Anthony Thorne

Mods should have the ability to sticky a thread with 'controversial' or 'heated discussion'; or something. This would serve two purposes. Anyone who wanted to skip the heated rhetoric would have a solid warning to skip it. And anyone who wanted to thread-crap a subject into oblivion to kick a topic off the front page, wouldn't be able to do so.

That said I agree with Pat that there the two most vocal sides here are each stuck in the ground, sticking to their guns, going around in circles etc. I asked Matt a question a couple of pages back about the bridge bombing plan, not because I was dismissive, but because I was curious what the full story was. Unless I'm wrong, he never answered it. If folks wanting to learn additional info are being brushed off in favour of the target shooting that has been going on for pages now, this thread may as well die a natural death.

Relatively new, Joel van der Reijden's chronology of CIA / Mossad collaborations. He plans further updates to it.

https://isgp-studies.com/mossad-cia-coups

Hi Chuck, I've posted a few things in some other threads which were met with either a 'hmmm' or a shrug. The big stuff I dug up takes a lot of writing to present in context and a chunk of it isn't even JFK related so it's on the back burner for now. That noted there were a few tidbits that Leslie and I discussed while mucking around on the essay that I'm not sure ended up in the final book. 

I have a couple of things here and there that might come out in the future, and there's an essay I want to write at some point that digs further into some of the stuff Lance De Haven Smith covered re the origins of the 'conspiracy theory' phrase used by the CIA in the 60's - he referenced some overseas news articles, and I dug up a couple of things referencing the names involved with that which kind of square the circle - but there's no timeframe for it.

I'll just add my essay involved a heap of research and conversation (the final piece was around 13,000 words, the one in the book is a bit over 3000 words I think) but it was all done right at the tail end of the work Leslie and HP had already done for COUP and I kind of was just throwing them some insights and research here and there at the very end of the process - yet the process of researching a few areas dug up a bunch of stuff, all largely from CIA Crest, which I'll have to tackle properly at some point. I think a couple of posters have read the longer essay.

Matthew, can you explain more about what the guys arrested hoped to achieve at the Washington Bridge?

I've seen the clips and heard the audio that was called in after they were arrested - what was their intended goal there if they hadn't been stopped. To blow something up and blame it on Palestinians, or was it something less dramatic than that?

My own searches this morning were versions of WHAT DOCUMENTS ARE ONLINE FROM THE 1960'S DISCUSSING [insert name here}, and WHO WERE THE MEMBERS OF [insert group} in 1987? Some useful info and food for thought came up in the responses.

Up to you, and I appreciate your vigilance, but as I said I just see the standard usual stuff from their FAQ right now.

A bigger query would be what the success rate is for queries as far as their info goes. I just found some Lockheed and government doc stuff that I'd been after, and a few nice leads on some bits and pieces from the 60's. But I mainly found it useful as a starting point for further Google searches. Time will tell I guess.

2 minutes ago, Robert Montenegro said:

 

As for as the proof that this AI is accessing Drive data:

 

  

Again, Robert, please calm down, and again - what are you going on about here? Did you read what you just posted?

As proof that the AI is accessing your private Bard activity, you cite a link stating that Google is storing the bard activity in your Google account.

This makes sense if they're keeping a standard record of what was searched. I figured that they would.

Where does it say it's accessing the drive for queries?

It doesn't.

Yep, I did figure that Google had access to all the documents stored on the Google drive. I almost view it the same as YouTube having access to all the videos that are on Youtube. Not a huge mystery whatever way you slice it.

Robert, what are you talking about?

Google Bard is run by Google. I'm pretty sure Google already has everything that is on the Google drive. I know this because I can't access any of it unless I sign in to Google, at which point Google lets me access the documents that Google is storing there. 

I just clicked two different links just now at the Google Bard site reading their FAQ's as to what is kept and recorded and collected. it's exactly the same stuff that I would have figured Google was collecting, nothing particularly out of the ordinary.

As far as banking information goes, I'm not sure how many people go so far as to store their own personal banking info with Google in Google docs. But if anyone is doing this, then they're giving their banking info to Google, probably without Google even asking for it. it seems a bit rich then to complain that Google has this, if you're going out of your way to give it to them.

Beyond all that, and more specifically, where does Google Bard say that they're accessing the materials on your private Google account or drive to conduct their searches? This seems to be what you're implying. Feel free to post a link if Google states that they're doing this. I just read a couple of pages of their standard FAQ's and terms and as far as I can see, they're not. All the 'accessing your conversations' quotes refer to what you're typing into Google Bard, nothing more or less.

Google Bard does appear to have an option where you can export its responses to Google docs. This actuality makes sense on a number of levels if you want to store its responses and commentary. I'd suggest people use Google Bard with a grain of salt and double check or verify whatever it digs up, but it appears to be a useful blunt level tool to dig stuff up quickly that might take you personally a good 30 or 40 minutes of surfing around to find things out the same way. Feel free to not use it if you think the Bard is stealing your data, but I just searched the term GOOGLE BARD ACCESSES GOOGLE DOCS on both Google and Duck Duck Go, and I'm not seeing any other commentary online from people suggesting that Google Bard is accessing their private drives for nefarious purposes.

if you have more concrete data or links indicating that Google Bard is doing things outside their standard and somewhat boring terms and conditions, feel free to post it.

