arrested, Oded
Ellner, subsequently stated on
Israeli TV that the five Israelis had been in New York at the time “to document
the event,” meaning the attack on the World Trade Center.
The FOIA release of the photos is
notable because responses to prior FOIA requests to the Department of Justice,
which oversees the FBI, had previously claimed that all of the photos taken by
the Israeli nationals had been destroyed in January 2014. The photos themselves
are heavily redacted, making it impossible to see the Israelis’ facial
expressions. However, previously declassified yet heavily
redacted FBI reportsstate that the Israelis are “visibly happy”
in nearly every photo, even when the burning towers are in the background. The
photos released are also not original copies and instead appear to be
photocopies of photocopies of the original pictures. In addition, of the
original 76 pictures developed by authorities from the camera in the Israelis’
possession, only 14 were released.
Based on the impressions of the
French website Panamza and subsequently MintPress, three of these photos — despite the heavy
redaction and poor quality — appear damning. Since 2001, even though the photos
were never released until now, it had been known that one of the Israelis
arrested — Sivan Kurzberg — was seen in a photo “holding a lighted lighter in
the foreground, with the smoldering wreckage [of the twin towers] in the
background,” according to Steven Noah Gordon, then-lawyer for the five
Israelis, as cited in a New York Times report from
November 2001.
The picture of Kurzberg with
the lit lighter appears to be photo #5 in the new FOIA release. Yet, the
picture released includes a visible date of September 10, 2001, the day before
the attacks, as do two other photos — images #7 and #8 in the collection —
whereas all other photos with dates show only the month and the year (9 ‘01).
The FOIA release did not provide any information as to the apparent discrepancy
in dates.
While this could be explained
away as the camera in question being programmed with a slightly inaccurate
date, that doesn’t seem to be the case for two reasons. First, only three out
of the 14 pictures appear to carry that date and, second, previously declassified
FBI reports report an eyewitness adamantly stating that Sivan Kurzberghad
visited the Doric Apartments on September 10, 2001 at around 3 p.m. with at
least one other man, with whom he was conversing in a foreign language, and had
identified himself as a “construction worker” to a tenant (page 61 of declassified FBI report).
In addition, the FBI report
noted that a van from Urban Moving Systems, the company that employed the five
Israelis at the time of their arrest, was present and was involved in moving a
tenant out of the complex on September 10 and that the movers all had foreign
accents. Thus, images 5, 7 and 8 may have been taken at the same complex a day
before the attacks.
This raises two possibilities.
First, that there are two images of Kurzberg with a lit lighter in front of the
towers, one taken before the attack and one taken at the time of the attack,
and that the FBI released only one of them. Second, that Kurzberg took the
picture with the lighter only the day before the attack and his lawyer
misrepresented the contents of the photo to the New York Times. Given that the background
of the photo — particularly the state of the towers — is indiscernible in the
recently released photo, it is difficult to determine which is the case.
However, other analysts have
interpreted the photos quite differently. For instance, Ryan Dawson, formerly
of Newsbud, cited the police report that details the clothing of some of the
Israelis at the time of their arrest and used that to link identities to the
redacted faces in the pictures. He believes that the Israeli holding the
lighter is not Sivan Kurzberg, but his brother Paul. Meanwhile, the person who
filed the FOIA request that resulted in the picture’s release, who wished to
remain anonymous, thought that Omer Marmari was more likely to be the man with
the lighter.
Both have stated that all
pictures were likely to have been taken on the day of the attacks. One reason
given for the appearance of the date of September 10, 2001 in only some of the
photos is due to the heavy editing, which rendered it invisible in the
remaining photos. Dawson asserted that the incorrect date was due to the
Israelis’ panicking when they were pulled over and attempting to edit the date
and hour on the camera upon the arrest in an effort to hide the evidence.
Another explanation put forth is that it was the result of a camera
configuration error.
