A Social Time Bomb

Excerpt from Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults, by Jacques Vallée.

The idea of contact with higher intelligence is a social time bomb. Several years ago I warned that unless my scientific colleagues undertook a serious and unbiased investigation of the UFO phenomenon, there would be a proliferation of new sects claiming contact with higher intelligences and special communication with outer space.

This prediction has now been fulfilled: in California, Oregon, and Colorado, for example, a group called Human Individual Metamorphosis (H.I.M.) is telling its followers to abandon all earthly possessions in hopes of reaching a higher physical level. In Europe, mysterious organizations recruit people who serious-ly believe that cosmic messages are coming to them from the "Universal Association of Planets." In France, Great Britain, all over the world, claims of contact with supernatural entities are leading to the creation of new sects. The expectation of higher intelligence is beginning to look like a form of worship. This raises some basic questions about science and religion: what is the source of the mystical experience? Some believers in contact with space claim to have discovered it.

Vallée, 1979: 65-66.

New evidence shows 'suicide' student was beaten to death

by Mark Townsend and Jamie Doward
THE OBSERVER

Compelling new evidence suggests that a 22-year-old Briton who had become involved with a right-wing political cult in Germany was murdered, contradicting the authorities' verdict of suicide.

Two new reports from leading forensic pathologists suggest that Jeremiah Duggan, a student at the British Institute in Paris, was battered to death with a blunt instrument as he tried desperately to defend himself.

The findings, to be revealed on Tuesday, cast grave doubt on the official verdict that Duggan hurled himself in front of cars on a dual carriageway in Wiesbaden. Forensic specialists found no trace of tyre marks on his body, or anything to suggest that he had been struck by a vehicle. But they did detect classic 'defence wounds' to Duggan's forearms and hands, which usually suggest someone trying to protect himself.

His head injuries are consistent with being beaten and 'exclude any possibility that the injuries to his head occurred because a motor vehicle ran over the body', according to the two studies.

Both reports are unanimous in rejecting the official account that Duggan was struck by two vehicles on the night he died in March 2003. They also found that he had ingested quantities of blood.

The official account by German authorities, based on police reports, says he was hit by a car travelling at 60mph and died instantly. However, the fact Duggan survived long enough to swallow large amounts of blood indicates he took a long time to die, which would not be the case after a high-speed collision.

The expert conclusions are the strongest evidence yet that Duggan was killed rather than committed suicide, and support his family's claims that the true circumstances surrounding his death have been covered up. The findings will be sent this week to the Attorney General as part of a submission of evidence aimed at securing a fresh inquest into the circumstances surrounding the death. Erica, his mother, hopes that a verdict of 'unlawful killing' will apply pressure for a fresh police investigation.

Duggan, from Golders Green, north-west London, had become involved with the Wiesbaden followers of Lyndon LaRouche, an American millionaire with virulent anti-Semitic views. Unaware of the group's leanings, the former Christ's Hospital pupil told followers that he was Jewish. At 4.20am on 27 March, 2003, Duggan rang his mother. His voice was hushed: 'Mum, I am in deep trouble.'

Asked where he was, Duggan began spelling out Wiesbaden. Before he could reach 'b', the line went dead. Hours later, police investigated reports of a body on the B455 outside Wiesbaden. The authorities quickly pronounced Duggan's death as a 'clear case' of suicide. The official version states that Duggan 'ran against' a Peugeot and was subsequently run over by a Golf.

Despite requests by British police, their German counterparts have failed to even reveal records of when they were first alerted that Duggan had been killed in a road traffic accident.

Frances Swain, of lawyers Leigh Day and Co, said: 'It is clear from the new evidence that JD did not die in a road traffic accident. How he did die has yet to be investigated and a fresh inquest is required to get those proper investigations off the ground. This is strong evidence that again questions what has been told to us. A new inquest is essential.'

FIGHT FOR JUSTICE

21 March 2003 Jeremiah Duggan travels to Wiesbaden for what he believes is an anti-war conference. In fact, it was organised by the far-right Schiller Institute, which is inspired by Lyndon LaRouche, a US right-wing conspiracy theorist, and run by his wife. It has a history of anti-Semitism.

27 March At 4.20am, Duggan, who was Jewish, called his mother, saying: 'I'm in deep, deep trouble, I want out.' Later he was found dead on a dual carriageway.

29 March German authorities claim he took his own life by jumping into traffic.

4 November British coroner Dr William Dolman dismissed suicide verdict, saying Duggan died 'in a state of terror'.

24 February 2004 Duggan family meet Foreign Office after German authorities refuse to reopen the case.

November 2005 Duggan's mother persuades German authorities to hand over photos made by investigators.

22 Feb 2006 Family calls for new inquest.

March 2007 Two forensic reports say Duggan was battered to death.

Oil rises after Iran arrests sailors

by Kevin Morrison
FINANCIAL TIMES

Oil prices rose on Friday after tensions with Iran escalated following the Islamic Republic’s capture of 15 British Navy sailors. The incident comes at an important moment in the stand-off between Iran and the West over its nuclear ambitions.

The US sent a second aircraft carrier recently to the Persian Gulf, and the Iranian navy has started a week of naval exercises there.

Heightened geopolitical tensions combined with a tightening oil market have sent oil prices to new highs for the year. Crude and petroleum product inventories in the developed world are declining and US petrol demand is increasing at a stronger-than-expected pace ahead of peak summer demand. On the supply side, analysts have trimmed output forecasts from producers outside the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

ICE Brent for May delivery added 67 cents to $63.18 a barrel by the end of London trade on Friday, and is up more than four per cent on the week. The May Brent contract reached its highest level for the year yesterday at $63.47.

May West Texas Intermediate gained 59 cents to $62.28 a barrel in late trade on the New York Mercantile Exchange, after hitting $62.65; its highest level since December 26. “You have got a series of bullish signals for the oil price, both on the supply and demand side, and on the political side too,” said one hedge fund manager.

Nickel prices had another roller-coaster ride. After rising more than 10 per cent in the previous week, the metal, used for stainless steel production, fell more than 12 per cent from last Friday’s record high of $48,300. The three-month nickel price fell six per cent or $2,700 to $42,450 a tonne.

The slide in the nickel price was prompted by more metal flowing into warehouses registered with the LME. The increase leaves nickel stockpiles at about a day’s worth of consumption.

Copper, which led the charge in the base metal price rally 12 months ago, started to climb on tighter fundamentals. This week, analysts and one of the world’s largest copper producers, BHP Billiton, have forecast a deficit of copper in the second quarter, the peak demand period of the year for base metals.

The red metal rose $20 to $6,720 a tonne yesterday, leaving it about 10 per cent higher on the week. Robin Bhar, metals strategist at UBS, said copper fundamentals meant prices could go a lot higher. “There are a lot more people short (entities that had pre-sold copper) than there were this time last year, when copper started its run up to its record. If we have copper going towards $7,000, you will find a lot more covering, which would trigger further rises,” said Mr Bhar.

Grains markets ended the week on a downward note before an important report next week. The US Department of Agriculture will issue its first crop planting estimates of the season, with the first indication this year as to whether an expected expansion in corn acreage has occurred.

The Road to Serfdom

by Caroline Glick
REAL CLEAR POLITICS

In Israel, as in the rest of the free world, we are witnessing the death by a thousand cuts of free thought.

Last month, two students at Cambridge University's Clare College became victims of this state of affairs. The students dedicated an edition of their satire magazine to the one-year anniversary of the global Muslim riots which followed the publication of caricatures of Muhammad in the Danish Jyllands Posten newspaper. As the students recalled, those riots led to the deaths of more than a hundred people.

Although the British media refused to republish the caricatures, British Muslims held terrifying protests throughout the country where they called for the destruction of Britain, the US, Denmark and Israel and for the murder of all who refuse to accept the global domination of Islam.

In their magazine, the students published some of the caricatures and mocked the Muslims for their hypocrisy in accusing British society of racial prejudice while calling for its violent destruction.

The Muslim reaction was apparently swift. Fearing for their lives, the students were forced into hiding.

But the Muslims were not alone in their anger. Clare College set up a special disciplinary court to consider action against the students. And the Cambridgeshire police opened a criminal investigation against them in late February.

The persecution of these students provides a case study of the two-pronged offensive being carried out today against Western culture. First there are the jihadists, who call for our destruction. Then there are the leftist intellectuals and public figures who defend radical Islamists and work to silence those who criticize them by criminalizing speech and condemning free thinkers as racists.

The direct consequence of this two-pronged offensive is the repression of free thought.

FOUR YEARS ago, US President George W. Bush called the invasion of Iraq "Operation Iraqi Freedom." The intention was clear. The purpose of the war was not merely to bring down Saddam Hussein's murderous, terror-supporting regime. It was to bring about the defeat of the vile world view that supported the regime and to replace that view with the values of freedom, tolerance and democracy.

Four years on, US forces continue their heroic fight to bring order and security to that violent land. But the purpose of their efforts is no longer clear. The US no longer pushes the Iraqis or the greater Arab world to abandon jihad in favor of freedom.

Earlier this month, columnist Joel Mowbray gave evidence of the Bush administration's abandonment of the war of ideas in a Wall Street Journal expose on the US taxpayer-financed Arabic-language television network Al-Hurra. The US launched Al- Hurra in February 2004 to compete with jihadist television networks like Al Jazeera. Its stated aim was to present a liberal, pro-democracy and pro-human rights voice to the Arab world. Yet, as Mowbray reported, since former CNN producer Larry Register was appointed to lead the network last November, that aim fell by the wayside.