Zelikow was brought into the NSC by Robert Blackwill, and he and Blackwill then became fixtures at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, run by its Dean, Graham Allison.

The Kennedy School was and is no ordinary school, and Allison was not an ordinary figure running it. Both Allison and the School had been joined at the hip to the Pentagon, CIA and military figures within government since the late 60's. Allison had started off in the 60's co-chairing a study group under Ernest May - known as the 'May Group' - for the Joint Chiefs to debate what had gone wrong during the Cuban missile crisis. In the 70's, Allison ran a program at the school preparing senior figures for positions in government. In the 80's, the school did work for the CIA, and created a permanent position for a CIA figure on campus. Allison also worked as an advisor to Dick Cheney, and worked for a strategy group run by the former Chairman of the JCOS, William Crowe. In personal correspondence to Barry Goldwater through this period, Crowe was adamant the country needed a new military build-up. Allison was doing other things of importance in the same vein through the 80's as well, but that's just a few of them.

Allison's mentor Ernest May had been a historian for the Joint Chiefs in the 50's, was enlisted again to write further Pentagon studies and reports and histories in the late 80's, and was very enthusiastic about the 9/11 Commission report when it eventually came out. Zelikow, in turn, was enthusiastic about May's work and May's influence on his writings. You can take the notion of someone writing an 'official history' for the Joint Chiefs, or an official history providing the Pentagon's view of a particular incident to the public, and view the 9/11 Commission report under that light. It explains a couple of things. In the late 90's, Allison and Zelikow did a rewrite together of Allison's original ESSENCE OF DECISION text.

Allison and other Kennedy School members also appear in the full roster of participants from the 1997/1998 Catastrophic Terrorism Study Group (CTSG) - this is the name given to it by Zelikow - that led to the Foreign Affairs article I linked to above. More than a few members of the Defense Science Board also appear in the roster of the CTSG. This was a group set up to deliberate on how an incident of catastrophic terrorism would affect the USA, and what the repercussions would be afterwards.  When the Kennedy School eventually did a 20th anniversary discussion on the importance of 9/11, what it meant for the world, how to view it today, Zelikow gave the opening talk, and Allison gave the closing one.

9/11 researchers might need to read between the lines a little bit, and then maybe dig further to see what comes up, but any planning for 9/11 would have entailed a number of things that would need to be discussed and figured out in advance. Not just the attacks on September 11, 2001, but also

The official story, including the narrative of what the hijackers had been up to

The story of why the hijackers had not been captured, what went wrong, how mistakes were made, etc

The subsequent War on Terror, in its specifics

and how the War on terror would be presented to the public.

That's the least of it, but if you go in with the notion that 9/11 was planned, you have to expect that some of the above was part of the planning, and that they needed a group to do the planning for them, and a place to do at least some of that planning. Who was Allison a personal advisor to again?

6 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

Another major piece of the 9/11 jigsaw puzzle has to do with the PNAC actors in the Bush-Cheney administration, including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Condolezza Rice, et.al.

They, clearly, wanted a pretext for deposing Saddam Hussein and implementing the Wolfowitz Doctrine in the Middle East-- long before George W. Bush became the GOP Presidential nominee in 2000.

George W. Bush's Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O'Neill, published an interesting memoir, The Price of Loyalty, after Dubya fired him for opposing Cheney's 2003 tax cuts.  In the memoir, O'Neill reported that Rumsfeld was talking about invading Iraq as early as January of 2001, and was blathering about Saddam being involved in 9/11 immediately after the WTC demolition on 9/11.

Rumsfeld had sent a letter to (I think) William Colby in the year or so before Colby's death, asking for his feedback and possible endorsement of a military strategy Rumsfeld was fixated on at the time. The strategy was 'shock and awe' and in the letter I read that Colby had sent back to Rumsfeld, Colby essentially said "Yeah, that's great, thanks for filling me in Donald, it's definitely interesting." or polite words to that effect. The strategy team that Rumsfeld was working with later distributed a study covering the tactic that Rumsfeld was keen on. It's here.

http://www.dodccrp.org/files/Ullman_Shock.pdf

That document was published in October 1996. The plan to invade Iraq appears to have been floating around through the 90's, and Rumsfeld was likely keen on the tactic as he knew it would get a good workout in the future.

The first two names on the cover are James Wade and Harlan Ullman. Wade appears again below. A year before she died, Ullman was cited by DC Madam Deborah Palfrey as a regular customer. Go figure.

https://edition.cnn.com/2007/LAW/04/12/dc.madam/index.html

Quote

 

The alleged "D.C. madam" dropped a name in court documents filed Thursday, but the man named laughed at being accused of hiring the high-end escort service run by Deborah Jeane Palfrey.

Government prosecutors say Pamela Martin and Associates was actually a prostitution ring that Palfrey operated in the Washington area for 13 years. Palfrey denies that her business provided sexual services to its customers.

In her motion to reconsider appointment of counsel, Palfrey named Harlan K. Ullman as "one of the regular customers" of the business.

