Episode 311 – 9/11 Suspects If there were some crusading District Attorney who actually wanted to prosecute the crimes of 9/11, how would he begin? Where would he start to unravel a plot so immense, one involving so many layers of obfuscation and the active collusion of some of the most powerful members of the perennial ruling class of America, the deep state? For those with limited bandwidth, CLICK HERE to download a smaller, lower file size version of this episode. For those interested in audio quality, CLICK HERE for the highest-quality version of this episode (WARNING: very large download). TRANSCRIPT Welcome, my friends, welcome to Episode 311 of The Corbett Report podcast, “9/11 Suspects,” which is being released on September 11, 2016. I am your host James Corbett of corbettreport.com. 9/11 was a crime. This should not be a controversial statement, but given how 9/11 was framed as a terrorist attack or even an “act of war” from the very moment that it occurred, it somehow is. If we lived in a world of truth and justice, 9/11 would have been approached as a crime to be solved rather than an attack to be responded to. Unfortunately we don’t live in such a world, but let’s imagine for a moment that we did. If there were some crusading District Attorney who actually wanted to prosecute the crimes of 9/11, how would he begin? Where would he start to unravel a plot so immense, one involving so many layers of obfuscation and the active collusion of some of the most powerful members of the perennial ruling class of America, the deep state? Like the prosecution of a mafia kingpin, it is highly unlikely that a prosecutor would put the suspected mastermind of the plot on trial first. Such a vast and intricate operation would be picked apart from the outside, starting with people on the periphery of the plot who could be forced to testify under oath and who could provide leads further up the ladder. As more and more of the picture is filled in, the case against the inner clique who ran the operation would begin to strengthen, and gradually more and more central figures could be brought to trial. As I say, if the events of the last 15 years have taught us anything it is that we do not live in such a world. But still, we are trying the crimes of 9/11 in the court of public opinion and there are still untold millions who think of 9/11 truth as a fringe movement driven by rash speculation and unwarranted leaps of logic. What if we “prosecuted” some of these peripheral figures, the ones who are demonstrably and provably involved in the events of that day or the cover up of those crimes, in that court of public opinion? Over the nine years of The Corbett Report’s existence we have looked at many figures who no doubt feature more prominently in the 9/11 plot itself from an operational standpoint: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Larry Silverstein, Dov Zakheim, Paul Bremer, Richard Armitage. Today we will look at some of the other suspects in that crime; not ringleaders or masterminds, not even people who were likely to know about the plot ahead of time. But those who helped cover up those crimes for the real perpetrators. Are you ready? Let’s go Suspect #1: Rudy Giuliani - Video After stepping down as mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani tried to launch himself as a national political leader on the back of the single defining event of his career. In the end he failed miserably, with voters immediately seeing his ploy for what it was: base political pandering. But what many do not realize is that Giuliani’s case is not just that of another ghoulish politician parading on the corpses of those who died on his watch for his own political gain. On the day of 9/11, while the remains of the twin towers and WTC7 were still smoldering, one of Mayor Giuliani’s first concerns was clearing away the evidence from the crime scene.
Despite reassurances that the rapid removal of the evidence from Ground Zero was important for emergency access, this process went far beyond merely clearing a path for rescue workers. As Erik Lawyer, founder of Firefighters for 9/11 Truth points out, the massive operation to haul away over 1.5 million tons of debris and to sell much of the steel to Chinese firm Baosteel at discount prices was not just an overzealous approach to clearing the area, but was itself a crime.
Needless to say, an investigation of the 9/11 crime scene following the national investigation standards has never been conducted and never will be as Giuliani oversaw the illegal destruction of the evidence itself. To add insult to this injury, in 2003 New York City Medical Examiner Charles Hirsch revealed that in the mad scramble to get rid of the crime scene evidence, human remains from the World Trade Center had been left at the Fresh Kills landfill [some footage HERE around 10min mark] where the debris was sorted and the steel was sold. In 2007 Eric Beck, a senior supervisor of the recycling facility that sifted the debris, admitted that some of those human remains ended up in a mixture that was used to pave roads and fill potholes in New York City. But as grotesque as such revelations are, they are not the most shocking part of Giuliani’s 9/11 story. In the late 1990s the Mayor oversaw the creation of a state-of-the-art $13 million emergency command center to coordinate the city’s disaster recovery and response efforts. Located on the 23rd floor of World Trade Center Building 7, just across Vesey Street from the Twin Towers, the center — dubbed by local press at the time as “Giuliani’s bunker”– included reinforced, bulletproof, and bomb-resistant walls, its own air supply and water tank, beds, showers to accommodate 30 people, and three backup generators. It could be used to monitor all of New York’s emergency communications frequencies and was staffed 24 hours a day. And yet, remarkably, on the morning of 9/11, neither Mayor Giuliani nor any other city personnel or police or fire department officials were in the bunker after the Twin Tower strikes.