In December the network began allowing itself to be used as a platform by arch terrorists like Hizbullah commander Hassan Nasrallah and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Last month, when the Israeli Islamic movement began attacking Israel for conducting an archeological dig by the Aksa mosque, Al-Hurra's coverage of the story was more extreme than Al Jazeera's. Palestinian Authority mufti Ikremah Sabri was brought on live and accused Israel of shooting and throwing bombs into the mosque and of denying medical care to those it had supposedly wounded. Al-Hurra has also hosted an al-Qaida terrorist who rejoiced in the September 11 attacks on America.

As is the case in Britain, the Bush administration's decision to largely abandon the ideological battlefield is the result of an uncompromising and unrelenting ideological and political assault against the voices that justify the war against the global jihad generally, and against the hawks in the Bush administration specifically.

Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and John Bolton - and arguably Scooter Libby - were all forced from their positions in the Pentagon, the State Department and the White House after coming under unrelenting attack by the Left which all but accused these men of treason for their vigilant support of the war against Islamic totalitarianism. A central component of the onslaught against them was the repeated claim that their support for Israel is what brought these men to delude America into believing that the global jihad is a threat to US national security.

One of the central players in this concerted attack has been the billionaire George Soros. Soros is an anti-Zionist Jew with a troubling past. Specifically, by his own admission in interviews with 60 Minutes in 1998 and PBS in 1993, Soros collaborated with the Nazis in seizing Jewish property in Budapest in 1944.

Author Serge Trifkovic, who is currently researching a biography of Soros, tells of a Holocaust survivor in Hungary who claims that the reason Soros was allowed to remain free was "the boy's special knowledge of the Jewish community and its attempts to protect its property from confiscation."

Since 2003, Soros has donated more than $100 million to radical left-wing groups and to the political campaigns of far-left anti-war Democratic candidates in the US. His money has made him one of the most influential forces in the Democratic Party.

After Hamas won the Palestinian election last January, Soros turned his guns against Israel. Last October he announced his intention to work with left-wing American Jewish groups such as Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, American Friends of Peace Now and the Israel Policy Forum to form an effectively anti-Israel lobbying group that will compete with the pro-Israel American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Soros accuses AIPAC of making common cause with the war hawks and so harming US and Israeli national security.

This week Soros laid out his anti-Israel views in the New York Review of Books. In a longwinded screed entitled, "On Israel, America and AIPAC," Soros presents an incoherent hodgepodge of sloppy logic and contradictory statements. On the one hand, he acknowledges that Israel's withdrawal from Gaza radicalized the Palestinians and brought Hamas to power. On the other hand, he insists that further Israeli withdrawals will cause the Palestinians to moderate. While he acknowledges that Hamas is a terror group, he insists that the US must recognize it and force Israel to recognize it and that AIPAC is responsible for neither recognizing Hamas as a legitimate political force in the region.

Soros claims to want peace for Israel. Yet he demands that the US and Israel embrace the Saudi plan which calls for Israel's effective destruction through a forced Israeli withdrawal from Judea, Jerusalem, Samaria and the Golan Heights and the demographic destruction of the Jewish state through unimpeded immigration of 4-5 million foreign-born Arabs.

In effect, Soros's arguments make clear that protestations aside, the advancement of human rights and peace cannot possibly be his true goals. Rather, what seems to interest him most is the erosion of the US-Israel alliance. A US abandonment of Israel is seen as a necessary component of an overall strategy for causing the US to cease its fight against the global jihad.

In her visit here next week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is expected to pressure the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government to continue diplomatic contacts with the Hamas-Fatah terror government through PA Chairman and Fatah commander Mahmoud Abbas. In light of the administration's weakening stand on Hamas, it is clear that Soros's views have taken hold in ever-widening policy circles in Washington.

In advancing their anti-Israel views, Soros and his allies (most recently, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof), invoke the work of radical leftist Israeli organizations like the Geneva Initiative, B'tselem and Peace Now. Like Soros, these organizations claim to act for the advancement of peace and human rights. And like Soros, these organizations effectively cooperate with pro-jihadist groups in eroding Israel's ability to defend its rights as a Jewish democracy.

The public storm that ensued this week after Jews in Hebron took control of a building they recently purchased in the city was a clear example of this leftist-jihadist collusion.

In demanding that the IDF move immediately to eject the Jews from the building they had bought, Peace Now and B'tselem ignored human rights and openly advocated the abrogation of the human rights of Israeli Jews to purchase and hold property. In so doing, they lent their support to the racist jihadist view that Jews must be barred from stepping foot in so-called Arab areas.

B'tselem spokeswoman Sarit Michaeli told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday that whether the Jews purchased the building or not was immaterial. In her words, "Our opposition in principle is that these settlements should be evacuated anyway and that there shouldn't be these pockets in Hebron."

She added that "other than watching and making sure that [the sale] was done in a legal way, the IDF has the obligation to make sure that settlers don't take over more areas."

In so arguing, Michaeli gave effective Jewish Israeli support to even more outrageous statements by Israeli Arab parliamentarians. As she claimed that the IDF's job is to fight Jews, Arab MKs Ibrahim Sarsour and Muhammad Barakei participated in the PA's "Jerusalem First" conference in Ramallah. Sarsour called for "Muslims and Arabs" to "liberate Jerusalem."

Sarsour declared, "Just as the Muslims once liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders, so must we today believe that we can liberate Jerusalem. It is not an impossible dream."

Barakei accused Israel of trying to "empty Jerusalem of its Palestinian inhabitants." Calling Jerusalem a "national issue, not just a religious issue," he called on Palestinians to act immediately to "reclaim the city."

As for Hebron, on Tuesday MK Taleb a-Sanaa called for an international boycott of Israel in response to the Jewish purchase and takeover of the building.

The Arab MKs spoke against the backdrop of Israel's first Arab cabinet minister Ghaleb Majadle's refusal to sing the national anthem and the publication of a University of Haifa poll showing that 76 percent of Israeli Arabs believe that Zionism is a form of racism and that 28% of Israeli Arabs deny the Holocaust.

Needless to say, no criminal investigations into possible treason charges have been opened against the Arab politicians.

A CLEAR line connects the Cambridge students, the Americans in Iraq, and the situation in Israel. The leftist-Islamist front is eroding the free world's sense of justice. Rather than assert our liberal, democratic values and defend our freedoms, fearing leftist condemnation, politicians and opinion shapers have permitted themselves to become shackled to ideologies that negate everything for which the free world stands.
Israel, which stands on the front lines of freedom, is duty-bound to stem the tide. But our ignoble leaders have preferred to stop thinking and silently surrender.

This is how a civilization collapses.

Was There Death Before Adam?

http://www.tungate.com/Death_Before_Adam.htm

In this essay, Elder Jones shows how death before Adam makes sense from a scriptural sense. He is not necessarily saying that evolution of man is true or untrue.

Steven E. Jones, BYU Professor

Many LDS students face a dilemma: animal fossils and other evidence seems to show that death occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago. Yet the Book of Mormon and other scriptures speak of the fall of Adam as introducing death into the world. The apparent contradiction troubles many. Nor is the timing of death's entry into the world a minor point, for it strikes at the central doctrine of Christ's atonement, as Elder McConkie succinctly stated the issue:

"Now if Adam did not fall and bring death into the world, there would be no need for the atoning sacrifice of Christ. If there were no atonement to ransom fallen beings and creatures from the effects of the fall, there would be no resurrection, no immortality, no salvation, no eternal life; and if all these things should vanish away, we could discard God himself, and our faith would be vain." [B.R. McKonkie, Mormon Doctrine, Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1966, p. 254.]

"Death began, as far as this earth is concerned, after and as a result of the fall of Adam. There was no death for man or for any form of life until after Adam transgressed. (2 Nephi 2:22; Doctrines of Salvation, vol. 1, pp. 107-120)." [Ibid., p. 185; see also Alma 42:9 and Moses 6:48]

Now, another scholar and defender of the faith states:

"On the other hand, to limit and insist upon the whole of life and death to this side of Adam's advent to the earth, some six or eight thousand years ago, as proposed by some, is to fly in the face of the facts so indisputably brought to light by the researcher of science in modern times, and this as set forth by men of the highest type in the intellectual and moral world.... To pay attention to and give reasonable credence to their research and findings is to link the church of God with the highest increase of human thought and effort." [B.H. Roberts, "The Truth, the Way, the Life."]

Are these views really contradictory as they seem to be? Can we reconcile the scientific evidence of ancient life and death with scriptural proclamations about Adam's fall and the atonement? Or must we choose between them?

I think there is a way to reconcile the fossil evidence with the scriptural evidence regarding pre-Adamic life and death. But before examining this idea let us first consider three models which evidently fail.

One faulty model is that of so-called "scientific creationism," which posits that all living things were created ex nihilo approximately six thousand years ago. As B.H. Roberts correctly observed, this notion flies in the face of established scientific evidence for living things on the earth millions of years ago. Furthermore, the notion was emphatically rejected by Joseph Smith, the LDS prophet:

"You ask the learned doctors why they say the world was made out of nothing; and they will answer, 'Doesn't the Bible say He created the world?' And they infer, from the word create, that it must have been made out of nothing. Now, the word create came from the word baurau which does not mean to create out of nothing; it means to organize; the same as a man would organize materials and build a ship. "Hence, we infer that God had materials to organize the world out of chaos ... The pure principles of element are principles which can never be destroyed; they may be organized and re-organized, but not destroyed. They had no beginning, and can have no end." [Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 350- 352.]

The statement about "pure principles of element" being capable of reorganization but neither destruction nor creation, presages the modern notion of conservation of mass-energy, which became accepted in physics some years after Joseph Smith's 1844 statement above. Clearly, his statement is a point of departure from our Christian friends who espouse "creationism", or creation from nothing about 6,000 years ago. We don't believe it.

