Did the "Dancing Israeli" theorists actually read the FBI file?

A few months ago a friend of mine, like myself Jewish, suggested to me that there would be forthcoming indictments of Israeli agents for involvement in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He was convinced that documents slated for declassification would shine a light on an operation by Israel's Mossad that had either prior knowledge or involvement in the plot. 

I would be remiss if I did not admit that for years controversial historical events, what are popularly panned as "conspiracy theories", are a topic that has fascinated me. But I've always had a blind spot for the 9/11 theories mostly because there were so many of them, and it is difficult to distinguish serious questions from spaced out hyperbolic speculation. And sure, I'll also admit that the idea that there could have been a nefarious plot to topple the Twin Towers and pull the USA into wars in the Middle East made me uncomfortable. After all, my own family hails from Israel, I served in its army a few years after 9/11, and I am very friendly with many of its staunchest supporters. I think that we all encounter a situation once in a while where the truth hits too close to home. So for a couple months I ignored my friend's musings and didn't really see any point in following up on them. This was a conscious decision, seeing as I have always been a nerd for obscure trivia and researching bits of knowledge that most would find are irrelevant. 

Climbing into the abyss

I was wrong. Well, let me rephrase that: I was wrong to fear looking into the matter. Not long ago another person posted an Unz Review article speculating that billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein might himself be a Mossad agent. The author was Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer and chair of the Council for the National Interest. Giraldi's work came as a further punch to the gut for two reasons: 1) He is a former foreign policy adviser to Rep. Ron Paul, one of the politicians whose views shaped mine on both foreign and domestic policy. 2) Giraldi's article was devoid of any evidence germane to the case. Much of it was rehashing the previous real Israeli spying scandals involving Arnon Milchan, Jonathan Pollard, and Robert Maxwell. There is a tie-in between Maxwell and Epstein's associate Ghislaine Maxwell who is the late tycoon's daughter, but other than that, the article did not offer any substance. and predicted that Sen. Chuck Schumer would withdraw his call for Secretary of Labour Alex Acosta (Epstein's former prosecutor) to resign if Israel would be implicated in the affair. Well, the fact is that Acosta did resign and the news cycle moved on immediately. Acosta had suggested during a press conference explaining his role that he had been told to back off, because Epstein was linked to intelligence.
Giraldi also claimed in the same article that Pollard had been the most damaging spy in US history. That's a difficult statement to substantiate: Worse than Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs? Worse than Aldrich Ames? And what about the Chinese spies of the 1990s like nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee that acquired ballistic missile and nuclear weapons technology often with the complicity of the Clinton administration?  And for those that want to ask the follow up let me state it clearly, Pollard deserved to be convicted of espionage. According to Seymour Hersh, a pillar of investigative journalism who exposed the My Lai Massacre in 1969-70, he was involved in all sorts of shenanigans at the time including trying to broker arms deals with Taiwan, South Africa and Argentina in order to support Afghan rebels. 

And that's really the issue that should interest everyone: The facts should be made clear before we assign guilt or blame. The criminal acts of spies like Pollard and Ames are criminal acts, whatever the would-be justification. The issues of the consequences on the national and foreign policy level cannot be separated from the underlying act. In the instance of Jeffrey Epstein, commentators like Giraldi are jumping the gun by going after the motive before even knowing the facts. Pollard's acts were illegal, but officials of the CIA during that period (when Giraldi himself was serving) were indicted for perjury in the Iran-Contra Affair, such as Alan Fiers and Clair George. The facts may show in the end that Epstein was indeed a spy, and we cannot rule out the possibility that Israel was his client. But after three years of hysteria over a so-called "Russian collusion" narrative of the 2016 presidential election, shouldn't people wait before jumping to conclusions on the latest big spying case?