So why wasn’t the Mayor and the city’s emergency personnel in the location that had been purpose built for just such an event? According to Giuliani, they had been told to evacuate because they had been given a warning that the Twin Towers were going to collapse. A warning that was evidently not passed on to any of the emergency personnel that were still working in the buildings.
Giuliani in his own words has admitted that he was warned that the World Trade Center was going to collapse. This despite the fact that there was no possible way for this to be predicted in the first hour of the unfolding disaster. Even more incredibly, despite being given this warning, no effort was made to pass it on to the police, firefighters and other responders who were still working in and around the buildings. When, precisely, was this warning given, and by whom? Why, despite acting on this warning himself, did Giuliani make no effort to pass the warning on to others? Predictably, when confronted with these questions by activists during his 2008 presidential campaign, Giuliani merely smiled and denied that he had ever received such a warning.
So where was the Mayor on 9/11? On Pier 92, which was already set up as a functional command center due to a full-scale emergency “drill” by FEMA that, by a remarkable coincidence, had been scheduled for the following day.
Mayor Giuliani oversaw the illegal destruction of the 9/11 crime scene and is criminally liable for the deaths of hundreds of emergency workers for not passing on prior warnings about the collapses of the Twin Towers. It is no wonder, then, that the Fire Department of New York so passionately detest Giuliani for his actions in disgracing their fallen brothers and covering up the 9/11 crime.
So what is the reward for Giuliani’s criminal actions on 9/11? An offer to become the head of the Department of Homeland Security in the event of a Trump presidency, of course. This is the state of American politics, and this is precisely why a true investigation of what happened on 9/11 never has, and never will, be conducted by the US government itself. Suspect #2: Christine Todd Whitman - Video The “dust lady” photo has become one of the iconic images of 9/11. The image of a woman, shocked and disoriented, completely covered in dust from the demolition of the Twin Towers, brings the nearly incomprehensible events of that day down to a human scale. But of course the “dust lady” was not the only one to feel the effects of the blanket of dust that descended on Manhattan after the towers fell. In the hours, days, and weeks that followed, thousands upon thousands of victims, first responders, emergency personnel, clean up crews, and residents were subjected to the poisonous stew of asbestos, benzene, mercury, lead, cadmium and other particulates from which many are now dying.
If the brave men and women who had rushed to the World Trade Center in the chaotic days after 9/11 to help with the search and rescue had done so knowing the risks they were facing, that would be one thing. But of course they did not. They had been given false assurances by Christine Todd Whitman, the EPA administrator who assured the public just days into the clean up that the air was safe to breathe.
As the weeks and months dragged on, Whitman, the EPA and its officials made statement after statement after statement reaffirming that contaminant levels were “low or non-existent” and that the air quality in Manhattan posed “no public health concern.” We now know that these reassurances were outright lies. On September 18th, the very same day that Whitman and the EPA were encouraging New Yorkers to return to work, the agency detected sulfur dioxide levels in the air so high that “according to one industrial hygienist, they exceeded the EPA’s standard for a classification of ‘hazardous’.” By that time, first responders were already reporting a range of health problems, including coughing, wheezing, eye irritation and headaches. The evidence continued to pour in that there were serious health concerns for those in and around Manhattan, but the information was suppressed almost as quickly as it was discovered. When a local lab tested dust samples from near the WTC site and found dangerous concentrations of fiberglass and asbestos, the New York State Department of Health warned local labs that they would lose their licenses if they processed any more “independent sampling.” When US Geological Survey scientists began performing tests on their own dust samples, they were shocked at the “alphabet soup of heavy metals” they found in it. They forwarded this information to the EPA, but the agency continued to assure the public that there was no evidence of long term health risks. The drama continued to unfold as information poured in about benzene, lead and other environmental toxins. Yet on September 18th the EPA specifically advised the public against wearing respirators outside the World Trade Center restricted area. Then, just two weeks later, the agency distributed respirators to their own staffers at the EPA’s Region 2 building on Broadway Street. As scientists, industrial hygenists, and even other government officials began to accuse the EPA of covering up the true extent of the problem in New York, the agency continued with its dogged assertion that the air was safe to breathe. It wasn’t until 2003 that the EPA’s own Inspector General revealed that the White House had been editing the agency’s press releases all along, finding that “the White House Council on Environmental Quality influenced, through the collaboration process, the information that EPA communicated to the public through its early press releases when it convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones.” When new documents were released to the public in 2011 on the eve of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, it was discovered that this editing was even worse than originally feared.