A second hypothesis was advanced by B.H. Roberts, who posited that all life prior to Adam was destroyed from the earth, and that Adam and other living things were then transported from another world. The geologic record does show cataclysmic destruction of the dinosaurs, for example, but this did not destroy all life, and in any case took place millions of years before Adam. In short, the geologic record does not support B.H. Roberts' theory.

A third hypothesis suggests that the earth was organized from pieces of other, older planets, so that the fossils derive from them. This interesting picture breaks down when we consider the empirical evidence for geologic times on our earth, including cooling from a molten state and subsequent continental drifts. Strata of fossils and coal fields also argue for an earth bearing life (and death) many millions of years ago. [See William L. Stokes, "Joseph Smith and the Creation," for further criticism of this notion.]

Now let us examine what science and the scriptures each mean by "death". For science, death implies a cessation of regeneration and chemical activity of a physical organism. Although some may wish to challenge the scientific methods of dating fossils, coal deposits, and so on, to me it is clear that this kind of death occurred many millions of years ago. There is no need to deny or ignore the fossil evidence.

But death in the scriptures has a different meaning than used generally in science, meaning a separation of the spirit from the body rather than a cessation of chemical impulses. [Matthew 27:50; Alma 11:42.] Science has nothing to say about the pre- mortal existence of spirits and their placement into physical bodies, since this discussion goes beyond what can be seen. And religion affirms that this is the way things should be during earth-life: we must walk by faith. For those of us who accept the scriptural truth that each person's spirit is a child of God, and that a major reason for coming to earth is to obtain a body, then the idea that death is a temporary separation of spirit from body is understandable and consistent. "Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy" is one of the beautiful scriptures translated by the prophet, Joseph Smith. [2 Nephi 2:25]

Consistent with this definition of death, LDS scriptures define the soul as the combination of spirit and body: "the spirit and the body are the soul of man." [Doctrine and Covenants 88:15.]

Now we are ready to think about the Adam as the first "soul" or the first "man" on earth: "And the Gods formed man from the dust of the ground, and took his spirit (that is, the man's spirit), and put it into him; and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul." (Abraham 5:7) "And I, the Lord God, formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul, the first flesh upon the earth, the first man also; nevertheless, all things were before created." (Moses 3:7)

We see that a body had been prepared -- we are not told in any detail how this was done -- and that Adam's spirit was placed into this body which had been prepared, so that Adam was in the scriptural sense the first soul or man on the earth.

But what does the scripture mean, "nevertheless, all things were before created"? [Moses 3:7] It sounds contradictory. What I am now suggesting, is that the bodies for man and other living things were indeed created or organized from the dust of the earth over eons of time before Adam, but that independent spirits were not placed into the bodies until Adam. Thus, Adam was in fact the first living soul on the earth, and his transgression brought death into the world, that is, a separation of spirit from body. [Moses 6:48] Christ's atonement was then needed to overcome the effects of the fall, so that the body could be restored to the spirit, "and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fullness of joy; and when separated, man cannot receive a fullness of joy." [D&C 93: 33-34.]

Do I posit that plants and animals lived and "died" on the earth before Adam? In the scientific sense of death, yes, but without separate spirits so that death did *not* occur in the scriptural sense. I invite you to re-read the accounts of creation from Genesis, Moses, and Abraham (and listen to the temple account) as I have done, and determine for yourself whether this notion does serves to clarify these accounts and to harmonize the scriptures with the testimony of the rocks, which after all have the same Author.

Now, an apparent weakness in this hypothesis from the LDS point of view is that spirits may be needed to animate any life forms. But notice the language used in describing the creation before Adam:

"And the earth was without form, and void; and I caused darkness to come up upon the face of the deep; and my Spirit moved upon the face of the water; for I am God." [Moses 2:2; compare Genesis 1:2] "And the Gods said: Let us prepare the waters to bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that have life..." "And the Gods prepared the waters that they might bring forth great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters were to bring forth abundantly after their kind; and every winged fowl after their kind And the Gods saw that they would be obeyed, and that their plan was good. And the Gods said: We will bless them, and cause them to be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas or great water; and cause the fowl to multiply in the earth." [Abr. 4:20-22]

These scriptures indicate that the Gods, through that Spirit which moved upon the waters, caused the beasts to be fruitful and multiply, etc., before Adam. Simultaneously, spirits were formed in a pre-mortal existence for all living creatures. These processes took six periods of unspecified length to accomplish. When bodies were prepared after their kind, that is, matching the spirits prepared separately in another realm, then these individual spirits were placed into the bodies, beginning with Adam.

There is a distinct and emphasized change with Adam, for "in the Garden of Eden, gave I unto man his agency" [Moses 7:32]. I suggest that at the time of Adam, independent spirits were for the first time placed in the bodies that had been formed; man now had his agency and no longer was there a need for God to "order" or "cause" growth of the creatures. Before that, the life and progress of living things was guided by God, evidently through the Spirit [Moses 2:2].

Note also that the scriptural language indicates that the waters and the earth were prepared "to bring forth" the creatures. This may provide some insight into the mechanism by which the Gods brought forth living things. I see nothing here out of harmony with scientific observations based on fossil evidences.

Now I hasten to say that I am not here trying to harmonize the scriptures with notions of the theory of organic evolution or of natural selection proposed by Darwin. In fact, many scientists including B.H. Roberts found problems in this theory. It seems pointless to try to reconcile scripture to a scientific theory which is itself in a state of flux as more data comes to light.

On the other hand, there are observations of fossils that show unequivocally that plants and animals lived well over 20,000 years ago, that is, before the time of Adam. If there was a progression of life on earth toward greater complexity, as the fossils show, I have no problem accepting the testimony of the scriptures cited above that this progress was ordered and caused by God. Moreover, this picture seems consistent with our scientific understanding of the laws of nature, that is, an intelligence can cause systems to go "uphill", improving from lower forms of life to much more complex forms, without violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics. LDS scientist Henry Eyring puts it this way:

"I might say in this regard that in my mind the theory of evolution has to include a notion that the dice have been loaded from the beginning in favor of more complex life forms. That is, without intelligent design of the natural laws in such a way as to favor evolution from lower forms to higher forms, I don't think the theory holds water." [Henry Eyring, "Reflections of a Scientist."]

I have re-read the statements of the First Presidency (J.F. Smith, J.R. Winder and A.H. Lund) regarding "The Origin of Man" and do find that the hypothesis here advanced in no way contradicts that definitive doctrinal statement. Their central point was "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, basing its belief on divine revelation, ancient and modern, proclaims man to be the direct and lineal offspring of Deity. ... By His almighty power [God] organized the earth, and all that it contains, from spirit and element, which exist co-eternally with Himself."

The details of the physical creation are not given in scripture. Indeed, why should they be? The Lord gave us the testimony of the rocks and bids us read. [Moses 6:63, D&C 88:77-80]

The Lord said that "all things are created and made to bear record of me... things which are on the earth, and things which are in the earth, and things which are under the earth, both above and beneath: all things bear record of me." [Moses 6:63] If this is true, do not the fossils in the earth also testify of their Creator? I find it so.

To me, the fossils speak of a God who caused the earth to bring forth bodies for us over millions of years. This seems like a very long time to us now; but God views time differently. [Psalms 90:4] No doubt this same "natural-law" pattern was also used for other worlds like earth. Meanwhile, our spirits lived in a separate sphere for eons of time with our Heavenly Parents. Finally, when all was ready, independent spirits of all living things were placed in those bodies to undergo an earth experience, beginning with Adam. This view gives an appreciation for the preparation of our bodies and their great importance in God's eternal plan for our progression and happiness. We do in fact find a sudden appearance of high intellectual skills such as mathematics (way beyond simple counting) about 6000 years ago, but we are not shown the hand of God in such a way that we are overwhelmed. After all, we are here to be tested. We must walk by faith.

Bush, al-Qaeda and Saddam

by Lucy Komisar

From A Game as Old as Empire
Summary highlights from Chapter 4: "The BCCI Game: Banking on America, Banking on Jihad"

BCCI: How the Reagan-Bush-CIA team used an offshore bank to run guns, finance Islamic jihadists, and launder money.

BCCI enriched the entourage of the Bushes and other Washington influentials. Its biggest shareholders were Saudi and United Arab Emirates sheiks. The money it stole—somewhere between $9.5 billion and $15 billion—made its 20-year heist the biggest bank fraud in history. Most of it was never recovered. The George H.W. Bush administration, in power when the mega-fraud was discovered, went after the bank half-heartedly and only after indictments by New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. It never touched the Persian Gulf money-men who ran the BCCI criminal enterprise. The Bush family and its allies used and then protected the world’s most criminal bank.

The Bank of Credit and Commerce International was founded in 1972 by a Pakistani banker, Agha Hasan Abedi, with the support of Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan, the ruler of the oil-rich state of Abu Dhabi and head of the United Arab Emirates.

The CIA used Islamabad and other BCCI branches in Pakistan to funnel some of the $2 billion that Washington sent to Osama bin Laden’s Mujaheddin to help fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. It moved the cash the Pakistani military and government officials skimmed from U.S. aid to the Mujaheddin. It also moved money as required by the Saudi intelligence services.

The CIA money passed from the U.S. to the al-Taqwa Bank in Nassau to Barbados to Karachi to BCCI in Islamabad. Al-Taqwa—the name means “fear of God”—was not a real bank with bricks and mortar and depositors and services. It was a shell bank set up to finance the jihad.

The BCCI operation gave Osama bin Laden an education in offshore black finance that he would put to use when he organized the jihad against America. And the CIA was well aware of its student’s capabilities. After 9/11, U.S. agents headed straight for al-Taqwa’s operations in Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Nassau and shut them down. Swiss police questioned al-Taqwa’s president, Youssef Mustafa Nada, who was part of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Islamist organization, and they searched his home in Campione d’Italia, an Italian tax haven on Lake Lugano.