Ullman is one of the leading theorists behind the "shock and awe" military strategy that was associated with the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"The allegations do not dignify a response," Ullman told CNN. "I'm a private, not a public, citizen. Any further questions are referred to my attorneys."

 

The full 9/11 story has a lot of deep rabbit holes, but I'd boil some of it - not all of it - down to the following. The requirement for a catalysing event, and plans to carry it out, were devised over the course of a few years at the very end of the 80's when various government and industry figures became extremely alarmed at the imminent drop in defense spending as the Cold War drew to a close. The trickle-down effect of diminished military technology investment was viewed as a potential national security crisis by insiders. The decision that 'something needs to be done' was conveyed within limited circles. People who could be convinced, were convinced. People who could be encouraged to help out for a big future financial reward were encouraged to do so. In a few instances, people who would ultimately need to be blackmailed, to encourage them to either help or to keep quiet, were potentially blackmailed. And people who were best kept out of the loop, and in the dark, were not told of what was being prepared. 

Prominent figures involved in the activities described in the above paragraph, took place in some of the annual American Assembly conferences in Washington from 1989 to 1991. Go through the books that the Assembly prepared for each gathering, and you'll see members from the Israeli security scene popping up in the first, and Wolfowitz and a lot of hawks gathering together for the final one. (The 1991 conference received funding from the armaments industry, btw). Wolfowitz put together his Defense Planning Guidance around the time of the final conference, and gave a talk giving a preview of what was on his mind.

I think some insiders knew that the future catalysing event would enable a reciprocal attack against a Middle Eastern target,. Some figures expected that target to just be Afghanistan. A deeper layer of participants felt that they could piggy back the event to direct a second attack against Iraq. The Afghanistan attack occurred not long after 9/11. The Iraq invasion took some insiders by surprise, and took the George W Bush admin a year and a half of extra effort to get off the ground. It's worth pondering whether some insiders knew the WTC buildings would be hit, and only a smaller circle knew that those buildings wouldn't be left standing.

If you want a name to place near the very top, try Norman Augustine. He was the former government insider who had reached an elevated position both in industry and as an advisor to government. He led the circles that started the panic in the late 80's, and pops up in key places in what came afterwards.

For additional reference, check the article at the end of this post detailing the scratch-each-other's-back govt/business relationship between eventual CIA director John Deutch and Augustine. The Defense Science Board, cited below, led the various studies that created the panic around defense spending in the late 80's. Augustine's 1987 study into the semiconductor industry, done at the request of Caspar Weinberger, was the trigger for those, see here.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1987/05/10/us-chip-industrys-gloomy-future/93b379fd-1e80-48b1-8d78-08461e556606/

Quote

"There's a great deal of urgency on this matter," Augustine said. "Time is running out, and I really don't think we're going to like the world we're living in 20 years from now if we don't address this problem."

Augustine's 'the sky is falling' activities (there were several more than are cited here) took place just as a wave of Reagan administration figures had exited or were preparing to leave government, and were looking for new avenues of making some cash. Cited below, James P Wade, the co-author with Ullman of Rumsfeld's later Shock and Awe planning. 

Quote

 

https://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/24/us/washington-talk-pentagon-with-new-curb-life-after-government-more-officials.html

WASHINGTON TALK: PENTAGON; With New Curb on Life After Government, More Officials Leave

A new regulation prohibiting Pentagon officials from taking jobs in the defense industry for two years after they leave Government has nudged some toward the door earlier than they might have been as the Reagan Administration draws to a close. ...

 ... Mr. Zakheim said he would leave the Pentagon at the end of this week, also to join System Planning, which is based not far from the Pentagon in Arlington, Va. 

''I've had six satisfying years here,'' Mr. Zakheim said in a telephone interview. ''Now I want to spend more time with my family and, frankly, to make more money.''

The president of System Planning is James P. Wade Jr., a former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Logistics. He resigned last year when he was not named Under Secretary for Acquisition in the Pentagon's new procurement setup.

 

A decade after Augustine began rattling the cage, Deutch would sit on a 1997 group alongside Philip Zelikow at Harvard studying castrophic terrorism as a likely imminent event for the country, and co-author the Foreign Affairs paper on the topic with Zelikow and Ashton Carter, another Defense Science Board figure.

https://web.mit.edu/chemistry/deutch/policy/1998-CatastrophicTerrorism.pdf

Bruce P Jackson, who worked under Augustine at both Martin Marietta and Lockheed, later served as Executive Director of the Project for a New American Century.

https://powerbase.info/index.php/Bruce_P._Jackson

https://www.vice.com/en/article/avygxk/how-to-make-millions-by-selling-war-917

Below, Deutch helps Augustine make some extra cash. There are additional names and events that flesh out the above narrative significantly, but this will do for now.

Quote

 

TAXPAYERS TAPPED FOR SWEET DEALS AT DEFENSE

Sun Sentinel, Nov 7th, 1996

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/1996/11/07/taxpayers-tapped-for-sweet-deals-at-defense/

In 1994, Defense Secretary William Perry, a charter member of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex, paid defense contractor Martin Marietta $350 million of your tax dollars to cover costs in restructuring when Martin Marietta purchased General Electric’s aerospace division and General Dynamic’s space systems division.