Intelligence requires no due process

One of the main themes that we as average citizens tend to forget when considering news relating to the three letter agencies like the CIA, FBI, and NSA is that at least on paper they have serious functional differences.  Unlike the other two the FBI is a law enforcement agency and is subordinate to the Department of Justice. The other two are national security intelligence bodies and are under the authority of the Defense Department. So as Giraldi is well aware officers of the intelligence agencies are able to take liberties with the information that they make public and then escape accountability when their information is wrong. Such was the case during the 2003 Iraq War hearings when the Bush Administration pushed the Niger Yellowcake "intelligence" lead on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq that turned out to be fabricated. The anti-war activists were right in 2003, and Philip Giraldi was among them, so the lesson of trusting premature speculation should be well learned by now. Unfortunately, Giraldi has peddled the same presumption of guilt since 2001 with regards to the "Dancing Israelis". 

This is because Giraldi and the CNI are singularly dedicated to what they perceive as the threat of Jewish and Israeli influence within the American government. For example, they have posted on the CNI website a 1990 speech by former Rep. Gus Savage (D-Ill.) condemning Jewish influence in AIPAC that rambled on-and-on about Jewish money being pumped into his opponent's campaign and how Driving Miss Daisy was "high-technology racism". Savage had been discovered in 1989 to have sexually accosted a female Peace Corps worker while on a visit to Zaire.

In the same vein is Giraldi's update concerning supposedly new evidence concerning the five male suspects arrested on September 11, 2001 known colloquially as "the Dancing Israelis". For many years I'd thought that this was simply a rumour or at most an exaggeration. In reality it is a cautionary tale on the importance of evidence in an accusation. Giraldi's update posits that "far exceeding the Saudi role is the involvement of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad". He refers to newly declassified photos of four of the five men released on earlier this year. But the photos reveal almost nothing, and both Giraldi and Whitney Webb of Mintpress News rightly object to the heavy redactions in the photographs. After seeing the declassified photos I've learned very little, but based on their FBI file, I've come to two personal conclusions.

1. The five men, if they were involved in a covert operation, were possibly the most incompetent secret agents one could assemble.
2. Unless Giraldi or anyone else has some countervailing evidence, the FBI probably concluded that there was no evidence against them beyond immigration, drug possession, or tax avoidance charges.

The individuals in question were all arrested later on September 11 in a white United Moving Systems van truck, and they all claimed to be employees of the moving service.

Rooftop view of nothing

Let's start first with the photos themselves. Some of the images don't show anything of significance. The images include two still frames of four of the men posing along view of Manhattan from the Doric Apartments parking lot. In another one from the same site one of the men points to his right, and in yet a third photo one of the men is holding a lighter at shoulder height to his right, which would mean the northeast direction. Simple geography however would suggest that this away from the World Trade Center, because Union City is located north of lower Manhattan where the Towers were located. The only suggestion that could be made, and this is a reach is that he was gesturing in the direction from which American Airlines Flight 11 came from. The second plane, United Flight 175 flew into the second tower from the south  although it originated like AA11 in Boston (see below). 

The flight paths of the four planes on September 11 (FBI).

And then the real question is why such intrepid "secret agents" would want to put themselves in photos of the attack that they were supposedly there to document with foreknowledge. The testimony of some of the witnesses holds that they were celebrating, slapping high fives and dancing. Such images might have been withheld (only 14 photos were released) but the real question is why one would need a team of five men to take video footage of one event from the same spot, include themselves in the photographs, and make a spectacle of themselves whether on video or in photographs? Why not one photographer? Or one man to film and another to drive and provide lookout? One of the photographs appears to show two of the men kneeling on a surface and smoking. What possible value could this have offered to an intelligence operation?

The MintPress article sources Panamza, a French blog that breaks down the photos one-by-one, however the Twin Towers are not visible in the photographs. In fact, from the photos supplied it seems as if no matter where they stood on the platform the men would be looking at buildings in adjacent Hoboken that would be obscuring parts of Manhattan. Panamza has published before articles claiming that the Charlie Hebdo attack was a false flag run by the Mossad.