One day in 2002 I took the ferry from Lugano, on the Swiss side, to Campione. Nada, a man who appeared to be in his 60s, met me at the dock and drove me up the winding road to his hilltop mansion, where luxurious living rooms decorated with ornate carvings and inlaid furniture reminded me of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. An intelligence source had sent me the confidential Nassau shareholder list of the al-Taqwa Bank that listed members of the bin Laden family. I confronted Nada with the list, and he acknowledged immediately that it was genuine. “The sisters of Binladen? The FBI knows it, Treasury knows it. They wrote and brought the photo of the list.”

BCCI also helped Saddam Hussein, again with the complicity of his Washington friends. The bank funneled millions of dollars to the Atlanta branch of the Italian government–owned Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, which was Baghdad’s American banker, so that from 1985 to 1989 it could make $4 billion in secret loans to Iraq to help it buy arms.

Congressman Henry Gonzalez held a hearing on BNL in 1992 during which he quoted from a confidential CIA document that said the agency had long been aware that the bank's headquarters was involved in the American branch's Iraqi loans.

Kickbacks from 15 percent commissions on BNL-sponsored loans were channeled into bank accounts held for Iraqi leaders via BCCI offices in the Caymans as well as in offshore Luxembourg and Switzerland. BNL was a client of Kissinger Associates, and Henry Kissinger was on the bank’s international advisory board, along with Brent Scowcroft, who would become George Bush Sr.’s national security advisor. That connection makes Bush administration indignation at the Iraq’s “oil for food” payoffs rather disingenuous. Bush and his friends of course knew that Saddam was making payoffs on their watch: their favorite criminal bank was moving the money! And in another pre-9/11 incident of blowback, the weapons bought by Saddam with BNL funds were used during the Gulf War against Americans and their allies.

Not content with aiding Saddam Hussein, the Reaganites decided to arm Iran as well. A Pakistani arms dealer, Arif Durrani, said that during the Reagan and Bush administrations the CIA used BCCI to finance shipments of Hawk missiles to Iran to promote stalemate in the Iran–Iraq War. BCCI’s largest borrower was the Gulf Group, the family company of Mustapha Gokal, financial advisor to radical Islamist Ayatollah Khomeini. BCCI gave the Gulf Group unsecured loans of $800 million—more than two-thirds its total capital—and the Gokal company provided Iran with war material, food and drugs.

BCCI’s major investors were powerful sheiks and families in the Middle East. Abu Dhabi Sheik Zayed and his family paid no more than $500,000, but they were the owners of record of almost one-quarter of the bank’s shares. A large part of the investment was risk-free—with guaranteed rates of return and buy-back arrangements. Sheik Kamal Adham, brother-in-law of the late Saudi King Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence from 1963 to 1979, and the CIA’s liaison in the area, became one of BCCI’s largest shareholders. George Bush Sr. knew Adham from his time running the CIA in 1975. Another investor was Prince Turki bin Faisal al-Saud, who succeeded Adham as Saudi intelligence chief.

The family of Khalid Salem bin Mahfouz, owner of the National Commercial Bank, the largest bank in Saudi Arabia, banker to King Fahd and other members of the ruling family, bought 20 to 30 percent of the stock for nearly $1 billion. Khalid was put on the board of directors. The family got $176 million in loans from BCCI.

The Arabs’ interest in the bank was more than financial. A classified CIA memo on BCCI in the mid-80s said that “its principal shareholders are among the power elite of the Middle East, including the rulers of Dubai and the United Arab Emirates, and several influential Saudi Arabians. They are less interested in profitability than in promoting the Muslim cause.”

The Bushes’ links to the bank passed through Texas businessman James R. Bath to bin Mahfouz. Bath invested money in the United States on behalf of bin Mahfouz and with a third partner, Ghaith Pharaon (a Saudi Harvard MBA), shared ownership of Houston’s Main Bank. In 1976, when Bush was the head of the CIA, the agency sold some of the planes of Air America, a secret “proprietary” it used during the Vietnam War, to Skyway, a company owned by Bath and bin Mahfouz. Bath then helped finance George W. Bush’s oil company, Arbusto Energy Inc., in 1979 and 1980.

When Harken Energy Corp., which had absorbed Arbusto (by then merged with Spectrum 7 Energy), got into financial trouble in 1987, Stephens helped it secure $25 million financing from the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS). As part of that deal, a place on the board, was given to Harken shareholder Sheik Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, whose chief banker was BCCI shareholder bin Mahfouz.

Then in 1988, George Bush Sr. was elected president. Harken benefited by getting some new investors, including Salem bin Laden, Osama bin Laden’s father, and Khalid Bin Mahfouz. Osama bin Laden himself was busy elsewhere at the time—organizing al-Qaeda.

As a result of Morgenthau’s investigation, in July 1992 a New York grand jury indicted Khalid bin Mahfouz and an aide for defrauding BCCI and its depositors of as much as $300 million, using depositors’ money to buy his bank shares. The U.S. Federal Reserve alleged that he breached banking regulations. But bin Mahfouz could not be touched by American criminal law in Saudi Arabia, and Morgenthau dropped the charges in 1993 after bin Mahfouz agreed to settle for $225 million. He and the National Commercial Bank also made a $253 million deal with BCCI’s creditors to resolve their claims. Kamal Adham, the former Saudi intelligence chief, agreed to pay a $105 million fine. The fines in the end topped $1.5 billion, a fraction of the amount that had disappeared, and nobody went to jail. The Justice Department didn’t go after Bush family friend and money source bin Mahfouz at all.

What happen to the billions of dollars sucked out of BCCI and never repaid to depositors? International banks’ complicity in the offshore secrecy system has effectively covered up the money trail. But in the years after the collapse of BCCI, Khalid bin Mahfouz was still flush with cash, and the former financier of George W. Bush became a financier of Osama bin Laden. In 1992, bin Mahfouz had established the Muwafaq (“blessed relief”) Foundation in the offshore Channel Islands, providing it with as much as $30 million. The U.S. Treasury Department called it “an Al-Qaeda front that receives funding from wealthy Saudi businessmen.”

His $21 billion National Commercial Bank was the world’s largest private bank. NCB was affiliated with Inter-Maritime Management SA, a subsidiary of the Bank of New York-Inter Maritime Bank in Geneva. By coincidence, another Inter-Maritime subsidiary, Unimags Trading, had shared a Geneva address with SICO, the Saudi Investment Company run by Yeslam Binladen. SICO is the holding company of the Saudi Binladen Group (SBG), the largest Middle East construction company, which operates though a web of offshore companies and is owned by the extended bin Laden family. Yeslam is the half-brother of Osama bin Laden.

In 1998, the U.S. complained to Saudi Arabia that the National Commercial Bank was funding Osama bin Laden’s activities in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and the Abu Sayyaf guerrillas in the Philippines. Bin Mahfouz was a board member of the Dar al-Mal al-Islami (DMI), the House of Finance of Islam, a Geneva-based bank charged with distributing subsidies of the royal family in the Muslim world. DMI, founded in 1981 and with assets of an estimated $3.5 billion, also had connections to the bin Laden family: its 12-member board of directors included Haydar Mohamed bin Laden, Osama bin Laden’s half-brother.

The connections are interesting. The bank’s president, Mohammed al-Faisal, was also an investor and board member of al-Shamal Bank, which held al-Qaeda members’ accounts. In testimony during U.S. trials of suspects in the 1998 attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, an al-Qaeda collaborator, Essam al-Ridi, recounted how bin Laden transferred $230,000 from al-Shamal Bank to a bank in Arizona to buy a plane to fly Stinger missiles from Pakistan to Sudan. Coming full circle, al-Faisal’s DMI was a major shareholder of al-Taqwa.

In 1999, U.S. investigators looking into the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Africa, found suspicious transfers of tens of millions of dollars from NCB to “charities” believed to funnel money to Osama bin Laden. Some of the “charities” were run by the bin Mahfouz family. The Saudis ordered an audit and confirmed the transfers. Altogether, $2 billion was missing from the National Commercial Bank. The Saudis put bin Mahfouz under house arrest and forced him to sell his shares.

But the money he ran still flowed to Osama bin Laden.

Inside Hizballah

ALEXANDRA AVAKIAN / CONTACT PRESS IMAGES / NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Rice Industry Troubled by Genetic Contamination

by Rick Weiss
WASHINGTON POST

When Fred Zaunbrecher heard in August that the popular variety of long-grain rice he was planning to grow had become contaminated with snippets of experimental, unapproved DNA, the Louisiana rice farmer took it in stride and ordered a different variety of seed for his spring planting.

But when federal officials announced last week that the rice he and many others switched to was also contaminated -- this time with a different unapproved gene -- irritation grew to alarm. The two sidelined varieties accounted for about a third of last year's Southern rice crop, and planting was set to begin within days.

"Everybody's been scrambling for seed," Zaunbrecher said. "I have no idea whether there will be enough or not."

The tremors going through the U.S. long-grain rice industry -- amplified by the decision of many biotech-wary nations to restrict imports of U.S. rice until questions of purity are resolved -- have revealed how vulnerable a $1 billion agricultural sector can be to the escape of something as small as a molecule of DNA. But rice is not the only crop being affected by genetic pollution.

Eleven years after the first gene-altered crops got the go-ahead for U.S. planting, biotech acreage is at a record high. Almost 90 percent of U.S. soy and corn, as well as about 60 percent of U.S. cotton, is spiked with genes from other organisms, mostly to confer resistance to insects and to make the crops immune to weed-killing chemicals.

Yet some of those genes have spread to weeds, making them tougher to control. Biotech crops approved only as animal feed have found their way into human food. And plants engineered to make medicines in their tissues have escaped from their test plots.

"Something's not working," said Al Montna, who grows 2,500 acres of rice in California. "Something's got to change."