Outraged at the fact that they had been lied to and their lives put at risk, residents and workers in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn sued Whitman and the EPA in 2004. In a 2006 ruling allowing the class action lawsuit to proceed, Judge Deborah A. Batts of Federal District Court in Manhattan excoriated Whitman, finding that her baseless assurances that the air was safe “increased, and may have in fact created, the danger” to people living and working in the area. Ruling that the EPA did, in fact, make “misleading statements of safety” about the air quality, Judge Batts said: “The allegations in this case of Whitman’s reassuring and misleading statements of safety after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks are without question conscience-shocking.” Batts’ decision was overturned by a panel of judges in 2008, who ruled that misleading the public and contributing to the health problems and deaths of untold Ground Zero workers was not conscience shocking enough to override her immunity from prosecution as a federal agent. If Whitman has a conscience at all, it is evidently not shocked by any of these accusations. She has not only never conceded guilt or even expressed sorrow for the ongoing sickness and deaths that her action helped bring about, she has repeatedly defended the actions of herself and the EPA in general.
Whitman’s lies are not just those of another self-serving politician looking to save their job or stay out of jail. They are the lies of someone who has contributed to the deteriorating health and even the death of thousands of innocent men and women. For the victims of Christine Todd Whitman, the EPA, the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and all of the other agencies and officers who lied to the public about the health risks in New York, 9/11 is not a single day of horror that occurred a decade and a half ago. It is a slowly unfolding nightmare, one that every day brings them one step closer to their grave. The “dust lady” is one of the icons of the tragedy of that day. Should it be any surprise, then, that she, too, was ravaged by 9/11 related diseases and ultimately died of cancer last year? She was not the first person to die from the aftermath of 9/11. And, thanks to Christine Todd Whitman and the liars at the EPA who have consigned untold thousands to a similar fate, she will not be the last.
Suspect #3: Philip Zelikow - Video It took President Bush an extraordinary 441 days after 9/11 to establish a commission to investigate the events of September 11, 2001. And it was not just the case that Bush was slow in acting; he actively resisted any investigation for as long as he could, taking the extraordinary and unprecedented step of personally asking Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to limit Congress’ investigation into those events. In the end, the commission was severely underfunded, severely rushed, and, as commission chairman, Thomas Kean, later admitted:
But the most unmistakable sign that Bush was only interested in appointing a cover up commission to “investigate” the largest attack on US soil in modern history was his initial choice for commission chairman.
Not even the New York Times could believe that Henry Kissinger, the consummate Washington insider, could pretend to conduct an independent fact-finding investigation into 9/11. “It is tempting to wonder if the choice of Mr. Kissinger is not a clever maneuver by the White House to contain an investigation it long opposed,” The Times editorialized after the announcement. Kissinger may have been prepared for such polite disagreement with his appointment. But he was not prepared to meet the 9/11 widows whose tireless efforts had forced the creation of the commission in the first place.