The view pasted into the Panamza, MintPress and Giraldi articles is shown below to the right. MintPress alleges that Sivan Kreuzberg, one of the men, is holding his lighter toward the WTC. But the buildings are not visible in the FBI photos, and most conspicuously as shown from their panorama view at the top they would have been facing the Chrysler Building and the Empire State building if they were able to see beyond the Hoboken skyline. I show these building profiles with illustrated stars next to them in the photo.

The obstructed view of Midtown Manhattan in the photographs also raises the question of why the men would choose to film the event from the middle of Union City on top of a below ground level garage as opposed to a point that would be higher. The taller of the two towers stood at 1,368 ft. and was located 3.02 miles from the apartment. This would still be a generous measurement as well since the address where the men were standing was 143.72 ft. above sea level whereas the Twin Towers sat at the time at only 10 ft. above sea level. This means that the men would have been able to gaze (neglecting the curvature of the earth) at a 4.43° angle at the highest point on the tower. Since 2001 the Hoboken riverfront that was between their position and the Hudson River and Lower Manhattan has been rebuilt to include a number of high rise buildings. However, at ground level the photos taken featured more of the elevated road behind them and some surrounding buildings than the skyline of Manhattan, let alone the highest buildings from that angle like the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings.

If anything the photographs released by the FBI would present exculpatory evidence that the men had a poor vantage point from which to observe Lower Manhattan. But the photos are only the most recent evidence. The truth is that if one reads the available evidence that has been public since at least 2015, one would have to wonder who planned whatever these people were doing and how they were chosen. It should be noted that this file includes large portions that are heavily redacted, and therefore like anyone else I would leave it open that there could be evidence that was withheld that could have incriminated the suspects. Reasons for document redactions could include anything from protecting confidential informants, restriction of disclosure of grand jury material (not likely in this case), protecting the identity of individuals and witnesses not charged in the course of an investigation, and run the gamut all the way to disclosure of classified intelligence information. An official letter making a FOIA request to the CIA from the 9/11 Working Group from 2007 names the five men as Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Omer Marmari and Yaron Shmuel. Also named are a group of individuals that are alleged to be Israeli agents, yet aside from Dominick Suter (see below) it is unclear what connection if at all they have to UMS and the five suspects.

The Tale of the File

In his article, Giraldi and MintPress highlight Page 61 from the report, an FBI FD-302 interview transcription filled out on September 13, 2001 in which a witness positively identified the man called No. 5 as having visited the apartment on September 10 at 3 PM. The same interview mentioned that he was speaking to a man after exiting the elevator in a foreign language that the witness could not identify and was not arrested or within the pictures shown to him. This poses a question that neither Giraldi or anyone else has asked until now: Is it possible that Person No. 5 was visiting an acquaintance living at the building the day before the attacks? If so, this could present an explanation as to why the crew were there. The MintPress article even mentions that they had been assisting a resident in moving out of the apartments on September 10.  While MintPress claims that the Israeli government acknowledged the operation, it only cites an archived Jewish Daily Forward article that quotes an anonymous American intelligence source claiming that Israel had acknowledged the operation privately. This is hardly a public admission. MintPress then falsely claims that the man claimed to be a construction worker to the witness. The FBI file from that page shows that he "could not recall the nature of the work the man stated that he was performing". 

The next pages concern the witness that is most likely to have been featured in media reports who spotted the men while peeking out at Manhattan with her binoculars. She also stated that she observed them celebrating and hugging while taking still photographs of the WTC. The witness also reported that the person recording footage was panning the horizon, however this was after the first collision of American Flight 11, so what purpose would he have had to scan an horizon that was empty of any planes? This also contradicts the accusation of foreknowledge as the second plane, coming from the south, would have been invisible from that area.