Some farmers are pointing fingers at biotech-seed producers, whose carelessness, they say, has allowed experimental DNA to drift into commercial varieties, transforming U.S. rice into a global pariah and sending the industry into its biggest crisis in memory.

Others are fed up with the Agriculture Department, which in the past six months has been scolded in three federal courts for not keeping adequate tabs on the burgeoning business of genetically engineered crops.

Whatever the root cause, the string of recent missteps has sullied an industry that, though long controversial in much of the world, has mostly grown under the radar in the United States.

Advocates say the biotech revolution has improved productivity while reducing the consumption of pesticides and tractor fuel. A report commissioned by industry leader Monsanto Co., released last week, estimated that biotech crops in 2005 allowed farmers to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by 9 million tons -- equivalent to removing 4 million cars from the roads.

But increasingly, farmers are concluding that early assurances that engineered varieties could be kept segregated from conventional crops were overstated.

So far, gene escapes have not had discernible effects on human or animal health, leading some proponents to suggest that the real problems are the strict rules in place from the early days of biotech, when safety was a major concern.

"Most of these issues have been issues of regulatory compliance and quality control," said L. Val Giddings, president of PrometheusAB, a Silver Spring-based biotech consulting firm. "These are important, but they aren't safety concerns."

Giddings and some others say it is time for more discriminating standards that would treat many biotech crops as environmentally friendly instead of criminalizing every smidgen of errant DNA.

Others see things differently.

"For years the industry said, 'This will never get out,' " said Joseph Mendelson III, legal director of the Center for Food Safety, a Washington advocacy group that has won several legal challenges against the Agriculture Department's handling of biotech crops. "Now it's, 'It will get out, but what does it matter?' We can have a scientific debate about that, but in the meantime it certainly matters a lot economically, because so much of the world doesn't want this stuff."

U.S. farmers such as Zaunbrecher have been caught in the middle, fighting off domestic efforts to introduce gene-altered rice until international markets warm to the product. He was going to plant a conventional variety called Cheniere on at least 500 of his more than 2,000 acres, until he learned that it had become inexplicably tainted with a weedkiller-resistant gene created by Bayer CropScience of Research Triangle Park, N.C., that was unapproved for rice.

In its place, he ordered Clearfield131, another non-engineered variety, developed by BASF of Germany. But on March 5, the USDA put out an emergency call to prevent all planting of that variety. Tests had found two laboratory-made genes not meant to be in it, one belonging to Bayer and one that has yet to be fully identified.

"Everybody's frustrated," said Bobby Hanks, who employs about 100 workers at Louisiana Rice Mill near Crowley. "At this point, the industry has very little confidence in researchers to keep these things out of the food stream."

Cynthia Sagers, a plant ecologist at the University of Arkansas, said USDA rules on how to isolate experimental rice from other varieties have not been stringent enough. Textbooks say rice is a self-pollinating plant, meaning its pollen does not drift far. "But stand in an Arkansas rice field at 11:45 on a sunny day," Sagers said, "and you'll see a zillion billion pollen grains blowing around."

Even if the pollen is contained, accidental mingling of engineered and conventional seeds occurs easily, especially when biotech varieties are not restricted to dedicated equipment and distribution streams.

A string of recent court rulings has revealed regulatory shortcomings for other biotech crops. In August, a federal judge criticized the USDA, saying it had "utter disregard" for the risks posed by plantings of biotech corn and sugar cane that the agency had endorsed in Hawaii. Two rulings in February took the agency to task for not fully considering the risks posed by biotech alfalfa and turf grass.

In the absence of stricter federal rules, some states have taken matters into their own hands. When a company recently sought permission to grow rice endowed with human drug-producing genes in California, officials there said okay -- if the company stayed at least 500 miles from the nearest rice field and waited for a special ruling from the state's Department of Food and Agriculture.

When the company sought instead to plant in Missouri, that state's legislature withheld promised research money until the company gave up and moved to Kansas -- a state that welcomed the project in part because no other rice is grown there.

Cindy Smith, deputy administrator in charge of biotechnology regulation at the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, said that oversight has improved considerably in the past two years and that other changes are coming. Central among them is a risk-based system that will streamline approvals of biotech crops that are similar to others with proven safety records while raising the bar for those that pose the greatest risks.

"The nature of our regulatory system is that it has to continually evolve . . . because we're regulating a technology that continues to evolve," Smith said. And though she said she "fully appreciates" the gravity of the occasional failing, Smith noted that the agency has overseen more than 13,500 field tests on nearly 80,000 locations nationwide, the vast majority without a hitch.

Yet in today's global market -- in which biotech food is largely shunned, in part as a matter of "green" philosophy and in part as a covert means of trade protectionism -- that may not be enough, said Montna, the California grower, who is chairman of the USA Rice Federation.

"Everything is about market acceptance," Montna said, noting that the rice federation has pushed for stricter testing of all seed to prevent future surprises.

That would help not only farmers but seed companies, too -- some of which are now suffering from decreased sales because their varieties have become contaminated, and others of which are being sued for misplacing their genes.

"I'm seeing a lot of very, very angry people," said Adam Levitt, a Chicago lawyer who is involved in a class-action lawsuit against Bayer that already includes hundreds of rice farmers and millers.

Bayer spokesman Greg Coffey said the company should not be blamed if the federal rules that it followed are inadequate.

"We do believe our work has adhered to USDA regulatory guidelines," he said, completing the circle of blame that on many farms today is as familiar as the seasons.

What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks? High-Fivers and Art Student Spies

by Christopher Ketcham

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. Furthermore, the available evidence undermines the carefully cultivated image of sanctity that defines the U.S.- Israel relationship. These are all factors that help explain the story's disappearance, and they are compelling reasons to revisit it now.


Torpedoing the FBI Probe

All five future hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which rammed the Pentagon, maintained addresses or were active within a six-mile radius of towns associated with the Israelis employed at Urban Moving Systems. Hudson and Bergen counties, the areas where the Israelis were allegedly conducting surveillance, were a central staging ground for the hijackers of Flight 77 and their fellow al-Qaeda operatives. Mohammed Atta maintained a mail-drop address and visited friends in northern New Jersey; his contacts there included Hani Hanjour, the suicide pilot for Flight 77, and Majed Moqed, one of the strongmen who backed Hanjour in the seizing of the plane. Could the Israelis, with or without knowledge of the terrorists' plans, have been tracking the men who were soon to hijack Flight 77?

In public statements, both the Israeli government and the FBI have denied that the Urban Moving Systems men were involved in an intelligence operation in the United States. "No evidence recovered suggested any of these Israelis had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attack, and these Israelis are not suspected of working for Mossad", FBI spokesman Jim Margolin told me. (The Israeli embassy did not respond to questions for this article.) According to the source at ABC News, FBI investigators chafed at the denials from their higher-ups. "There is a lot of frustration inside the bureau about this case", the source told me. "They feel the higher echelons torpedoed the investigation into the Israeli New Jersey cell. Leads were not fully investigated". Among those lost leads was the figure of Dominik Suter, whom the U.S. authorities apparently never attempted to contact. Intelligence expert and author James Bamford told me there was similar frustration within the CIA: "People I've talked to at the CIA were outraged at what was going on. They thought it was outrageous that there hadn't been a real investigation, that the facts were hanging out there without any conclusion."

However, what was "absolutely certain", according to Vincent Cannistraro, was that the five Israelis formed part of a surveillance network in the New York- New Jersey area. The network's purpose was to track radical Islamic extremists and/or supporters of militant Palestinian groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The former CIA counterterrorism officer who spoke anonymously told me that FBI investigators determined that the suspect Israelis were serving as Arabic-speaking linguists "running technical operations" in northern New Jersey's extensive Muslim communities. The former CIA officer said the operations included taps on telephones, placement of microphones in rooms and mobile surveillance. The source at ABC News agreed: "Our conclusion was that they were Arab linguists involved in monitoring operations, i.e., electronic surveillance. People at FBI concur with this". The ABC News source added, "What we heard was that the Israelis may have picked up chatter that something was going to happen on the morning of 9/11".

The former CIA counterterrorism officer told me: "There was no question but that [the order to close down the investigation] came from the White House. It was immediately assumed at CIA headquarters that this basically was going to be a cover-up so that the Israelis would not be implicated in any way in 9/11. Bear in mind that this was a political issue, not a law enforcement or intelligence issue. If somebody says we don't want the Israelis implicated in this — we know that they've been spying the hell out of us, we know that they possibly had information in advance of the attacks, but this would be a political nightmare to deal with."


The Israeli "Art Student" Spies

There is a second piece of evidence that suggests Israeli operatives were spying on al-Qaeda in the United States. It is writ in the peculiar tale of the Israeli "art students", detailed by this reporter for Salon.com in 2002, following the leaking of an internal memo circulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration's Office of Security Programs. The June 2001 memo, issued three months before the 9/11 attacks, reported that more than 120 young Israeli citizens, posing as art students and peddling cheap paintings, had been repeatedly — and seemingly inexplicably—­ attempting to penetrate DEA offices and other law enforcement and Defense Department offices across the country. The DEA report stated that the Israelis may have been engaged in "an organized intelligence gathering activity", but to what end, U.S. investigators, in June 2001, could not determine. The memo briefly floated the possibility that the Israelis were engaged in trafficking the drug ecstasy. According to the memo, "the most activity [was] reported in the state of Florida" during the first half of 2001, where the town of Hollywood appeared to be "a central point for these individuals with several having addresses in this area".