Perry gave an already bloated defense contractor big dough to buy another chunk of the defense welfare system, guaranteeing at least 20 percent profit on everything built – and not built.

In 1991, for example, the Pentagon canceled the Navy’s A-12 bomber because the program cost buckets more than the contractors had estimated and was simply the Navy’s version of the Air Force’s B-2 stealth bomber. Though $3 billion was spent and not a single flying machine built, it looks like we taxpayers will be slugged with $1.5 billion more for breach of contract.

The $350 million payoff deal to Martin Marietta smells like a barnyard because Perry had long-term business links with Martin Marietta, which was a client of his consulting firm, Technology Strategy & Alliances – Perry’s cash machine when the Democrats weren’t running the Pentagon.

Perry became the Pentagon’s No. 1 man after the late Secretary of Defense Les Aspin got sacked for failing to send tanks to our Ranger Task Force in Somalia. In this musical chairs exercise, John Deutch became the No. 2 man, and Paul Kamininski became No. 3.

Kamininski is also a long-term MICC player; he’d replaced Perry as CEO of Technology Strategies & Alliances. Deutch, a MICC charter member like Perry, had been a player on the Martin Marietta advisory board, receiving $42,500 in consulting fees the year before the cozy deal was done.

So by the end of 1994, the three top civilians in the Pentagon were all former defense consultants with deep ties to each other, to Martin Marietta and to other top defense contractors. All three belong to the MICC millionaire’s club, thanks to your hard-earned tax dollars.

Nice scam, if you can get away with it.

Norman Augustine, Martin Marietta’s head man, served on the Defense Science Board together with Perry and Deutch, and Augustine worked closely with Deutch at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory, a long-term MICC suckling, while Deutch ran MIT.

You’d have thought this kind of back-room deal would violate Clinton’s ethics regulations and that even the slime inside the Beltway would have screamed, “How could the top three Pentagon civilians cut such a sweet deal with their former client?!”

Easy. Congress – our watchdog – just scarfed up its share of the scam in PAC dollars and looked the other way.

Playing Pentagon monopoly the way Perry, Deutch and Kamininski did is nothing new. Over 20,000 employees checked out of the Pentagon and cashed in with defense contractors between 1975-85. Over one-fifth of these modern-day carpetbaggers went to work in the defense industry on the very same projects they’d worked on in the Pentagon. Because, like Perry and friends, they’re all in bed with one another – and Congress – while you the taxpayer keep getting screwed.

A lot of these Pentagon brass end up on the boards of big defense contractors, too. Former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and retired Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. John Vessey served on the board of Martin Marietta.

When Laird and Vessey retired after the restructuring, Martin Marietta paid them almost half a million dollars each. In all, Martin Marietta paid out almost $2 million to retiring board members, including $236,000 to Republican presidential candidate Lamar Alexander.

Of course, the dumb old taxpayer picked up the tab for the Martin Marietta scam, including an $8.2 million wet kiss for Martin Marietta’s CEO Norman Augustine. Oh, and don’t fret about Perry; he’s set to retire to Fat City come 1997. His replacement, current CIA director Deutch, has the nod from his pal Bill Clinton – so the Pentagon revolving door will spin again.

Meanwhile, it’s the old story: no dough to spare for our grunts. Once again, our kids will go into battle with secondhand gear that is third-rate compared to what’s toted by many of our potential foes.

The author is a retired U.S. Army colonel whose military and journalism careers spanned nearly a dozen wars and conflicts. Write to him in care of King Features, 216 E. 45th St., New York, N.Y. 10017, or visit his home page at http://www.hackworth.com.

 

W. Niederhut, thanks for the clip. I've seen it before, as it appears to be the only clip online with footage from the later Israeli TV interview of the young men. (There was also a British TV series that interviewed them, possibly the BBC or Channel 4).

I stand by my comment that researchers should be cautious about claiming that the men stated 'our purpose was to document the event'.

We see footage of the guys talking. We hear some intro music from the show, and the sound of the host chatting to them. After that, for whatever reason, we don't get to hear what they say and read any accompanying subtitles. Instead, we get our unknown narrator talking over the top of them. So we're left to guess if the translation is accurate, and whether the men said the attributed statement. Did they? I have no idea. At around 1:40 into the video, the narrator replays the clip twice where the audio track quotes the man as saying 'our purpose was to document the event', and the second replay of it is over footage of the guy saying maybe two syllables at most. So good luck finding where he actually said it.

Realistically, if there was a subtitled clip of the guy making the claim, and you could clearly hear him saying it, with all the words discernible, and subtitles at the bottom of the screen, you could take the footage to your nearest Jewish pal, or the Israeli embassy, or a local community TV outlet, play the clip, and say "Hey, what was this all about?". Then anyone watching it would have to debate or discuss or query the point, and uncomfortable questions might get asked. But this has never happened, and won't happen, because we can't hear the audio of what the guy is saying, and we just have to take the word of the narrator. So the 9/11 truth movement gets a tidbit thrown their way at them to keep everyone occupied and make everyone excited, but it's a piece of evidence that you can't use, can't quote, and can't actually show anyone else, because we have no way of clearly verifying the above. Funny how that works. You'd think that if the guy had made the comment on Israeli TV, and someone wanted to prove to us that he had made the comment on Israeli TV, they would just play us the clip, subtitled, so we could see and hear it for ourselves. But not here. 