Given the highly redacted and
edited nature of the pictures, what is most notable of all is the fact of what
is not seen (i.e. edited out) in the photos. Clearly, there was an interest in
preventing the public from seeing the state of the towers at the time of the
photos were taken and also in preventing the public from seeing the facial
expressions of the Israelis, despite it being known from the FBI report that
they are “visibly happy” and “jovial.” The state of the towers being edited out
is particularly telling, especially considering that
As to whether any of the
Israelis knew of the attacks in advance, the relevant section of the FBI report
that asks “1. Did the Israeli nationals have foreknowledge of the events at WTC
and were they filming the events prior to and in anticipation of the
explosion?” is notably redacted in its entirety, suggesting that the FBI did not
determine the answer to that question to be an emphatic “no.”
If images 5 and 7 were indeed
taken the day prior to the attack, the question then becomes why the FBI
officially concluded that the arrested Israelis had no prior knowledge of the
attacks? One report from ABC News dated June 2002 suggests that the Bush administration
intervened in the investigation. That report states that
“Israeli and U.S. government officials worked out a deal — and after 71 days,
the five Israelis were taken out of jail, put on a plane, and deported back
home [to Israel].” If the Bush administration had cut a deal with Israel’s
government to cover up the incident, it certainly would not have been the
first time a U.S. presidential administration had done so
on Israel’s behalf.
Further evidence that
higher-ups in the administration intervened is the fact that then-Attorney
General John Ashcroft personally signed off on
the detainees’ release. Upon his entering the private sector as a lobbyist and
consultant in 2005, the Israeli government became one of Ashcroft’s first clients.
A cover-up certainly seems to
have happened to some extent, between the destruction of records of the
investigation and the fact that official conclusions of the investigation do
not add up. In the latter case, the FBI — in a file dated September 24, 2001– officially stated that
they “determined that none of the Israelis were actively engaged in clandestine
intelligence activities in the United States.” However, that conclusion
was directly contradicted by
U.S. officials a year later and by the fact that Israel’s own government subsequently acknowledged that
the five Israelis had indeed been involved in “clandestine intelligence
activities in the United States.”
In addition, the new FOIA
release of the photos suggests that another FBI conclusion — that “none of the
pictures developed from the film found inside the 35-mm camera depicted the
twin towers prior to the attack” — was inaccurate. This may explain why the
images released via the recent FOIA request were heavily edited leaving details
in the background greatly obscured, making it impossible to determine whether
the photos were taken prior to or during the attacks based solely on the state
of the towers.
Beyond the photos and observed
activities of the so-called “Dancing Israelis,” it is worth revisiting several
other suspicious circumstances linked to their arrest that clearly show that
the men in question were hardly the “tourists” they had claimed to be. One
often cited example is the fact that one of the men, Oded Ellner, had a “white
sock-like sack filled with $4,700 in cash,”
as well as maps of the city with certain places highlighted, and box cutters.
In addition, the van in which the Israelis were arrested was “oddly” lacking
“equipment typically used in a moving company’s daily duties,” according to the
FBI, and residue of explosives was found in the van.
Of the explosive residue, the
declassified FBI report states:
A search of the van and
individuals was conducted at the time of the vehicle stop. The vehicle was also
searched by a trained bomb-sniffing dog which yielded a positive result for the
presence of explosive traces. Swabs of the vehicle’s interior were taken, and
those samples were sent to the FBI laboratory for further analysis. Final
results are still pending.”
In total, the FBI reported that
four items related to explosives were found in the ban and are labeled in the
report as “Fabric Sample (Explosive Residue),” “Control Swabs – SA [ – ]
Gloves,” “Control Swabs – (Bomb Suits),” and “Blanket Samples For Explosive
Residue.” In addition, a VHS tape and some still photographs found in the van
“were sent to Laboratory Examiner [ redacted ] (Explosives Unit).”
In addition to the strange
nature of some of the Israelis’ possessions in the van and on their person, the
company that employed them — Urban Moving Systems — was of special interest to
the FBI, which concluded that the company was likely a “fraudulent operation.”
Upon a search of the company’s premises, the FBI noted that “little evidence of
a legitimate business operation was found.” The FBI report also noted that
there were an “unusually large number of computers relative to the number of
employees for such a fairly small business” and that “further investigation
identified several pseudo-names or aliases associated with Urban Moving Systems
and its operations.”