In retrospect, the fact that a large number of "art students" operated out of Hollywood is intriguing, to say the least. During 2001, the city, just north of Miami, was a hotbed of al-Qaeda activity and served as one of the chief staging grounds for the hijacking of the World Trade Center planes and the Pennsylvania plane; it was home to fifteen of the nineteen future hijackers, nine in Hollywood and six in the surrounding area. Among the 120 suspected Israeli spies posing as art students, more than thirty lived in the Hollywood area, ten in Hollywood proper. As noted in the DEA report, many of these young men and women had training as intelligence and electronic intercept officers in the Israeli military—­ training and experience far beyond the compulsory service mandated by Israeli law. Their "traveling in the U.S. selling art seem[ed] not to fit their background", according to the DEA report.

One "art student" was a former Israeli military intelligence officer named Hanan Serfaty, who rented two Hollywood apartments close to the mail drop and apartment of Mohammed Atta and four other hijackers. Serfaty was moving large amounts of cash: he carried bank slips showing more than $100,000 deposited from December 2000 through the first quarter of 2001; other bank slips showed withdrawals for about $80,000 during the same period. Serfaty's apartments, serving as crash pads for at least two other "art students", were located at 4220 Sheridan Street and 701 South 21st Avenue. Lead hijacker Mohammed Atta's mail drop was at 3389 Sheridan Street—approximately 2,700 feet from Serfaty's Sheridan Street apartment. Both Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, the suicide pilot on United Airlines Flight 175, which smashed into World Trade Center 2, lived in a rented apartment at 1818 Jackson Street, some 1,800 feet from Serfaty's South 21st Avenue apartment.

In fact, an improbable series of coincidences emerges from a close reading of the 2001 DEA memo, the 9/11 Commission's staff statements and final report, FBI and Justice Department watch lists, hijacker timelines compiled by major media and statements by local, state and federal law enforcement personnel. In at least six urban centers, suspected Israeli spies and 9/11 hijackers and/or al-Qaeda­connected suspects lived and operated near one another, in some cases less than half a mile apart, for various periods during 2000­01 in the run-up to the attacks. In addition to northern New Jersey and Hollywood, Florida, these centers included Arlington and Fredericksburg, Virginia; Atlanta; Oklahoma City; Los Angeles; and San Diego.

Israeli "art students" also lived close to terror suspects in and around Dallas, Texas. A 25-year-old "art student" named Michael Calmanovic, arrested and questioned by Texas-based DEA officers in April 2001, maintained a mail drop at 3575 North Beltline Road, less than a thousand feet from the 4045 North Beltline Road apartment of Ahmed Khalefa, an FBI terror suspect. Dallas and its environs, especially the town of Richardson, Texas, throbbed with "art student" activity. Richardson is notable as the home of the Holy Land Foundation, an Islamic charity designated as a terrorist funder by the European Union and U.S. government in December 2001. Sources in 2002 told The Forward, in a report unrelated to the question of the "art students", that "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 [2001]". It's plausible that the intelligence prompting the shutdown of the Holy Land Foundation came from "art student" spies in the Richardson area.

Others among the "art students" had specific backgrounds in electronic surveillance or military intelligence, or were associated with Israeli wiretapping and surveillance firms, which prompted further concerns among U.S. investigators. DEA agents described Michael Calmanovic, for example, as "a recently discharged electronic intercept operator for the Israeli military". Lior Baram, questioned near Hollywood, Fla., in January 2001, said he had served two years in Israeli intelligence "working with classified information". Hanan Serfaty, who maintained the Hollywood apartments near Atta and his cohorts, served in the Israeli military between the ages of 18 and 21. Serfaty refused to disclose his activities between the ages of 21 and 24, including his activities since arriving in the U.S.A. in 2000. The French daily Le Monde meanwhile reported that six "art students" were apparently using cell phones that had been purchased by a former Israeli vice consul in the U.S.A.

Suspected Israeli spy Tomer Ben Dor, questioned at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport in May 2001, worked for the Israeli wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping company NICE Systems Ltd. (NICE Systems' American subsidiary, NICE Systems Inc., is located in Rutherford, New Jersey, not far from the East Rutherford site where the five Israeli "movers" were arrested on the afternoon of September 11.) Ben Dor carried in his luggage a print-out of a computer file that referred to "DEA Groups". How he acquired information about so-called "DEA Groups" — via, for example, his own employment with an Israeli wiretapping company—­ was never determined, according to DEA documents.

"Art student" Michal Gal, arrested by DEA investigators in Irving, Texas, in the spring of 2001, was released on a $10,000 cash bond posted by Ophir Baer, an employee of the Israeli telecommunications software company Amdocs Inc., which provides phone-billing technology to clients that include some of the largest phone companies in the United States as well as U.S. government agencies. Amdocs, whose executive board has been heavily stocked with retired and current members of the Israeli government and military, has been investigated at least twice in the last decade by U.S. authorities on charges of espionage-related leaks of data that the company assured was secure. (The company strenuously denies any wrong-doing.)

According to the former CIA counterterrorism officer with knowledge of investigations into 9/11-related Israeli espionage, when law enforcement officials examined the "art students" phenomenon, they came to the tentative conclusion that "the Israelis likely had a huge spy operation in the U.S. and that they had succeeded in identifying a number of the hijackers". The German daily Die Zeit reached the same conclusion in 2002, reporting that "Mossad agents in the U.S. were in all probability surveilling at least four of the 19 hijackers". The Fox News Channel also reported that U.S. investigators suspected that Israelis were spying on Muslim militants in the United States. "There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks, but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it", Fox correspondent Carl Cameron reported in a December 2001 series that was the first major exposé of allegations of 9/11-related Israeli espionage. "A highly placed investigator said there are 'tie-ins'. But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, 'evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information.'"

One element of the allegations has never been clearly understood: if the "art students" were indeed spies targeting Muslim extremists that included al-Qaeda, why would they also be surveilling DEA agents in such a compromising manner? Why, in other words, would foreign spies bumble into federal offices by the scores and risk exposing their operation? An explanation is that a number of the art students were, in fact, young Israelis engaged in a mere art scam and unknowingly provided cover for real spies. Investigative journalist John Sugg, who as senior editor for the Creative Loafing newspaper chain reported on the "art students" in 2002, told me that investigators he spoke to within FBI felt the "art student" ring functioned as a wide-ranging cover that was counterintuitive in its obviousness. DEA investigators, for example, uncovered evidence connecting the Israeli "art students" to known ecstasy trafficking operations in New York and Florida. This was, according to Sugg, planted information. "The explanation was that when our FBI guys started getting interested in these folks [the art students] — when they got too close to what the real purpose was — the Israelis threw in an ecstasy angle", Sugg told me. "The argument being that if our guys thought the Israelis were involved in a smuggling ring, then they wouldn't see the real purpose of the operation". Sugg, who is writing a book that explores the tale of the "art students", told me that several sources within the FBI, and at least one source formerly with Israeli intelligence, suggested that "the bumbling aspect of the art student thing was intentional."

When I reported on the matter for Salon.com in 2002, a veteran U.S. intelligence operative with experience subcontracting both for the CIA and the NSA suggested a similar possibility. "It was a noisy operation", the veteran intelligence operative said. The operative referred me to the film Victor, Victoria. "It was about a woman playing a man playing a woman. Perhaps you should think about this from that aspect and ask yourself if you wanted to have something that was in your face, that didn't make sense, that couldn't possibly be them". The intelligence operative added, "Think of it this way: how could the experts think this could actually be something of any value? Wouldn't they dismiss what they were seeing?" U.S. and Israeli officials, dismissing charges of espionage as an "urban myth", have publicly claimed that the Israeli "art students" were guilty only of working on U.S. soil without proper credentials. The stern denials issued by the Justice Department were widely publicized in the Washington Post and elsewhere, and the endnote from officialdom and in establishment media by the spring of 2002 was that the "art students" had been rounded up and deported simply because of harmless visa violations. The FBI, for its part, refused to confirm or deny the "art students" espionage story. "Regarding FBI investigations into Israeli art students", spokesman Jim Margolin told me, "the FBI cannot comment on any of those investigations." As with the New Jersey Israelis, the investigation into the Israeli "art students" appears to have been halted by orders from on high. The veteran CIA/NSA intelligence operative told me in 2002 that there was "a great press to discredit the story, discredit the connections, prevent [investigators] from going any further. People were told to stand down. You name the agency, they were told to stand down". The operative added, "People who were perceived to be gumshoes on [this matter] suddenly found themselves hammered from all different directions. The interest from the middle bureaucracy was not that there had been a security breach but that someone had bothered to investigate the breach. That was where the terror was".


Choking off the press coverage

There was similar pressure brought against the media venues that ventured to report out the allegations of 9/11- related Israeli espionage. A former ABC News employee high up in the network newsroom told me that when ABC News ran its June 2002 exposé on the celebratory New Jersey Israelis, "Enormous pressure was brought to bear by pro-Israeli organizations" — and this pressure began months before the piece was even close to airing. The source said that ABC News colleagues wondered, "how they [the pro-Israel organizations] found out we were doing the story. Pro- Israeli people were calling the president of ABC News. Barbara Walters was getting bombarded by calls. The story was a hard sell but ABC News came through the management insulated [reporters] from the pressure".

The experience of Carl Cameron, chief Washington correspondent at Fox News Channel and the first mainstream U.S. reporter to present the allegations of Israeli surveillance of the 9/11 hijackers, was perhaps more typical, both in its particulars and aftermath. The attack against Cameron and Fox News was spearheaded by a pro-Israel lobby group called the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), which operated in tandem with the two most highly visible powerhouse Israel lobbyists, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (itself currently embroiled in a spy scandal connected to the Defense Department and Israeli Embassy). "CAMERA pep- pered the shit out of us", Carl Cameron told me in 2002, referring to an e-mail bombardment that eventually crashed the Fox News.com servers. Cameron himself received 700 pages of almost identical e-mail messages from hundreds of citizens (though he suspected these were spam identities). CAMERA spokesman Alex Safian later told me that Cameron's upbringing in Iran, where his father traveled as an archeologist, had rendered the reporter "very sympathetic to the Arab side". Safian added, "I think Cameron, personally, has a thing about Israel"—coded language implying that Cameron was an anti-Semite. Cameron was outraged at the accusation.