Either way, aside from that statement, the rest of the evidence is on target. It's worth noting that researcher Ryan Dawson has given a much longer breakdown of the Israeli events of that day in his documentary work, and he very recently spent a few hours covering it all again for the Fresh and Fit podcast, a popular lad's lifestyle show on Rumble (which usually focuses on interviews with bikini-clad bimbos and wannabe rappers) where the hosts, more red-pilled than you'd expect, basically turned the show over to Dawson for three episodes and allowed him to detail the above to more than half a million people. The episodes are worth a listen, as Dawson made some FOIA requests of his own, connected the dots to some other news reports, and overall turned up way more to the story than what we'd heard before. FWIW, Dawson talks about the events of that day for a couple of hours, but from memory he also doesn't cite the 'document the event' claim in his breakdown of it.

Just a side note if my perspective on things isn't clear. I think both Paul and W. Niederhut are more on target than most with their observations, and I also think if you play devil's advocate and take the 'document the event' claim out of the breakdown cited above, everything else still hangs together. It's that one claim I'd suggest people be wary of.

Thank you Sean. The FOIA documents have their selfies from the morning, where none of them appear to be particularly gloomy.

9 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

They later appeared on Israeli television, and said that they were filming the WTC demolitions to "document the event."

I'd caution against researchers citing that as a fact, as there's no evidence anywhere confirming this. I've seen the same screenshots and videos that everyone else has of the guys apparently from Israeli TV. There's no transcript of their statements, no audio, and an unidentified narrator makes the same claim that W. Niederhut makes above. It's all very tenuous and there's every chance the claim was made to lead researchers up the garden path - i.e for all I know the men simply appeared on television and told the host, "Well, we're glad that's over with and it's great to be back home."

But the Israelis in question were definitely on top of a van, were celebrating at one point, and were definitely arrested. From Marc Perelman's article in the Jewish Daily Forward, March 2002 - 

https://web.archive.org/web/20030413184526/http://www.forward.com/issues/2002/02.03.15/news2.html

Quote

 

According to one former high-ranking American intelligence official, who asked not to be named, 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.

After their arrest, the men were held in detention for two-and-a-half months and were deported at the end of November, officially for visa violations.

However, a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI concluded that at least two of them were in fact Mossad operatives, according to the former American official, who said he was regularly briefed on the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials.

"The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it," he said. "The conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs but that they could leave because they did not know anything about 9/11."

However, he added, the bureau was "very irritated because it was a case of so-called unilateral espionage, meaning they didn't know about it."

Spokesmen for the FBI, the Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to discuss the case. Israeli officials flatly dismissed the allegations as untrue.

However, the former American official said that after American authorities confronted Jerusalem on the issue at the end of last year, the Israeli government acknowledged the operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington.

The five men — Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Omer Marmari and Yaron Shmuel — were arrested eight hours after the attacks by the Bergen County, N.J., police while driving in an Urban Moving Systems van. The police acted on an FBI alert after the men allegedly were seen acting strangely while watching the events from the roof of their warehouse and the roof of their van.

 

So I wasn't there, but if Allen Lowe wants to query why folks believe the arrested suspects were on top of a van, he can ask the New Jersey police who made the claim in their original report.

The FOIA release of some police documents, complete with pictures of the goofballs involved from the morning, is linked here.

https://www.scribd.com/document/409691150/FOIA-Release-of-9-11-Dancing-Israelis-thru-the-FBI#

Christopher Ketchum's March 2007 article on the men for Counterpunch cites the above Forward piece, and goes into additional detail.

Quote

 

On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, an FBI bulletin known as a BOLO – “be on lookout” – was issued with regard to three suspicious men who that morning were seen leaving the New Jersey waterfront minutes after the first plane hit World Trade Center 1. Law enforcement officers across the New York-New Jersey area were warned in the radio dispatch to watch for a “vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack”:

White, 2000 Chevrolet van… with ‘Urban Moving Systems’ sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center… Three individuals with van were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent explosion. FBI Newark Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold for prints and detain individuals.

 

At 3:56 p.m., twenty-five minutes after the issuance of the FBI BOLO, officers with the East Rutherford Police Department stopped the commercial moving van through a trace on the plates. According to the police report, Officer Scott DeCarlo and Sgt. Dennis Rivelli approached the stopped van, demanding that the driver exit the vehicle. The driver, 23-year-old Sivan Kurz­berg, refused and “was asked several more times [but] appeared to be fumbling with a black leather fanny pouch type of bag”. With guns drawn, the police then “physi­cally removed” Kurz­berg, while four other men – two more men had apparently joined the group since the morning – were also removed from the van, handcuffed, placed on the grass median and read their Miranda rights. They had not been told the reasons for their arrest. Yet, according to DeCarlo’s report, “this officer was told without question by the driver [Sivan Kurzberg], ‘We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.’” Another of the five Israelis, again without prompting, told Officer DeCarlo – falsely – that “we were on the West Side Highway in New York City during the incident”.

