Revisiting 9/11: Proof the Israeli Government Knew
The World Trade Center as seen from Jersey City (Credit: Wally Gobets on Flickr)
The following uses exclusively establishment media and government sources to make the case that the Israeli government had precise foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks. The majority is sourced from a declassified FBI report. I’ve included screenshots and links to the report so people may verify for themselves. Criticisms of my argument are welcome in the comments.
Background:
On the morning of September 11, 2001, five Israeli nationals were spotted “celebrating” and “high-fiving” atop a parking garage in New Jersey while they photographed the burning World Trade Center (WTC). The men worked as movers for Urban Moving Systems and drove a moving van. A witnessing neighbor notified the police of the van’s plate number, and the Israelis were apprehended later in the day.
Timing:
The FBI confirmed the men arrived before the impact of the second plane (9:03 am):
One witness claimed to see them at the garage around 8:00 am, about 40 minutes prior to the initial impact (8:46 am):
At least one Israeli had visited this vantage point the day before (9/10). One witness “definitely saw” one of the Israelis at the apartment complex adjacent to the parking garage on 9/10, and another corroborated this claim, adding the Israeli identified himself as a “construction worker”:
The group likely had a prior interest in the WTC because in their moving van was a photograph of the buildings “lit up at night” (thus, pre-9/11):
Also found in the van was a plane ticket from NY to Israel, leaving on 9/12/01. The ticket was purchased in early June at the latest, meaning this departure date had been planned for months:
Celebrating the Attack:
Their celebratory demeanor is confirmed by numerous witness testimonies and by the FBI’s review of photos on the Israelis’ confiscated camera. The bureau determined they were “visibly happy” in the photographs:
According to an attorney representing the Israelis at the time, one photo depicted a member of the group “holding a lighted lighter in the foreground, with the smoldering wreckage [of the twin towers] in the background.” - NYT
One Israeli implicitly acknowledged that they were indeed celebrating when he explained to FBI agents that “Israel now has hope that the world will now understand us”:
This begs the question — given the Israelis arrived before the second plane’s impact (when it was unknownwhether the crash was intentional or accidental) — how did the men know they were witnessing a terrorist attack?
Mossad:
Several of the celebrating men were Mossad agents. This is confirmed by:
ABC: “Sources tell ABC News, during a check of national security databases, some of the men were listed as having connections with Israeli intelligence.”
The Forward — a “respected Jewish newspaper” per ABC — cited its own sources claiming at least two of the movers were Mossad. Media bias rating sites give Forward a “high” accuracy rating and center-left leaning (they’re not as friendly to ZeroHedge).
Juval Aviv — a former Mossad agent who was not involved in this case — later said Urban Moving Systems was a Mossad front company.
Part of the FBI report (though redacted) appears to confirm ABC’s claim that the Israelis appeared in national security databases. The FBI’s Universal Index (UNI) returned positive results for at least two of the men, identifying one “as an Israeli [redacted]”:
Israel’s espionage apparatus within the US in 2001 was demonstrably precise. According to US officials speaking to The Forward, “Israeli intelligence played a key role in helping the Bush administration to crack down on Islamic charities suspected of funneling money to terrorist groups, most notably the Richardson, Texas-based Holy Land Foundation last December [‘01].”
For a thorough analysis of Israeli operations in the US in 2001, read this article from Salon Magazine and the author’s follow-up work.
Thus far, we have shown that multiple Mossad agents photographed the WTC and scoped out their 9/11 viewing location at least one day prior, they celebrated the attack immediately after the first plane’s impact (despite no public knowledge that it was a terrorist attack yet), and they were set to fly back to Israel on the following day.
I struggle to find an innocent explanation for these actions alone, but in case you’re not convinced, below are additional factors supporting the claim that the men possessed foreknowledge of the attacks.