Kissinger was dethroned and the commission went ahead under chairman Thomas Kean and vice chair Lee Hamilton. But while Kissinger’s appointment and resignation received all the attention, the White House was busy slipping another agent into the commission through the back door. In January of 2003, just weeks after Kissinger stepped down, it was quietly announced that Philip D. Zelikow would take on the role of executive director. As executive director, Zelikow picked “the areas of investigation, the briefing materials, the topics for hearings, the witnesses, and the lines of questioning for witnesses.” In effect, this was the man in charge of running the investigation itself. So who was Philip Zelikow? The commission’s press release announcing his position described him as “a man of high stature who has distinguished himself as an academician, lawyer, author and public servant.” Although they noted his position at the University of Virginia and his previous role as executive director for the National Commission on Federal Electoral Reform, curiously missing from this brief bio are the multiple conflicts of interest that show how the Bush administration essentially put one of its own in charge of investigating how the Bush administration “failed” on 9/11. In 1995 he coauthored a book with Bush’s national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice. He was part of the transition team that helped the Bush administration take over the White House from the Clinton administration. He was even a member of Bush’s post-9/11 Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. But perhaps most incredibly, Zelikow actually authored the Bush administration’s 2002 “National Security Strategy” that outlined the preemptive war doctrine that would be used against Iraq. This, however, is something that not even 9/11 commissioners Kean or Hamilton themselves knew at the time the commission was formed.
These conflicts of interest were not merely theoretical. After the victims’ family members discovered Zelikow’s links to the Bush administration, he was forced to recuse himself from the proceedings of the commission (which he himself was directing) that had to do with the Bush White House transition or the National Security Council. Hearing of Zelikow’s appointment, former counter terrorism czar Richard Clarke (who Zelikow helped to demote during the Bush transition), remarked that “The fix is in,” wondering aloud: “Could anyone have a more obvious conflict of interest than Zelikow?” Key staffers and even one of the commissioners threatened to quit the commission altogether when learning of Zelikow’s history. When the 9/11 victims’ family members discovered Zelikow’s links, they protested his appointment. But unlike with Kissinger, this time their concerns were dismissed and Zelikow plowed ahead. As even Zelikow himself admits, his ties to the very figures he was supposedly investigating are a legitimate concern, and any real investigation of the 9/11 cover up would begin with him.
Conveniently left out of Zelikow’s story about the “81 staffers” keeping their eye on his decisions is that they were staffers who were hired by him and under his complete control. In fact, Zelikow took over the hiring of the commission staff and even stopped staffers from communicating directly with the commissioners themselves. In the first few months, the 9/11 commissioners themselves rarely even visited the commission because Zelikow denied them their own offices or the ability to hire their own staffers. The most remarkable example of Zelikow’s dictatorial control came in March 2003, just three months into the commission’s 16-month investigation began. It was at that time, before the commission had even convened a single hearing, that Zelikow, along with long-time associate and commission consultant Ernest May, co-wrote a complete outline of the final report.
So what exactly did Zelikow do as executive director? He allowed information in the commission’s final report derived from illegal CIA torture sessions, despite not having access to the evidence of those sessions themselves (which were later illegally destroyed). This included the testimony of alleged “9/11 mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who was waterboarded 183 times in a single month, whose children were kidnapped by the CIA, who was told that his children were going to be tortured with insects, and who eventually confessed to a whole series of plots, including bombing a bank that didn’t exist at the time he was arrested. More than one quarter of the footnotes in the final commission report source from this torture testimony, and as Zelikow himself admitted, “quite a bit, if not most” of the commission’s information on the 9/11 plot itself came from this testimony. Zelikow denied interviews and documents to staffers investigating the Saudi connection to the attacks, eventually firing one of them and removing the text of their investigation from the final report. He personally rewrote a commission staff statement to suggest a systematic link between Al Qaeda and Iraq before 9/11, outraging the authors of the original statement. He worked behind his own staffer’s back to stop them from serving the Pentagon a subpoena to answer about information NORAD was withholding from the commission. He sat on a proposal to open a criminal investigation into FAA and military officials who lied to the commission for months, and then forwarded that proposal not to the Justice Department, who could have brought criminal charges, but to the Inspector General, who could not. And he covered up information on Able Danger, a military intelligence team that had identified several of the alleged 9/11 hijackers in the country before 9/11.