From inside the vehicle the officers, who were quickly joined by agents from the FBI, retrieved multiple passports and $4,700 in cash stuffed in a sock. According to New Jersey’s Bergen Record, which on September 12 reported the arrest of the five Israelis, an investigator high up in the Bergen County law enforcement hierarchy stated that officers had also discovered in the vehicle “maps of the city … with certain places highlighted. It looked like they’re hooked in with this”, the source told the Record, referring to the 9/11 attacks. “It looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park.”

The five men were indeed Israeli citizens. They claimed to be in the country working as movers for Urban Moving Systems Inc., which maintained a warehouse and office in Weehawken, New Jersey. They were held for 71 days in a federal detention center in Brooklyn, New York, during which time they were repeatedly interrogated by FBI and CIA counterterrorism teams, who referred to the men as the “high-fivers” for their celebratory behavior on the New Jersey waterfront. Some were placed in solitary confinement for at least forty days; some were given as many as seven lie detector tests. One of the Israelis, Paul Kurzberg, brother of Sivan, refused to take a lie-detector test for ten weeks. Then he failed it.

Meanwhile, two days after the men were picked up, the owner of Urban Moving Systems, Dominik Suter, a 31- year-old Israeli national, abandoned his business and fled the United States for Israel. Suter’s departure was abrupt, leaving behind coffee cups, sandwiches, cell phones and computers strewn on office tables and thousands of dollars of goods in storage. Suter was later placed on the same FBI suspect list as 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and other hijackers and suspected al-Qaeda sympathizers, suggesting that U.S. authorities felt Suter may have known something about the attacks. The suspicion, as the in­­vestigation unfolded, was that the men working for Urban Moving Systems were spies. Who exactly was handling them, and who or what they were targeting, was as yet uncertain.

It was New York’s venerable Jewish weekly The Forward that broke this story in the spring of 2002, after months of footwork. The Forward reported that the FBI had finally concluded that at least two of the men were agents working for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, and that Urban Moving Systems, the ostensible employer of the five Israelis, was a front operation. Two former CIA officers confirmed this to me, noting that movers’ vans are a common intelligence cover. The Forward also noted that the Israeli government itself admitted that the men were spies. A “former high-ranking American in­tel­ligence official”, who said he was “regularly briefed on the inves­tigation by two separate law enforcement officials”, told reporter Marc Perelman that after American authorities confronted Jeru­salem at the end of 2001, the Israeli government “acknowledged the operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Wash­ington”. Today, Perelman stands by his reporting. I asked him if his sources in the Mossad denied the story. “Nobody stopped talking to me”, he said. In June 2002, ABC News’ 20/20 followed up with its own investigation into the matter, coming to the same conclusion as The Forward. Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of operations for counterterrorism with the CIA, told 20/20 that some of the names of the five men appeared as hits in searches of an FBI national intelligence database. Cannistraro told me that the question that most troubled FBI agents in the weeks and months after 9/11 was whether the Israelis had arrived at the site of their “celebration” with foreknowledge of the attack to come. From the beginning, “the FBI investigation operated on the premise that the Israelis had foreknowledge”, according to Cannistraro. A second former CIA counterterrorism officer who closely followed the case, but who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me that investigators were pursuing two theories. “One story was that [the Israelis] appeared at Liberty State Park very quickly after the first plane hit. The other was that they were at the park location already”. Either way, investigators wanted to know exactly what the men were expecting when they got there.

Before such issues had been fully explored, however, the in­­vestigation was shut down. Following what ABC News reported were “high-level negotiations between Israeli and U.S. government officials”, a settlement was reached in the case of the five Urban Moving Systems suspects. Intense political pressure apparently had been brought to bear. The reputable Is­­raeli daily Ha’aretz reported that by the last week of October 2001,some six weeks after the men had been detained, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and two unidentified “prominent New York congressmen” were lobbying heavily for their release. Ac­­cording to a source at ABC News close to the 20/20 report, high-profile criminal lawyer Alan Der­showitz also stepped in as a negotiator on behalf of the men to smooth out differences with the U.S. government. (Dershowitz declined to comment for this article.) And so, at the end of No­­vem­ber 2001, for reasons that only noted they had been working in the country illegally as movers, in violation of their visas, the men were flown home to Israel.

Today, the crucial questions raised by this matter remain un­­answered. There is sufficient reason – from news reports, statements by former intelligence officials, an array of circumstantial evidence, and the reported acknowledgment by the Israeli government – to believe that in the months before 9/11, Israel was running an active spy network inside the United States, with Muslim extremists as the target. Given Israel’s concerns about Islamic terrorism as well as its long history of spying on U.S. soil, this does not come entirely as a shock. What’s incendiary is the idea – supported, though not proven, by several pieces of evidence – that the Israelis did learn something about 9/11 in advance but failed to share all of what they knew with American officials. The questions are disturbing enough to warrant a Congressional investigation.