However as evident from any image available the towers are not visible from that vantage point.  Other witnesses are unable to identify some or any of the individuals in the FBI supplied suspect photos. A female witness interviewed on the 14th stated that she saw Witness No. 4 on the Liberty State Park ferry returning from Manhattan at 12:30 on September 11. If the suspects had shot footage or taken still photographs from Liberty State Park it would have made much more sense. The view below shows the trajectory of an observer from the park on a map towards the WTC along with a photo from the water taxi that could be taken at a distance of less than 1.2 mi. Another witness interviewed on the 16th saw a box truck (not a Chevy van) with "United Moving" on its side after arriving at Liberty State Park sometime after 10AM and observed three men entering the truck after the closing of Ellis Island was announced, one of them with a 35mm camera. This would be consistent with the Canon Rebel 1000 later captured. But by this point the plane impacts would have already long been over. Could the men have been been photographing the Twin Towers? Yes. But so was anyone with a camera in arm's reach. What value would there have been for them to be filming or photographing the ensuing carnage that could not have been gained from network TV footage?

Of course, if one believes the idea that the five men were documenting the attacks for the Mossad it would make perfect sense that they would visit the Park. In fact the towers could be seen from virtually anywhere on the park's open grounds as this website shows. Is it conceivable that a professional group of spies had chosen the Doric Apartment complex with its obscured view on purpose the day before, and not known that it was an inadequate vantage point, and only then decided to drive further down the Hudson River in order to actually capture lower Manhattan? And remember, if they had foreknowledge of the worst terror attack in American history would they have taken the risk of appearing so conspicuously at a site where they took photos of themselves smoking along the Hoboken skyline? On the 14th the FBI also interviewed a person who had been painting an apartment at the Doric Aparments who viewed the men from the window between approximately 9 and 9:10 AM, and the white van AND a brown van in the vicinity. By this point both planes would have impacted the towers. By this point the second plane was either impacting or already had crashed into the south tower. However, this witness does not report seeing any celebration occurring.

Another witness reports that Urban Moving had been mentioned in a phone call by a resident announcing that they were moving out ahead of the end of a lease expiring at the end of September. This witness appears to have been working on the complex's administrative office. She then reported that after requesting licenses from Urban Moving it was promptly supplied. 

Amateur behaviour

A major issue that neither Giraldi nor any of the other accusatory sources never address is the reckless conduct of the supposed surveillance team on top of the already mentioned celebrations and presence of members in photos, pointing in the wrong direction, choosing a poor vantage point, and bringing five people to do a job for which two would have been sufficient. When they were caught, the team members apparently had three passports in the Chevy van, including an expired one. Two of the men, Paul and Sivan Kurzberg, are according to every account brothers. The choice of using two blood relatives on the same team in any illegal or covert enterprise carries serious risk, as the arrest of one or both can lead to a confession by one in order to spare a penalty for the other.

According to the FBI report of the search of the vehicle no video camera was found, and the only camera found was the 35mm Canon Rebel 2000. It is possible that the group ditched the video camera at some point during their travels that day, or that it was misplaced or disposed of between their arrest and the search, but it has never been seen since the day the men were arrested.

In an interview of one of the subjects under detention in Brooklyn on September 20 he confessed to having the phone number of a Moroccan hashish dealer (it is unclear whether he is a Moroccan living in New York, or perhaps a Moroccan Israeli). In the list of items seized from the vehicle there is included: "Adapted Nesquick drink bottle with spout (hash pipe)". So someone in this group of crack agents sent to film the biggest act of terror in American history with foreknowledge decided to toke up in their work van sometime that week and risk being stopped on a petty drug charge? Other items seized were a two-page letter in Hebrew, a diary book in Hebrew, a book with names and phone numbers, and an envelope postmarked from Charlotte to Maryland. There was also also a letter of introduction from the Bank HaPoalim branch in Kiryat Ono, Israel to the US Embassy. At a certain point one has to wonder how many absurd risks these men were willing to take of exposure in order to take footage of a terrorist attack from a poor vantage point with drug paraphernalia in their work vehicle.

The probe into United Moving Systems created a lead to another moving company White Glove Movers in Jersey City. There the FBI interviewed some individuals including one that apparently may have been in involved in Israeli intelligence based on the redaction as this person (name and gender undisclosed) reported knowing someone that travels abroad armed. This is the clearest nexus that I could find in the publicly available evidence to an intelligence operation. 