According to a source at Fox News Channel, the president of the ADL, Abraham Foxman, telephoned executives at Fox News' parent, News Corp., to demand a sit-down in the wake of the Cameron reportage. The source said that Foxman told the News Corp. executives, "Look, you guys have generally been pretty fair to Israel. What are you doing putting this stuff out there? You're killing us". The Fox News source continued, "As good old boys will do over coffee in Manhattan, it was like, well, what can we do about this? Finally, Fox News said, 'Stop the e-mailing. Stop slamming us. Stop being in our face, and we'll stop being in your face—by way of taking our story down off the web. We will not retract it; we will not disavow it; we stand by it. But we will at least take it off the web.'" Following this meeting, within four days of the posting of Cameron's series on Fox News.com, the transcripts disappeared, replaced by the message, "This story no longer exists".

What did Mossad know and tell the U.S.?

Whether or not Israeli spies had detailed foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, the Israeli authorities knew enough to warn the U.S. government in the summer of 2001 that an attack was on the horizon. The British Sunday Telegraph reported on September 16, 2001, that two senior agents with the Mossad were dispatched to Washington in August 2001 "to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many as 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation". The Telegraph quoted a "senior Israeli security official" as saying the Mossad experts had "no specific information about what was being planned". Still, the official told the Telegraph, the Mossad contacts had "linked the plot to Osama bin Laden". Likewise, Die Zeit correspondent Oliver Schröm reported that on August 23, 2001, the Mossad "handed its American counterpart a list of names of terrorists who were staying in the U.S. and were presumably planning to launch an attack in the foreseeable future". Fox News' Carl Cameron, in May 2002, also reported warnings by Israel: "Based on its own intelligence, the Israeli government provided 'general' information to the United States in the second week of August that an al-Qaeda attack was imminent". The U.S. government later claimed these warnings were not specific enough to allow any mitigating action to be taken. Mossad expert Gordon Thomas, author of Gideon's Spies, says German intelligence sources told him that as late as August 2001 Israeli spies in the United States had made surveillance contacts with "known supporters of bin Laden in the U.S.A. It was those surveillance contacts that later raised the question: how much prior knowledge did Mossad have and at what stage?"

According to Die Zeit, the Mossad did provide the U.S. government with the names of suspected terrorists Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who would eventually hijack the Pentagon plane. It is worth noting that Mihdhar and Hazmi were among the hijackers who operated in close proximity to Israeli "art students" in Hollywood, Florida, and to the Urban Moving Systems Israelis in northern New Jersey. Moreover, Hazmi and at least three "art students" visited Oklahoma City on almost the same dates, from April 1 through April 4, 2001. On August 24, 2001, a day after the Mossad's briefing, Mihdhar and Hazmi were placed by the CIA on a terrorist watch list; additionally, it was only after the Mossad warning, as reported by Die Zeit, that the CIA, on August 27, informed the FBI of the presence of the two terrorists. But by then the cell was already in hiding, preparing for attack.

The CIA, along with the 9/11 Commission in its adoption of the CIA story, claims that Mihdhar and Hazmi were placed on the watch list solely due to the agency's own efforts, with no help from Mossad. Their explanation of how the pair came to be placed on the watch list, however, is far from credible and may have served as a cover story to obscure the Mossad briefing This brings up the possibility that the CIA may have known about the existence of the alleged Israeli agents and their mission, but sought, naturally, to keep it quiet. A second, more troubling scenario, is that the CIA may have subcontracted to Mossad, given that the agency was both prohibited by law from conducting intelligence operations on U.S. soil, and lacked a pool of competent Arabic-fluent field officers. In such a scenario, the CIA would either have worked actively with the Israelis or quietly abetted an independent operation on U.S. soil. In his 9/11 investigative book, The Looming Tower, author Lawrence Wright notes that FBI counterterrorism agents, infuriated at the CIA's failure to fully share information about Mihdhar and Hazmi, speculated that "the agency was shielding Mihdhar and Hazmi because it hoped to recruit them".

The two al-Qaeda men, Wright notes, "must have seemed like attractive opportunities; however, once they entered the United States they were the province of the FBI..." Wright further observes that the CIA's reticence to share its information was due to a fear "that prosecutions resulting from specific intelligence might compromise its relationship with foreign services". When in the spring of 2002 the scenario of CIA's domestic subcontracting to foreign intelligence was posed to the veteran CIA/NSA intelligence operative, with whom I spoke extensively, the operative didn't reject it out of hand. The operative noted that in recent years the CIA's human intelligence assets, known as "humint" — spooks on the ground who conduct surveillances, make contacts, and infiltrate the enemy — had been "eviscerated" in favor of the NSA's far less perilous "sigint", or signals intelligence program, the remote interception of electronic communications. As a result, "U.S. intelligence finds itself going back to sources that you may not necessarily like to go back to, but are required to", the veteran intelligence operative said. "We don't like the fact, but our humint structures are gone. Israeli intel's humint is as strong as ever. If you have an intel gap, those gaps are not closed overnight. It takes years and years of diligent work, a high degree of security, talented and dedicated people, willing management and a steady hand. It is not a fun business, and it's certainly not one without its dangers. If you lose that capability, well organizations find themselves having to make a pact with the devil. The problem [in U.S. intel] is very great".

If such an understanding did exist between CIA and Mossad with regard to al-Qaeda's U.S. operatives, the complicity would explain a number of oddities: it would explain the CIA's nearly incoherent, and perhaps purposely deceptive, reconstruction of events as to how Mihdhar and Hazmi joined the watch list; it might even explain the apparent brazenness of the Israeli New Jersey cell celebrating on the morning of 9/11 (protected under the CIA wing, they were free to behave as they pleased). It would also explain the assertion in one of the leading Israeli dailies, Yedioth Ahronoth, that in the months prior to 9/11, when the Israeli "art students" were being identified and rounded up, the CIA "actively promoted their expulsion". The implication in the Yedioth Ahronoth article was that the CIA was simply being careless, not trying to spirit the Israelis safely out of the country. At this point we cannot be certain.

Israeli spying against the U.S. is of course hotly denied by both governments. In 2002, responding to my own questions about the "art students", Israeli embassy spokesman Mark Regev issued a blanket denial. "Israel does not spy on the United States", Regev told me. The pronouncements from officialdom are strictly pro forma, as it is no secret that spying by Israel on the United States has been wide-ranging and unabashed. A 1996 General Accounting Office report, for example, found that Israel "conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any U.S. ally". More recently, a former intelligence official told the Los Angeles Times in 2004 that "[t]here is a huge, aggressive, ongoing set of Israeli activities directed against the United States". It is also routine that Israeli spying is ignored or downplayed by the U.S. government (the case of convicted spy Jonathan Pollard, sentenced to life in prison in 1986, is a dramatic exception). According to the American Prospect, over the last 20 years at least six sealed indictments have been issued against individuals allegedly spying "on Israel's behalf", but the cases were resolved "through diplomatic and intelligence channels" rather than a public airing in the courts. Career Justice Department and intelligence officials who track Israeli espionage told the Prospect of "long-standing frustration among investigators and prosecutors who feel that cases that could have been made successfully against Israeli spies were never brought to trial, or that the investigations were shut down prematurely".

The Questions That Await Answers

Remarkably, the Urban Moving Systems Israelis, when interrogated by the FBI, explained their motives for "celebration" on the New Jersey waterfront a celebration that consisted of cheering, smiling, shooting film with still and video cameras and, according to the FBI, "high-fiving" — in the Machiavellian light of geopolitics. "Their explanation of why they were happy", FBI spokesman Margolin told me, "was that the United States would now have to commit itself to fighting [Middle East] terrorism, that Americans would have an understanding and empathy for Israel's circumstances, and that the attacks were ultimately a good thing for Israel". When reporters on the morning of 9/11 asked former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the effect the attacks would have on Israeli- American relations, he responded with a similar gut analysis: "It's very good", he remarked. Then he amended the statement: "Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy [for Israel from Americans]".

What is perhaps most damning is that the Israelis' celebration on the New Jersey waterfront occurred in the first sixteen minutes after the initial crash, when no one was aware this was a terrorist attack. In other words, from the time the first plane hit the north tower, at 8:46 a.m., to the time the second plane hit the south tower, at 9:02 a.m., the overwhelming assumption of news outlets and government officials was that the plane's impact was simply a terrible accident. It was only after the second plane hit that suspicions were aroused. Yet if the men were cheering for political reasons, as they reportedly told the FBI, they obviously believed they were witnessing a terrorist act, and not an accident.

After returning safely to Israel in the late autumn of 2001, three of the five New Jersey Israelis spoke on a national talk show that winter. Oded Ellner, who on the afternoon of September 11 had, like his compatriots, protested to arresting officer Sgt. Dennis Rivelli that "we're Israeli", admitted to the interviewer: "We are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event". By his own admission, then, Ellner stood on the New Jersey waterfront documenting with film and video a terrorist act before anyone knew it was a terrorist act.

One obvious question among many comes to mind: If these men were trained as professional spies, why did they exhibit such outright oafishness at the moment of truth on the waterfront? The ABC network source close to the 20/20 report noted one of the more disturbing explanations proffered by counterintelligence investigators at the FBI: "The Israelis felt that in some way their intelligence had worked out — i.e., they were celebrating their own acumen and ability as intelligence agents".