Yet none of this information found its way into Congress’s joint committee report on the attacks, and it was not even tangentially referenced in the nearly 600 pages of the 9/11 Com­mission’s final report. Nor would a single major media outlet track the revelations of The Forward and ABC News to investigate further. “There weren’t even stories saying it was bullshit”, says The Forward’s Perelman. “Honestly, I was surprised”. In­­stead, the story disappeared into the welter of anti-Israel 9/11 conspiracy theories.

It’s no small boon to the U.S. government that the story of 9/11-related Israeli espionage has been thus relegated: the story doesn’t fit in the clean lines of the official narrative of the attacks. It brings up concerns not only about Israel’s obligation not to spy inside the borders of the United States, its major benefactor, but about its possible failure to have provided the U.S. adequate warning of an impending devastating attack on American soil.

 

If Allen above needs further confirmation that the event happened, someone else can post the photos of the twits involved from the FOIA document linked above.

Dr Colleen Shogan is also a novelist. The blurb below is from her novel STABBING IN THE SENATE. The third volume in her detective series, CALAMITY AT THE CONTINENTAL CLUB, features her heroine Kit Marshall searching for clues at the National Archives.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B017CBHTOE?notRedirectToSDP=1&ref_=dbs_mng_calw_0&storeType=ebooks

Quote

Life is good for Kit Marshall. She’s a staffer in D.C. for a popular senator, and she lives with an adoring beagle and a brainy boyfriend with a trust fund. Then, one morning, Kit arrives at the office early and finds her boss, Senator Langsford, impaled by a stainless steel replica of an Army attack helicopter. Panicked, she pulls the weapon out of his chest and instantly becomes the prime suspect in his murder. Circumstances back Kit’s claim of innocence, but her photograph has gone viral, and the heat won’t be off until the killer is found. Well-loved though the senator was, suspects abound. Langsford had begun to vote with his conscience, which meant he was often at odds with his party. Not only had the senator decided to quash the ambitions of a major military contractor, but his likely successor is a congressman he trounced in the last election. Then there’s the suspiciously dry-eyed Widow Langsford. Kit’s tabloid infamy horrifies her boyfriend’s upper-crust family, and it could destroy her career. However, she and her free-spirited friend Meg have a more pressing reason to play sleuth. The police are clueless in more ways than one, and Kit worries that the next task on the killer’s agenda will be to end her life. Book 1 in the Washington Whodunit series.

1 hour ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Why would the U.S. want to locate bio-weapons research facilities near the Russian border?

 

So they could eventually have bio-weapons near the Russian border. This isn't rocket science.

1 hour ago, Sandy Larsen said:

I can understand why it would be advantageous to have missile launch sites in countries neighboring your enemy. But I don't see any advantage to having biological weapons research labs near them. This would serve only to make your enemy nervous. 

 

Less nervous than having missiles pointed at them? There's maybe a difference, but I don't see it as being a big one.

1 hour ago, Cliff Varnell said:

Here’s the 2005 agreement between the USA and Ukraine.

https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/05-829-Ukraine-Weapons.pdf

AGREEMENT 
between the Department of Defense of the United States of America and the Ministry of Health of Ukraine Concerning Cooperation in the Area of Prevention of Proliferation of Technology, Pathogens and Expertise that could be Used in the Development of Biological Weapons.</q>

What is the specific evidence that these labs were converted to produce biological weapons rather than prevent them?

If they were producing biological weapons - on the sly - would it have been written up in the public agreement, or would it be left out of the public agreement?

Equally, I'm not sure why you're asking me personally to produce evidence that the US was doing those things at the labs, as I've never asserted there was definite proof that they were doing so. But so far we have the public agreement, and some journalists writing up their reassuring tour of the facilities, presented as evidence that they weren't. Go figure.

The long public statement, with screenshots and documentation and photos, that was presented by the Russians as their proof of the assertions, is in the public domain and can be found online if you're curious. I browsed it many months ago, but didn't feel the need to dive deeper into the rabbit hole then, and don't feel the need now. I actually agree with Sandy above, that's it's a possibility. Others can produce greater evidence if they want to confirm it as being a thing.

13 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:

 

How many projects involve the Pentagon, the European Union, and the World Health Organization?

Who knows? I can see those EU and WHO members bossing their Pentagon counterparts around though.

I doubt the Russians were confused about any of the above. The Nunn-Lugar threat reduction program - the safeguard activities tackling old Soviet weapons programs that seem to be a precursor to the biological weapons agreement -  popped up while I was reading stuff for my COUP IN DALLAS essay something like two years ago when documentation showed how several Defense Science Board members were involved. (Ashton Carter, who I'm not a fan of, even wrote a very funny chapter about his travels with William Perry to Russia to work on it in one of his books). I stumbled across it all randomly so I'm sure they've never been too confused about it.

Seeing documentation that the lab's stated purpose was not nefarious would never be enough to calm the Russians, simply as the US government, Pentagon and intelligence agencies have a history of setting up organisations or groups for one purpose and then using it for another. How many front groups and activities did the CIA start up in their fight against Communism? More than a few. Don't mind us, we're not doing anything sneaky here, we promise. Oh, okay.