From the initial outline to the final report, Zelikow carefully guided the process, hiring and firing the staff, directing their research efforts, deciding on witnesses, scrubbing information, and shielding his former colleagues in the White House from criticism. But perhaps more remarkable than the fact that “the fix was in” from the moment he took over the commission and began working on the predictive outline of the final report, is that he had in fact written about 9/11 and its eventual aftermath in 1998, three years before September 11th. In an article entitled “Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger,” written for the Council on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs in November 1998, Zelikow and co-authors Ashton Carter and John Deutsche ask readers to imagine a catastrophic act of terrorism like the destruction of the World Trade Center. “Like Pearl Harbor, the event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either future terrorist attacks or U.S. counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently.” Zelikow’s amazing prediction becomes somewhat less remarkable when we learn his own self-described expertise in the creation and management of “public myth.” In a separate 1998 article on public myths, Zelikow identifies “generational” myths that are “formed by those pivotal events that become etched in the minds of those who have lived through them,” before noting that the current set of public myths, formed during the New Deal in 1933, are currently fading. Convenient for Zelikow, then, that the “Pearl Harbor” event that would define the next “generational” myth, known as the “War on Terror,” would arrive just three years later, and that he would be in charge of the commission tasked with creating and managing the public perception of that myth. Indeed, given his central role in the cover up of 9/11
and deflecting concern away from legitimate 9/11 suspects,
any true investigation into the events of September 11th
would involve a thorough interrogation of Philip D.
Zelikow. A 21 year veteran of the CIA, Robert Baer is billed as “one of America’s most elite intelligence case officers.” Having worked field assignments in Lebanon, Sudan, Morocco, Iraq and other international hotspots, he was praised by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh as “perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East.” He has written multiple books based on his experiences with the agency. He has worked as a consultant on documentary and television projects. He regularly appears as a commentator on CNN and other news outlets, and he writes a regular column on intelligence matters for Time. George Clooney’s character in Syriana, Bob Barnes, is based on Baer and his experiences with the CIA.
Robert Baer retired from the CIA in 1997 and received the agency’s Career Intelligence Medal the following year. In short, he is a serious and well-respected career intelligence official. All of this makes it particularly stunning that in 2008 he told a team of citizen journalists in Los Angeles that he knew a man who “cashed out” the day before 9/11.
Given Robert Baer’s experience and training, it is difficult to comprehend just how significant the information that he just casually admits here really is. We are left with only two possibilities: either Baer is lying, or he has direct knowledge of someone “whose brother worked at the White House” who had foreknowledge of the 9/11 plot. There is no middle ground here. The man Robert Baer claims to know is at least an accessory before the fact to the crimes of 9/11, if not an actual accomplice or co-conspirator in those crimes. By failing to report this information to the investigative authorities, Baer leaves himself open to being an accessory after the fact to those same crimes. Title 18 Section 3 of the US Code defines the criteria for an “Accessory After the Fact” to a crime committed against the United States: “Whoever, knowing that an offense against the United States has been committed, receives, relieves, comforts or assists the offender in order to hinder or prevent his apprehension, trial or punishment, is an accessory after the fact.” Given the exceptionally grave nature of this admission and its repercussions, one would suppose that Baer has been questioned by other media and/or the FBI and made to discuss in detail precisely who it was who cashed out and how he knew about the 9/11 plot in advance. But one would be wrong. Since making this stunning admission to the cameras of We Are Change Los Angeles, no one has ever asked Baer for more information about the case. So what does Robert Baer say about the possibility of a 9/11 inside job? In 2007, writing about the CIA’s admission that they illegally destroyed the videotaped interrogations of high profile terror suspects, Baer said: “I myself have felt the pull of the conspiracy theorists — who believe that 9/11 was an inside job, somehow pulled off by the U.S. government. For the record, I don’t believe that the World Trade Center was brought down by our own explosives, or that a rocket, rather than an airliner, hit the Pentagon. I spent a career in the CIA trying to orchestrate plots, wasn’t all that good at it, and certainly couldn’t carry off 9/11. Nor could the real pros I had the pleasure to work with.” But just one year before he gave a very different answer to Thomas Hartmann on his radio show.
So why is Robert Baer hiding the identity of a 9/11 accomplice or co-conspirator? And will the FBI be asking him for details of this story any time soon? Until the American public show some interest in this shocking admission, it is unlikely that anything will happen. Suspect #5: Gen. Ralph Eberhart - Video According to the official story of September 11, 2001, four hijacked airliners flew wildly off course over the most sensitive airspace in the United States for 109 minutes without being intercepted by a single fighter jet. As Commander-in-Chief of the North American Aerospace Defense Command on 9/11, General Ralph Eberhart was in charge of the largest failure to defend North American airspace in history. Rather than accepting blame for his command’s complete lack of response that morning, however, or even expressing regret about what had occurred, General Eberhart instead spent the rest of his career attempting to pin the blame for this failure squarely on the FAA.
