Antiwar.com Blog

A new piece by the talented Christopher Ketcham in Counterpunch relates a story well-known to longtime readers of Antiwar.com: we were, after all, the first to write about the Israeli connection to the events of 9/11. A month later, Carl Cameron came out with his famous four-part series which opened with these chilling words:

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. 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.’

Ketcham, author of a previous piece detailing the “Israeli art student” phenomenon, offers up intriguing new insights and information from inside sources about the story that won’t die — in spite of repeated attempts by the Lobby to quash it. Amy Goodman interviews Ketcham, Alexander Cockburn, and Forward reporter Marc Perelman (one of the first to break this story in 2002).

Easily the most interesting aspect of Ketcham’s story is his description of the five Israelis, employees of a Weehawken, New Jersey, moving company, who were observed, on the morning of 9/11, cheering and laughing in the parking lot of Liberty State Park, overlooking the Hudson — and with a clear view of the burning twin towers. A radio alert went out to police officers, and the white 2000 Chevie van they were in was spotted shortly afterwards, and apprehended. As Ketcham relates: 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.’

Ketcham cites a former CIA counter-terrorism expert as saying:

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,” avers Ketcham, “investigators wanted to know exactly what the men were expecting when they got there.”

Indeed. This story was originally written as a follow-up to Ketcham’s original piece in Salon, and then rejected — an hour before it was to be posted — in the dubious grounds that it reported “nothing new.” Then The Nation was supposed to publish it, but backed down at the last moment. Ketcham’s piece isn’t online yet, but if you want to find out how to get a copy (yes, on dead tree!), go here.

(I wrote a short book, The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection, published in 2003. Go buy it. And you might want to check out Antiwar.com’s archive of documentary materials in our “Israeli Art Students Files.”)

Antiwar Radio: Jon Basil Utley

Journalist Jon Basil Utley talks about the anti-Communist legacy of his mother Freda, who lost China, his post-Cold War break with the pro-empire “conservative” movement, the Armageddon Lobby and some of the possible consequences of a war against Iran.

MP3 here. (29:34)

Jon Basil Utley is associate publisher of The American Conservative and Robert A. Taft Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. A former correspondent for Knight Ridder in South America, Utley has written for the Harvard Business Review on foreign nationalism and was for 17 years a commentator on the Voice of America. He is director of Americans Against World Empire.

Antiwar Radio: Anthony Gregory

The Independent Institute‘s Anthony Gregory discusses the Left, Right, Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, libertarians, war and a State out of control.

MP3 here. (29:45)

Anthony Gregory is a research analyst at the Independent Institute, a public policy research organization that analyzes government policy and suggests nonpartisan, peaceful, free-market solutions to today’s social and political ills. He is also a policy advisor to The Future of Freedom Foundation, a guest editor for Strike the Root, and a columnist for LewRockwell.com.

Antiwar Radio: Tony Swindell

Vietnam veteran and newspaper editor Tony Swindell tells the story (he was there that day) of Hugh Thompson and the My Lai massacre, how the Army destroyed Thompson for his heroic actions, the terrible fact that his predictions about Iraq have come true, his open letter to U.S. soldiers “The Looming Shadow of Nuremberg,” and the case of Lt. Ehren Watada.

MP3 here. (17:53)

Antiwar Radio: Martin Smith

PBS Frontline producer Martin Smith explains U.S. Army’s training of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution’s Badr Corps and the problems this creates for the American mission to train a national army before withdrawal – the subject of his upcoming documentary “Gangs of Iraq” for Frontline.

MP3 here. (29:09)

Martin Smith is a leading documentary producer with over 30 years experience in television. He has won every major television award, including two Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Gold Batons. Smith has been producing for PBS FRONTLINE since the flagship public-affairs series first aired back in 1983. Since then, Smith has produced scores of documentaries for FRONTLINE and has supervised the production of many more. In 1989 Smith produced a special PBS four-part series, AFTER GORBACHEV’S USSR, with former New York Times reporter Hedrick Smith, for which he won his first duPont-Columbia Gold Baton.

In 1998 he created RAIN Media, an independent production company specializing in current affairs programs. Since that time Smith has produced more than a dozen hours of programming for FRONTLINE, including HUNTING BIN LADEN — first broadcast in 1999, then updated and rebroadcast immediately after September 11. His other recent FRONTLINE reports include: DRUG WARS, which won every major television award, including an Emmy for Outstanding Analysis of a Single Current Story, the George Foster Peabody Award, Chicago International Film Festival Gold Plaque and a Writer’s Guild Award; LOOKING FOR ANSWERS, a documentary about the United States’ failure to understand fully the hatred for America among Muslim fundamentalists; and SAUDI TIME BOMB?, a film about the growing tensions between America and its Saudi ally. In 2003, Smith’s series of films on terrorism won him his second duPont-Columbia Gold Baton, considered the broadcast equivalent of the Pulitzer prize.

Most recently Smith produced THE STORM, which won an Emmy for its look at Hurricane Katrina and the state of America’s emergency response system, and RETURN OF THE TALIBAN, an investigation of the wild tribal areas in Pakistan, which have become a potential new front in the war on terror.

This is Smith’s fourth film about Iraq since the invasion in 2003. Previously, he produced TRUTH, WAR AND CONSEQUENCES (2003), BEYOND BAGHDAD (2004), and PRIVATE WARRIORS (2005). TRUTH, WAR AND CONSEQUENCES won a 2003 Writers Guild Award and the duPont-Columbia Silver Baton.

Antiwar Radio: Bob Watada

Bob Watada explains the situation of his son Ehren, the American officer being punished by the military for refusing to deploy to Iraq and “offending” the military with his public statements, how the State will not let him present a defense in “court” as the State rejects its own Nuremberg standard, the amount of gratitude expressed to him by fellow soldiers and how Americans can be helpful to Ehren’s cause.

MP3 here. (17:26)

From “US Hypocrisy Reaches All-Time High” by Paul Craig Roberts:

“U.S. Army Lt. Ehren Watada took the Nuremberg lesson to heart. He refused to deploy to Iraq on the solid grounds that the war is illegal, which it is under the Nuremberg standard, and that he cannot order troops under his command to commit illegal actions. Watada is correct. If the U.S. general staff had the integrity of Lt. Watada, America and Iraq would have been spared the pointless and bloody conflict. Bush was able to illegally initiate the conflict because the American military behaved exactly as the German military and followed the orders of a criminal commander in chief. Watada must be court-martialed in order to protect Bush and his obedient commanders from war crimes charges.

“By prosecuting Lt. Watada, the U.S. military has demeaned the Nuremberg trials and demoted them to merely the revenge of the victorious. Watada’s prosecution demolishes the illusion that the Nuremberg trials established a civilized principle of international law. All it did was to reaffirm that might is right. Germany’s ideology of domination was a war crime, but America’s ideology of domination is not.”