The Associated Press is reporting that Scotland Yard informed the Israeli Embassy in London moments before Terror Thursday dawned that attacks were imminent, according to a “senior Israeli official.” Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to show up at a conference slated to take place in a hotel directly above a subway station where one of the blasts went off. AP avers “The warning prompted him to stay in his hotel room instead, government officials said.”
The story is datelined Jersusalem, and so we are talking about Israeli officials in this instance, not Scotland Yard.
I am listening now to Brian Paddock of Scotland Yard saying that no one received any warnings: that the authorities – the London authorities, that is – had no intelligence that led them to believe terrorist attacks were coming. Less than an hour later, reporter Andrea Mitchell is saying that the warnings came “after the attacks,” which would seem rather inexplicable, but there you have it.
We report — you decide. However, one has to wonder why the AP is citing several unnamed Israeli government officials in support of this story. Why did Netanyahu stay in his hotel room instead of attending the conference? If Scotland Yard didn’t warn him, then who did?
This isn’t the first time that Israeli foreknowledge of a terrorist attack against the West has been raised by a reputable source. One has to wonder: why is it that these reports of Israeli foreknowledge come up with such metronomic regularity? With all that smoke, is there really no fire?
In spite of the denials coming in, the question is: is the Associated Press lying? And if the Israelis are disturbed by these rumors — and they may just be rumors — one has to wonder why Israeli government officials seem to be spreading them.
On December 11, 2001, Carl Cameron of Fox News — hardly the nexus of anti-Israeli sentiment in the U.S. — reported the following:
“There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9-11 attacks, but investigators suspect that they Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it. A highly placed investigator said there are ‘tie-ins.’ But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, “evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.”
In The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection, I make the case that the Israelis knew something was afoot, and this alleged warning to Netanyahu — and I emphasize the word alleged quite deliberately — repeats that ominous pattern.
UPDATE: This report from Wales says that Netanyahu was going to attend the conference, “but the attacks occurred before he arrived.” Quite different from not showing up due to a warning. The report goes on to note that “Just before the blasts, Scotland Yard called the security officer at the Israeli Embassy and said warnings of possible attacks had been received, the [senior Israeli] official said.” Here is the first report on the Netanyahu warning, which is attributed to Agence France Presse.
UPDATE II: Stratfor.com, the respected national security-intelligence analysts, has published an account of the alleged Israeli warning that confirms, at least to some extent, the above: that the source of the warning wasn’t Scotland Yard, but rather came from the Israelis themselves. Unfortunately, this is part of their “premium” content, as is available only to subscribers [someone has already posted it on the internet, of course]. Here’s the money quote:
“Contrary to original claims that Israel was warned ‘minutes before’ the first attack, unconfirmed rumors in intelligence circles indicate that the Israeli government actually warned London of the attacks ‘a couple of days’ previous.”
More on this in my upcoming column.