Supporting Evidence:
A notepad in the Urban Moving van contained a phone number for a company affiliated with one of the 9/11 hijackers and another number for an individual with “authentic ties to Islamic militants in the middle east”:
A former American employee of Urban Moving Systems told the FBI that he quit due to a strong “anti-American” sentiment at the company and that one Israeli coworker told him, “Give us 20 years and we’ll take over your media and destroy your country”:
One Israeli possessed $4,700 in cash (over $8,000 in today’s dollars):
When arrested by state police, the Israelis lied about their whereabouts at the time of the attack, saying they were in Manhattan, and pleaded with the cops, “We are not your problem… The Palestinians are the problem.” (An odd thing to say if you thought you were being pulled over for a traffic violation):
Inspection of the Urban Moving van by a bomb-sniffing dog “yielded positive results” for traces of explosives:
Analysis:
I welcome readers to provide a scenario — considering the above facts — in which these Mossad agents DO NOT have prior knowledge of the attacks. I cannot come up with one.
A generous interpretation might be that the Israelis had generic knowledge of an impending attack, though not an exact date/location. In fact, this much was confirmed by US intel officials at the time, who said Mossad warned the US of an impending attack in August ‘01 but gave no specifics as to when/where.
While still strange, the celebration makes sense under this theory — “Oh, this must be that attack we heard about! Now the US will support Israel’s struggle against Palestinian radicals!” — but it does not explain the plane tickets leaving on 9/12, the pre-attack photos of the WTC, nor their visits to the viewing location on the day prior to 9/11. These coincidences are too perfect to be mere happenstance.
I see one explanation: these men possessed precise foreknowledge of this attack and allowed it to happen.
As it turns out… many in the US intelligence community reached the same conclusion and — in a similar style of argument — did so because of a lack of plausible alternatives. As Carl Cameron of Fox News reported at the time, citing multiple high-level US intelligence officials, “There’s a great deal of evidence they say they have collected — none of it necessarily conclusive — it’s more when they put it all together, a bigger question they say is, ‘How could they not have known?’” (Full video here):
… and Carl’s sources must have been pretty compelling to overrule the Zionist narrative of Fox’s editorial, especially during the Bush era.
Q.E.D.
As for why these Mossad agents were released back to Israel two months later, it could be that some in the US government were complicit or that Israel leveraged connections/blackmail to get them freed. Of note, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, who signed off on the release, went on to start a private lobbying firm in 2005 and on-boarded a state-owned Israeli arms dealer as one of his initial clients.
Note 1 — some who have reported on this story (like Whitney Webb) pointed out that the photos taken by the Israelis (declassified in 2019) display a date of 9/10/01 as evidence that they were taken before the attack. However, the internal clock on the camera was nearly 15 hours behind — as noted by the FBI in the initial investigation — and therefore is consistent with the photos being taken on 9/11. This was written into the report on 9/21/01 and the photos were not declassified until 2019, so it is clearly not an attempt by the FBI to “save face.”
Still, multiple witness testimonies placing the Israelis at the complex on 9/10 and the photo found in the van of the “WTC lit up at night” achieve the same purpose in making the case that the men had prior knowledge of the attacks.
Image from separate declassified grouping of photos taken by the Israelis. Only a portion were declassified and images appear to have been photocopied, thus not revealing much in the background.
Note 2 — many have pointed to “The B-thing,” a modern art exhibit that was under construction on the 91st floor of the WTC with a proposed launch date of Sep. 11, 2001. I’ve not been able to find any evidence linking this to Israel (the artists were Austrian) or find anything suspicious other than the coincidence with the date.
Note 3 — I encountered this image quite a bit while researching this story:
From what I could gather, this image is fake. However, there were reports from officers and pedestrians on the ground during 9/11 of a truck with a mural of a plane flying into the WTC. This is confirmed by a recording from a police intercom, a video of a pedestrian discussing the truck on the afternoon of 9/11, and a subsequent report by some sort of NGO affiliated with San Jose State University.
It’s certainly interesting, but I’ve seen no credible connection to Urban Moving Systems. Also, the police intercom indicates this van would have been in lower Manhattan, so it’s certainly not the original van in question.
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