The FBI presence at the Urban
Moving Systems search site drew the attention of the local media and was later
reported on both television and in the local press. A former Urban Moving
Systems employee later contacted the Newark Division with information indicating
that he had quit his employment with Urban Moving Systems as a result of the
high amount of anti-American sentiment present among Urban’s employees. The
former employee stated that an Israeli employee of Urban had even once
remarked, “Give us twenty years and we’ll take over your media and destroy your
country” (page 37 of the FBI report).
The FBI returned to search the
premises of Urban Moving Systems a month later, but by that time found:
The building and all of its
contents had been abandoned by…the owner of Urban Moving Systems. This [was]
apparently being done to avoid criminal prosecution after the 09/11/2001 arrest
of five of his employees and subsequent seizure of his office computer systems
by members of the FBI-NK on or around 09/13/2001.”
The company’s owner — Dominik
Otto Suter, an Israeli citizen — had fled to Israelon
September 14, 2001, two days after he had been questioned by the FBI. The
FBI told ABC News that
“Urban Moving may have been providing cover for an Israeli intelligence
operation.” Surprisingly, since at least 2016, Suter has been living in the San
Francisco Bay Area, where he works for a contractor for major tech
companies like Google and Microsoft. According to the public records database Intelius, in 2006 and 2007 Suter also
worked for a telecommunications company — Granite Telecommunications — that works for the
U.S. military and several other U.S. government agencies.
In addition to Urban Moving
Systems, another moving company, Classic International Movers, became of
interest in connection with the investigation into the “Dancing Israelis,”
which led to the arrest and detention of four Israeli nationals who worked for
this separate moving company. The FBI’s Miami Division had alerted the Newark
Division that Classic International Movers was believed to have been used by
one of the 19 alleged 9/11 hijackers before the attack, and one of the “Dancing
Israelis” had the number for Classic International Movers written in a notebook
that was seized at the time of his arrest. The report further states that one
of the Israelis of Classic International Movers who was arrested “was visibly
disturbed by the Agents’ questioning regarding his personal email account.”
While the case of the “Dancing
Israelis” has long been treated as an outlier in the aftermath of September 11,
what is often overlooked is the fact that hundreds of Israeli nationals were
arrested in the aftermath of the attacks.
According to a FOX News report from
December 2001, 60 Israelis were apprehended or detained after September 11,
with most deported, and a total of 140 Israelis were arrested and detained in
all of 2001 by federal authorities. That report claimed that the arrests,
ostensibly including the “Dancing Israelis,” were in relation to an
investigation of “an organized [Israeli] intelligence gathering operation
designed to ‘penetrate government facilities.’”
The report also added that most
of those arrested, in addition to having served in the IDF, had “intelligence
expertise” and worked for Israeli companies that specialized in wiretapping.
Some of those detained were also active members of the Israeli military; and
several detainees, including the “Dancing Israelis,” had failed polygraph tests
when asked if they had been surveilling the U.S. government.
A key aspect of that report,
compiled by journalist Carl Cameron, also states that federal investigators
widely suspected that Israeli intelligence had prior knowledge of the September
11 attacks. In the report, Cameron stated:
The Israelis may have gathered
intelligence about the attacks in advance and not shared it. A highly placed
investigator said there are ‘tie-ins’ but when asked for details he flatly
refused to describe them saying: ‘Evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is
classified. I cannot tell you about the evidence that has been gathered. It is
classified information.’”
One exchange between Cameron
and host Brit Hume included in the report is particularly telling:
HUME: “Carl, what about this
question of advanced knowledge of what was going to happen on 9/11? How clear
are investigators that some Israeli agents may have known something?”
CAMERON: “Well it’s very explosive
information obviously and there is a great deal of evidence that they say they
have collected. None of it necessarily conclusive. It’s more when they put it
all together a big question they say is, ‘How could they have not known?’ —
almost a direct quote, Brit.”