The questions abound: Did the Urban Moving Systems Israelis, ready to "document the event", arrive at the waterfront before the first plane came in from the north? And if they arrived right after, why did they believe it was a terrorist attack? What about the strange tale of the "art students"? Could they have been mere hustlers, as they claimed, who ended up repeatedly crossing paths with federal agents and living next door to most of the 9/11 hijackers by coincidence? Did the Israeli authorities find out more about the impending attacks than they shared with their U.S. counterparts? Or did the Israeli spies on the ground only intercept vague chatter that, in their view, did not warrant breaking cover to share the information? On the other hand, did the U.S. government receive more advance information about the attacks from Israeli authorities than it is willing to admit? What about the 9/11 Commission's eliding of reported Israeli warnings that may have led to the watch- listing of Mihdhar and Hazmi? Were the Israeli warnings purposely washed from the historical record? Did the CIA know more about pre-9/11 Israeli spying than it has admitted?

The unfortunate fact is that the truth may never be uncovered, not by officialdom, and certainly not by a passive press. James Bamford, who in a coup of reporting during the 1980s revealed the inner workings of the NSA in The Puzzle Palace, points to the "key problem": "The Israelis were all sent out of the country", he says. "There's no nexus left. The FBI just can't go knocking on doors in Israel. They need to work with the State Department. They need letters rogatory, where you ask a government of a foreign country to get answers from citizens in that country". The Israeli government will not likely comply. So any investigation "is now that much more complicated", says Bamford. He recalls a story he produced for ABC News concerning two murder suspects — U.S. citizens — who fled to Israel and fought extradition for ten years. "The Israelis did nothing about it until I went to Israel, knocking on doors, and finally found the two suspects. I think it'd be a great idea to go over and knock on their doors", says Bamford.

The suspects are gone. The trail is cold. Yet many of the key facts and promising leads sit freely on the web, in the archives, safe in the news-morgues at 20/20 and The Forward and Die Zeit. An investigator close to the matter says it reminds him of the Antonioni film "Blow-Up", a movie about a photographer who discovers the evidence of a covered-up murder hidden before his very eyes in the frame of an enlarged photograph. It's a mystery that no one appears eager to solve.

No Apology for Sex Slavery, Japan's Prime Minister Says

by Martin Fackler
THE NEW YORK TIMES

TOKYO, March 5 — Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Monday that Japan would refuse to comply if the United States Congress demanded an apology for his nation's use of foreign women as sexual slaves during World War II.

Japan has already lobbied against a resolution, under consideration in the House of Representatives, that would call on Tokyo to take clearer responsibility for its enslavement of some 200,000 mostly Korean and Chinese women known euphemistically here as "comfort women."

Japan has apologized before and issued a major report in 1993. But there are widespread concerns that Mr. Abe and other conservative Japanese lawmakers may try to water down or reverse such admissions of guilt as part of a broader push to revise their nation's wartime history.

Speaking in Parliament, Mr. Abe reiterated the position of conservative scholars here that Japanese officials and soldiers did not have a hand in forcing women into brothels, instead blaming any coercion on contractors used by Japan's military.

Mr. Abe rejected testimony before a House committee by surviving victims, who said they had been kidnapped by Japanese soldiers to serve in military brothels. He said "testimony to the effect that there had been a hunt for comfort women is a complete fabrication."

He also criticized the proposed House resolution, which blames Japanese authorities for the coercion, saying it "was not based in objective fact, and does not consider the Japanese government's measures so far."

Political analysts said ignoring the House resolution, which is nonbinding, was not likely to drive a wedge between Tokyo and Washington, its most important ally. The fear among Japanese diplomats is that Mr. Abe or other Japanese politicians will overreact and make claims that reinforce the perception in the United States and elsewhere that Japan remains unrepentant for its wartime aggression, analysts said.

"It just looks bad for the prime minister to be getting involved in these sorts of historical details," said Minoru Morita, a political analyst who runs an independent research institute in Tokyo. "Plus, his argument isn't going to sway world opinion anyway. Even if the military wasn't pointing guns at the women, they still could have been coerced."

Apparently in a nod to such concerns, Mr. Abe appeared to pull back from a comment last week denying that the women had been forced at all to work in brothels. On Monday, he told Parliament he supported the 1993 government statement, which acknowledged that the military had at least an indirect role in forcing the women into sexual slavery.

That government had also apologized to the women and set up a fund to pay them compensation, which is set to expire this month.

"There probably was not anyone who followed that path because they wanted to follow it," Mr. Abe said, speaking of the women's entry into military brothels. "In the broad sense, there was coercion."

With that limited concession, Mr. Abe appeared to be trying to defuse a growing diplomatic row with Asian neighbors over last week's denial, which outraged officials and women's groups across the region.

As opinion polls show his approval falling among Japanese voters, Mr. Abe can ill afford to be seen as provoking China and South Korea, much less undermining ties with the United States, political analysts and opposition lawmakers said.

"If Japan doesn't apologize and repent for its past violations of human rights, won't it lose international trust?" a lawmaker from the opposition Democratic Party, Toshio Ogawa, asked Mr. Abe during Monday's parliamentary debate.

Mr. Morita and others said that vowing to ignore the possible House resolution appeared to be an attempt by Mr. Abe to appease his conservative base even as he supported the 1993 statement.

But Mr. Abe's claims that Japan had no official role in its military brothels carried another potential public relations risk, they said: in making such denials, he was in effect dismissing as liars the aging women now coming forward with tearful testimony of their ordeals.

One was Lee Yong-soo, 78, from South Korea, who testified in the House last month that she had been kidnapped by Japanese soldiers at age 16 and raped repeatedly at an army brothel. In a news conference last week in Tokyo, she said Japanese soldiers had dragged her from her home, covering her mouth so she could not call to her mother.

"I want Japan and the Japanese prime minister to apologize," she said. "As a victim who was forcibly taken, as someone who lived through those events, I'm a living witness."

CIA papers reveal 1950s Japan coup plot

by Joseph Coleman
ASSOCIATED PRESS

TOKYO - Declassified documents reveal that Japanese ultranationalists with ties to U.S. military intelligence plotted to overthrow the Japanese government and assassinate the prime minister in 1952.

The scheme — which was abandoned — was concocted by militarists and suspected war criminals who had worked for U.S. occupation authorities after World War II, according to CIA records reviewed by The Associated Press. The plotters wanted a right-wing government that would rearm Japan.

The CIA files, declassified in 2005 and publicized by the U.S. National Archives in January, detail a plot to oust the pro-U.S. prime minister, Shigeru Yoshida, and install a more hawkish government led by Ichiro Hatoyama.

The CIA, in papers released under an act of the U.S. Congress to declassify documents related to Japanese war crimes, said the plotters were led by Takushiro Hattori, a former private secretary to Hideki Tojo, the wartime prime minister hanged as a war criminal in 1948.

Two CIA documents said the plot reportedly had the support of 500,000 people in Japan, and that the group planned to use a contact who controlled a faction inside the National Safety Agency — a precursor to the Defense Ministry — to help launch the coup.

The files reviewed by the AP strongly suggest the Americans were unaware of the plot until after it had been dropped. The plot was developed after the U.S. postwar occupation of Japan ended in April 1952, and the CIA files say American financial support for Hattori's group had dried up by then.

Still, the documentary evidence of the plot illustrates the violent potential of the right-wing, anti-communist cabal that had worked under the U.S. occupation authority's "G-2" intelligence wing in the early days of the Cold War in the late 1940s and early 50s. The CIA operated separately from the G-2.

"Since the beginning of July 1952, plans for a coup d'etat have been initiated among a group of ex-purgees including former military officers. The leader of the group is ex-Colonel Hattori Takushiro," said an Oct. 31, 1952 report, which claimed "this report is the first to mention a definite rightist plan involving violence."

"The original plan of the group was to engineer a coup d'etat, including the assassination of Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru on account of his hostile attitude toward depurgees and nationalists," the CIA document said.

According to the document, Hattori colleague Masanobu Tsuji talked the group out of the coup, urging it to focus instead on countering the Socialist Party. The files say the group then decided it would not stage a coup as long as Yoshida's conservative Liberal Party remained in power.

However, the group still considered violence an option, the files say.

"The group is considering the possibility of some minor assassination attempt in lieu of a coup d'etat," the Oct. 31, 1952 document said.

Hattori and others had worked under the aegis of Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby, the anti-communist G-2 chief. During the occupation, Willoughby was considered the second most powerful American after his boss, Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

Some group members were considered choice war crimes trial targets after the war.

Tsuji had been wanted for involvement in the Bataan Death March of 1942, in which thousands of Americans and Filipinos perished. Another group associate was Yoshio Kodama, a war profiteer and mob boss who was deeply involved in procuring materials — often illegally — for the Japanese military machine.

Neither of them was prosecuted for war crimes.

The Japanese militarists joined U.S.-supported missions to spy on communists in Japan, infiltrate agents into Soviet and North Korean territory, and recruit Japanese mercenaries to protect Taiwan from communist forces in mainland China, declassified documents show.

The CIA files, however, say the operations were riddled with intelligence leaks, hobbled by a lack of competent agents, and deeply compromised by rivalries among the rightists themselves. The agents' top priorities, the documents say, were profits and an eventual resurgence of a militarist Japan.

The assassination plot detailed in the CIA files came at a difficult time for Hattori's group.

The departure of Willoughby from Japan in 1951 as the U.S. occupation wound down deprived the rightists of their leading American patron and paymaster. Meanwhile, Yoshida was openly hostile to Hattori's push for rearmament.

"The government attitude toward the Hattori group has been increasingly antagonistic, and the group has lost influence since the departure of General Willoughby," said a CIA document dated April 18, 1952.

Yoshida was pushed out of office peacefully in 1954 and replaced by Hatoyama, but the ultrarightist dream of resurrecting a militarist Japan never happened. The 1947 pacifist constitution bars Japan from warfare and has never been amended.