Although Eberhart’s version of events was cemented into place as the official story of 9/11 propounded by the 9/11 commission, they are in fact self-serving lies. In Eberhart’s version of events, NORAD is completely subordinate to the FAA. In reality, however, NORAD is specifically tasked with dealing with such events itself, not waiting passively for FAA orders. NORAD’s own regulations for dealing with hijacked jets specifically state that “FAA Authorization for Interceptor Operations is not used for intercept and airborne surveillance of hijacked aircraft within the [continental United States].” These standard operating procedures were not merely theoretical, or some obscure regulation that would have been unfamiliar to the four-star general in charge of defending American airspace. In the year 2000 alone, NORAD scrambled fighters in response to “unknowns”–pilots who didn’t file or diverted from flight plans or used the wrong frequency–129 times. Perhaps even more remarkable, however, is that Eberhart and NORAD offered not one, not two, not three, but four separate timelines of their complete lack of response that morning. The first, offered by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers just two days after the attacks during his confirmation hearings in the Senate, claimed that not a single fighter was scrambled to intercept any of the airliners until after the incident at the Pentagon. One week later, NORAD released a partial timeline that indicated they had in fact received advance notification about three of the planes with as much as 20 minutes warning, more than enough time for the planes to have been intercepted. A third story emerged in May 2003; this time, NORAD was only contacted about Flight 175 at 9:05, 3 minutes after it crashed into the south tower. The official story, found in the 9/11 Commission’s final report, was that NORAD received no advance notice of any of the flights. Eberhart and the military were completely exonerated. However, Eberhart had testified in October 2001 that NORAD had been notified about Flight 77 at 9:24 AM. The 9/11 Commission determined that this was a lie. Regardless of the truth or untruth of any of these accounts, the simple fact is that, according to the 9/11 Commission itself, Eberhart had lied to Congress, which is in fact a crime. By the 9/11 Commission’s own account, Eberhart should have been tried. But Eberhart’s lies do not end there.
Once again, Eberhart’s depiction of events is a self-serving and easily demonstrable lie. Not only had NORAD envisioned such a scenario, they had been training for it extensively in the years leading up to 9/11. Between October 1998 and September 2001, NORAD had conducted 28 exercise events involving hijackings. At least five of those hijack scenarios involved “a suicide crash into a high-value target.” Furthermore, at least six of the exercises took place completely within American airspace, putting to rest the oft-heard excuse that NORAD wasn’t prepared for threats from within the US. Another note that would be of interest to prosecutors looking at potential foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks pertains to Eberhart’s dual role as Commander-in-Chief of US Space Command, where he was responsible for setting something called the “Infocon threat level.” Established in March 1999, the Infocon threat level was designed as a measure of the threat to Defense Department computer systems and networks and different levels required different protocols for securing communications and information systems. At 9:09 PM on September 10, 2001, less than 12 hours before the attacks began, Eberhart reduced Infocon to Level 5 , the lowest threat level, making it easier for hackers to compromise Defense Department systems and controls. Eberhart has never been asked about this change in the public record. There are a laundry list of other questionable actions that Eberhart took on 9/11. His failure to implement military control over US airspace. His decision to drive from Peterson Air Force Base to NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Control Center at 9:30 AM, right in the middle of the attack, despite knowing this would involve loss of communication for part of the drive, and the fact that it took him 45 minutes to complete the 30 minute trip. His decision to ground all fighter jets by ordering them to battle stations instead of ordering them to scramble at 9:49 AM. And even NORAD’s inability to turn over basic documentation to government investigators. The official story of 9/11 is a lie. But Eberhart’s story is a lie within that lie, designed to absolve himself and other members of the US military charged with defending American airspace that morning from the most catastrophic failure in that mission in their history. And not only did Eberhart survive with his career intact, he was praised as a “9/11 hero” and moved into the private sector after leaving NORAD in 2004, as chairman and board member of a number of companies that directly benefited from the post-9/11 police state and the post-9/11 war on terror. Ralph E. Eberhart remains at large. Suspect #6: The Dancing Israelis - Video
In the days after 9/11, while Ground Zero continued to smoulder, millions heard Dan Rather and various media outlets repeat vague and unconfirmed reports of arrests that took place that day. These rumors held that Middle Eastern men, presumably Arabs, were arrested in explosive-packed vans in various places around the city on September 11th, and that some had even been photographing and celebrating those events. What most do not realize is that those reports were not mere rumors, and we now have thousands of pages of FBI, CIA and DOJ reports documenting those arrests.