However, it is essential to
note that Israeli intelligence did attempt to warn the
U.S. government at least twice beginning in August 2001 as did the intelligence
agencies of many other countries, including France, the UK, Egypt, Russia and
Jordan. Yet, no people connected to any other intelligence agency other than
Israel were caught celebrating the attacks as they took place in the area nor were
accused by mainstream media of operating a large spy ring within the U.S. at
the time. One theory to explain this discrepancy is that the Mossad elements of
which the “Dancing Israelis” and other alleged Israeli spies could have been
part of a specific section of Israeli intelligence that were acting
independently as a rogue agency. Such a possibility is not unusual given that
divisions of or groups within the CIA have been known to “go rogue” on
several occasions.
If the “Dancing Israelis”, and
more broadly the Mossad and the Israeli government, had foreknowledge of
September 11, why would they remain silent and not attempt to warn the American
government or public of the coming attacks? In the case of the “Dancing
Israelis,” why would Israelis celebrate such an attack?
One of the detained “Dancing
Israelis,” Omer Marmari, told police the following about why he viewed the
September 11 attacks in a positive light:
Israel now has hope that the
world will now understand us. Americans are naïve and America is easy to get
inside. There are not a lot of checks in America. And now America will be
tougher about who gets into their country.”
While Marmari’s statement may
suggest one reason some of the “Dancing Israelis” were so “visibly happy” in
their photographs, there are also other statements made by top Israeli
politicians that suggest why the Israeli government and its intelligence agency
declined to act on apparent foreknowledge of the attack.
When asked, on the day of the
9/11 attacks, how the attacks would affect American-Israeli relations, Benjamin
Netanyahu — the current Israeli prime minister — told the New York
Times that “It’s very good,” before quickly adding
“Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.” He then
predicted, much as Marmari had, that the attacks would “strengthen the bond
between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades,
but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.”
Netanyahu, in a candid
conversation recorded in 2001, also echoed Marmari’s claim that Americans are
naïve. In that recording, Netanyahu said:
I know what America is. America
is something that can easily be moved. Moved to the right direction. … They
won’t get in our way. They won’t get in our way… 80 percent of the Americans
support us. It’s absurd.”
In addition, also on the day of
the September 11 attacks, Netanyahu — who at the time was not in political
office — held a press conference in
which he claimed that he had predicted the attacks on the World Trade Center by
“militant Islam” in his 1995 book, Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat
Domestic and International Terrorism. In that book, Netanyahu had posited that Iranian-linked
“militants” would set off a nuclear bomb in the basement of the World Trade
Center.
During his press conference on
the day of the attacks, Netanyahu also asserted that the 9/11 attacks would be
a turning point for America and compared them to the 1941 attack on Pearl
Harbor. Netanyahu’s statement echoes the infamous line from the “Rebuilding America’s
Defenses” document authored by the neoconservative think tank,
the Project for a New Ameican Century (PNAC). That line reads. “Further, the
process of transformation [towards a neo-Reaganite foreign policy and
hyper-militarism], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a
long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl
Harbor.”
Then again, years later In
2008, the Israeli newspaper Maariv reported that Netanyahu had stated that the September 11
attacks had greatly benefited Israel. He was quoted as saying: “We are benefiting
from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the
American struggle in Iraq.”
Indeed, it goes without saying
that the aftermath of 9/11 — which involved the U.S. leading a destructive
effort throughout the Middle East — has indeed benefited Israel. Many of the
U.S.’ post-9/11 “nation-building” efforts have notably mirrored the policy
paper “A Clean Break: A New
Strategy for Securing the Realm,” which was authored by American
neoconservatives — PNAC members among them — for Netanyahu’s first term as
prime minister.
That document calls for the
creation of a “New Middle East” by, among other things, “weakening, containing,
and even rolling back Syria” and “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq —
an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right.” As is known now,
both of those main objectives have since come to pass, each with strong Israeli involvement.
Update | This article was updated to include
and accommodate alternative analyses of the newly released photos as well
information on Israeli intelligence warnings to the U.S. prior to September 11,
2001 that came to the attention of MintPress after initial its publication.
Feature photo | Four of the
Israeli nationals arrested for “puzzling behavior” during the September 11
attacks are seen casually posing together in front of the Manhattan skyline
while the September 11 attacks were in progress | Photo #1
Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist
based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets
including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century
Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and
is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in
Journalism.