Suter's real dilemma

There are many insinuations made about the true nature of United Moving Systems including by Giraldi that its owner Dominick Suter was operating a front company for an intelligence operation. With the evidence that is available, it is likely that he was very guilty, but not of espionage.

Giraldi cites the fact that he fled for Israel a few days after the FBI obtained a warrant to search his offices in Weehawken, NJ. But the FBI witness reports indicate that regardless of any supposed role in 9-11 UMS was at the very least violating tax and labour laws in the state. A female witness interviewed on the 16th claimed that the owner of UMS (Suter) had between 20 and 30 foreign men from Poland, Ukraine, and Israel working for him with tourist (visitor) visas. It is illegal to work in the United States as a tourist without a non-immigrant work visa. The witness explicitly said that Suter would pay below minimum wage in cash and often refuse to pay his employees knowing that they have no legal recourse due to their immigration status. According to USCIS' website employers that violated the laws of verifying identity and employment authorization and filling out I-9 forms could face civil or criminal penalties. The same witness claimed that Suter used a service that would provide for his employees Florida driver's licenses within one day for $400 or $500. This disclosure by a witness would have given the FBI and IN&S (now ICE) probable cause to raid Suter's business. 

Also, as registered multiple times in the FBI file, one of the suspects was caught with over $4,000 in cash in his sock. For paying employees under the table Suter would have been liable for back taxes and possible criminal charges for tax evasion that would have resulted in up to five years in federal prison and a fine of $250 thousand.  Since 9/11 there have been various reports of Suter visiting the United States again, mostly on sites speculating about the Mossad's role in the terror attacks. His first name is variously spelled Dominic, Dominik, and Dominick. 

Open questions

The transparency of the 9/11 Commission Report has always been at issue with citizen observers and journalists alike, and it ignored numerous legitimate lines of inquiry. The chair of the commission, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, had no real investigative experience and had served in state government since 1972, but did have an affiliation with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a civilian organization that has acted often to advocate for regime change abroad. One of the other GOP Commission members, former Illinois Gov. James Thompson, was a lobbyist for both United and American Airlines. Anthony Cordesman, a national security analyst and Council on Foreign Relations member with experience dating to the early 1970s and hardly a counterculture figure himself, claimed in 2004 that the Commission Report neglected many topics and included paragraphs of "generalities or cliches with absolutely no operating content at all". Thanks to the hasty and papered over work of the commission the 9/11 Truth Movement was ignited with plenty of kindling as Americans rightly exercised their natural instinct of skepticism.
But skepticism has to give way to logical deduction, and what Giraldi and others do is pretend that this mystery is as of yet completely unsolved. Yes, there are gaps in the informational profile of the "five dancing Israelis" but that does not mean we disregard the available evidence. This analysis isn't meant to suggest that the skepticism about the events of 9/11 or the role of other foreign governments (whether Israel, Saudi Arabia or any other) are without merit and that we should trust the official version of events blindly. Indeed, it is difficult to read the FBI information coherently with all of the text redacted. The conclusion that I reached pertains specifically to the five men arrested in East Rutherford, NJ on September 11 and the observations made by the witnesses that day. It is difficult to put any method to the madness of such a poorly executed "plan", and therefore I would suggest that supporters of this theory are either deceiving themselves or deliberately supporting a lie based on their own personal interest. 

UPDATE 9-23-2019:
A couple of new details have been clarified since originally writing this. 

• Whitney Webb (like myself) incorrectly asserted that the photos were taken at the Doric Apartments, whereas many of them were taken on the roof of UMS' warehouse at 3 18th Street Weehawken, NJ. However this view presents an even worse vantage point than the Doric.
• There was no hash pipe in the work van, but rather a print photograph of one that was used in order to sustain their charge that several fund transfer documents found were tied to small recreational drug transactions.