The men were spotted shortly after 8:46 AM, yet somehow at this early stage, just minutes after the first plane strike on the World Trade Center, they were already positioned in a parking lot in Liberty State Park, taking pictures of the towers and celebrating. They left the scene shortly after being spotted and at 3:31 PM the FBI issued an all points bulletin advising officers in the Greater New York area to be on the lookout for a “White, 2000 Chevrolet van…with ‘Urban Moving Systems’ sign on back.” At 3:56 PM, the van was spotted traveling eastward on State Route 3 in New Jersey and pulled over by Officer Scott DeCarlo and Sgt. Dennis Rivelli of the East Rutherford police department. Inside they found five men: Sivan Kurzberg and his brother, Paul, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner, and Omar Marmari.
According to the police report of the incident, Sivan Kurzberg told Officer DeCarlo: “We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.” Their official story: they were just Israeli tourists working for a moving company who had heard about the first World Trade Center strike and rushed to get a better view of the events.
Although this narrative is still trotted out when the story of the dancing Israelis is raised in the media, it is an easily demonstrable lie. FBI reports confirm that the men were not taking somber pictures of a horrific event. When their 76 pictures were developed, they revealed the men had indeed been celebrating; smiling, hugging each other, and high-fiving. One of the pictures even featured Sivan Kurzberg holding a lighter up with the burning tower in the background. And these were no ordinary tourists. Oded Ellner had $4,700 stuffed into his sock. They lied to the police about where they had been that morning. They were carrying plane tickets for immediate departure to different places around the globe. The FBI confirmed that two of the men had ties to Israeli intelligence and came to suspect that they had indeed been on a mission for the Mossad. And of course, after returning to Israel Ellner claimed on national Israeli TV that they had been sent there “to document the event.”
Their purpose was to “document the event”? But how could they possibly have known what “event” they were documenting at that point, before the second plane strike when those few who even knew about the situation had assumed it to be an accident or pilot error? And when did they arrive at the parking lot to “document the event” anyway? The FBI reports show how the men gave confused and often conflicting accounts of when and how they learned about what was happening and when they arrived at the parking lot. Oded Ellner even said they had arrived their shortly after 8:00 AM, which would have been 45 minutes before the attacks even began [see page 45 here]. This is in line with one of the eyewitnesses that had placed their Urban Moving Systems van at the parking lot at 8:00 AM [see page 33 here]. How could they have been in place and ready to “document the event” unless they knew what was about to happen? Anyway you cut it, this story is unbelievable. Men with documented connections to Israeli intelligence and working in the United States without appropriate permits were detained after having been caught celebrating the attack on the World Trade Center at a time when no one knew that the WTC strike was an attack. So surely these men are locked behind bars to this day, right? Surely they were transferred to Guantanamo and held without trial for 15 years as part of the “War on Terror,” weren’t they? No. They were immediately transferred to federal custody, held for 71 days, and then deported back to Israel. The owner of the “Urban Moving Systems” company that had employed them, Dominik Suter, was investigated by the FBI, too. They concluded that “Urban Moving may have been providing cover for an Israeli intelligence operation” and even seized records and computer systems from the company’s offices. When they went back to question him again on September 14th, he had fled back to Israel. And what about the dancing Israeli’s pictures themselves? The Justice Department destroyed their copies on January 27, 2014. And these intelligence agents on an intelligence mission who were there to “document the event” of 9/11 before anyone knew 9/11 was taking place? Don’t worry, they were just spying on Arab terrorists.