Final link in Sandy's good post above - the facilities are operated by the Ukrainian government. Would they be against a bio-weapons program targeted at the Soviets, or for it? If they were against developing weapons to use against Russia then good for them.

On 6/18/2023 at 1:29 AM, Sandy Larsen said:

 

Well, okay.... I agree that it's conceivable that there are such American financed labs in Ukraine. But without evidence to indicate so, there is no reason to think that there are.

I mean.... anything is possible.

 

 

I'm not sure why you're treating the presence of American-financed labs in the Ukraine as possible, but unconfirmed. Did you read the Snopes article and follow the initial 'debunking' link that it provided? The second paragraph of the Snopes article says this.

Quote

The claim that the U.S. is operating secret biolabs in Ukraine is one that has been repeatedly spread by Russian propagandists since at least 2018.

As part of the Snopes expose of Russian propaganda, they send us to this debunking link.

https://www.codastory.com/disinformation/does-the-us-have-a-secret-germ-warfare-lab-on-russias-doorstep/

And it then notes the following.

Quote

But the Kremlin refuses to accept that the U.S. government has spent $350 million of taxpayers’ money to build a research center on Russia’s doorstep simply to deal with public health hazards.

Quote

 

we asked if we could see the lab for ourselves.

Its official name is the Richard G. Lugar Center for Public Health Research, and it is housed in a specially-built complex just off the main road to Tbilisi’s international airport. It is equipped to what’s known as Bio-Safety Level III (BSL III) standards, which means it can handle all but a handful of the most dangerous known microbes, including anthrax and the bacteria that causes bubonic plague.

Our credentials were checked before our visit, and we were searched when we entered the complex — though the security precautions hardly seemed out of the ordinary.

As part of our tour, we were shown what is regarded as the lab’s most sensitive area, its store of “Especially Dangerous Pathogens” (EDPs), a high-security repository of lethal bacteria and viruses collected by scientists. It is known as the “pathogen museum.” Even though many of these EDP samples were originally procured in Soviet times, some Russian media reports have speculated that this store is the basis of a bio-weapons arsenal. Its work was so tightly under wraps, that residents had dubbed it “a secret Pentagon station.” — Russian TV reporter.

On one Russian point there is no dispute. The Tbilisi laboratory, as well as an associated network of smaller monitoring facilities across the country, was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense.

 

So the labs are there, they're funded by the Department of Defense, and they have a lot of lethal bacteria and viruses collected there for research.

The distinction between the US and Russian explanations for this, are that the Russians feel that the Pentagon built a bio lab containing lethal viruses on their border for nefarious reasons, and the US government says its purpose is benevolent.

Does the Pentagon have many other projects on the go at the moment that are funded for altruistic reasons just to help out the world? I guess If this is one, maybe there are others.

Here it is. I wish more people would watch this. Helms acts so guilty here.

George Galloway put out an interesting video today, noting that even though he strongly disagreed with RFK Jr's Israel stance, he was still by far his preferred candidate. I'd be happy to see RFK Jr make it to the Presidency.

Interesting Greenwald interview following RFK Jr's recent Breaking Points interview.

31 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

For instance, why would the Chinese government collaborate with the U.S. government on bio-weapons research?

I can't speak for the many US government scientists that regularly collaborate with Chinese ones. The US isn't at war with Chine so maybe joint bio-weapons research wasn't verboten back in the day. I doubt either side would be overly thrilled to continue similar research at the moment.

Quote

 

FACT SHEET: U.S.-CHINA SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY COOPERATION HIGHLIGHTS: 32 YEARS OF COLLABORATION

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/st-fact-sheet.pdf

U.S. public health officials are working with Chinese counterparts under a variety of cooperative ventures in the areas of disease prevention and control, including conducting epidemiological research; investigating outbreaks of emerging and reemerging disease including pandemic influenza, salmonellosis, SARS, and enterovirus 71; providing more than 1,500 individuals with rapid-response training; and providing technical assistance in the area of HIV/AIDS.

 

Quote

Also hasn't the alleged Ukrainian bio-weapons lab claim been exposed as Russian propaganda?

I'm confident every single mainstream US media outlet has called it this, and numerous non mainstream outlets that I've seen have stated the opposite. My own take, I'm sure NATO is involved with standard weapons research concerning nukes and regular armaments, others will need to be the judge as to whether accompanying biological warfare research seems logical or a forbidden step too far. I haven't read RFK's new book yet, so I'll be curious if he talks about it.

Fascinating to read they were using blackmail to get those results back then. I guess if it works, it works. This is what many people cite as being a key thing with the Jeffrey Epstein situation (ie his murder and probable cover-up), that Epstein was a guy who helped blackmail many high profile business people and politicians by getting them on camera sleeping with underage models. Once they'd done it, Epstein and his pals would say, great, now you need to do these things for us - and you're welcome to keep sleeping with those young women, come to our island if you want - or we can leak the tapes and ruin your career. Whitney Webb is all over this stuff at the moment, but I haven't kept track of every detail.

I have the ebooks of Newman's earlier volumes, but not this one. I do hope his next volume starts to feel more like a JFK assassination book, as he's taking the long slow route from a good sized distance. But his books are good books and I've learned new things in each one.