But this story is not merely preposterous on its face; even the implications of this story are themselves preposterous. If indeed the “official story” is a ridiculous lie, then are we to believe that these crack Israeli Mossad operatives who were presumably aware of the attack that was about to take place had been sent to photograph the burning tower from a parking lot across the Hudson River? And that these specially trained intelligence professionals on their super secret mission were celebrating, high-fiving and going out of their way to be noticed in performance of their task? This is equally preposterous. The only other possible conclusion is that these men were serving merely as a distraction. That they were not there to photograph for Israeli intelligence one of the most heavily photographed scenes in the world on that morning, but instead to be noticed and arrested as a way to divert attention from a much bigger and more sinister story. So if they were meant to distract from a bigger story, what story could that possibly be?
The most phenomenal part of this report is not that it was eventually erased from the web by Fox News itself, but that it ever made it to the air at all. In December of 2001, Fox News investigative reporter Carl Cameron filed an explosive 4-part series that went in-depth into an Israeli art student spying ring that had been under investigation before 9/11, extensive Israeli wiretapping of sensitive US government communications, and the 60 Israeli spies that were detained in the wake of the September 11th attacks. Unsurprisingly, the story was quickly dropped and no mainstream journalists dared to continue probing into the matter. This is the real story of Israeli spies and 9/11; not some vague rumours about some dancing Israelis but an FBI dragnet that swept up the largest foreign spying ring ever caught red-handed on American soil. And although the FBI were convinced that these spies knew about 9/11 in advance, their investigations were stifled and the issue was swept under the rug. Rather than making Israel enemy number one in the war on terror, Israel remains to this day the US’ “most important ally.”
But perhaps this is understandable. After all, we all remember how Yasser Arafat gloated about 9/11 and said it was good for Palestinians, right? Oh wait, that wasn’t Yasser Arafat. It was Benjamin Netanyahu.
Given that the ultimate consequence of 9/11 was the beginning of a now 15 year long struggle to transform the Middle East, a struggle that the neocons that went on to populate the Bush administration had been openly advocating since the “Clean Break” policy paper in the mid-1990s, it isn’t hard to see how the September 11th attacks were indeed a boon for Israel. But information linking Israeli spies to advance knowledge of 9/11 remains “classified information.” In a world of true justice, the dancing Israelis and other Israeli spies with insider advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, who openly celebrated those attacks, would be the targets of the “war on terror,” not its beneficiaries. CONCLUSION Alright friends, that is the end of today’s exploration, but it is obviously not the end of the exploration of the crimes of 9/11. We have only begun to scratch the surface of the suspect list and I have no doubt that the well-informed listeners of this podcast will be able to come up with many more people that should be on that list, individuals who could be similarly prosecuted for their role in the crimes of that day. In fact, I would highly encourage such an exercise. If there are any intrepid Corbett Reporteers who want to try their hand at creating their own “9/11 Suspect”-style report, don’t wait for orders from headquarters, just do it. Post it to your blog or your YouTube channel or wherever you can and I’ll let others know it’s out there. As always, today’s podcast is just the beginning of this research, not the end… …and on that note, please do make use of this research. A complete, hyperlinked transcript of this entire report is available at corbettreport.com/suspects. This transcript encapsulates years of research, a month of writing, and a month of painstaking video editing by the incomparable video editor, Broc West, so I implore you to take advantage of it. It’s there, it’s a resource, please help spread it around. I’d like to thank all of The Corbett Report members who make this research possible. All of those subscribers who support this website with as little as $1 a month and without whom today’s report, let alone all the rest of the work I produce, literally would not be possible. For nine years I have been pursuing the truth about 9/11 and other topics that “mainstream” and “respectable” researchers won’t go near. It’s a labour of passion borne from my own commitment to truth and justice, but it is not popular work, it doesn’t win awards, and it isn’t making anyone rich, least of all me. But I am blessed and humbled to be in a position to do this work thanks only to the graciousness of your support, so to each and every one of you: thank you sincerely. To those who are not yet subscribers to The Corbett Report but who do appreciate this work, I highly encourage you to think about signing up for a membership. Once again, as little as $1 a month (although more is always appreciated) will get you a login for the website, allowing you to comment on the site and access the subscriber newsletter, which is posted to the website every weekend. And for all of those who have reached out in the past to let me know they don’t do PayPal or bitcoin, you’re in luck. I have just signed up for a brand new Patreon account, so you can now become a patron via patreon.com/corbettreport. Details are available at corbettreport.com/support. Thank you again for your time today, and until next time,
this is James Corbett of corbettreport.com signing off. |