The Ryan Dawson Refund Guide Part 1

It is undeniable that in the course of the last 60 years going back to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Vietnam War there has been a process whereby each generation of Americans is confronted with an event that causes them to doubt the official version of events and media accounts. This phenomenon can be seen in a wide variety of topics from campus culture (the Duke Lacrosse Case, Rolling Stone's "A Rape on Campus") to scientific data (Michael Mann's "Hockey Stick" saga), to war atrocities (Ghouta chemical attack, Kuwaiti incubators controversy, Pallywood), to alleged spying scandals (Trump-Russia scandal). Media organizations do the work of power brokers to promote a story without regard for establishing the facts before going to print (or the airwaves). In many cases when journalists, alternative media, or individual citizens question the conventional logic to the story they are reprimanded by media figures as "conspiracy theorists" or "extremists". The consequence is that rather than inform the public the media serves as the filter that removes the information inconvenient to its stakeholders from a given story. 

No better instance exists for this issue than the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This was the topic of a debate that I had with self-styled "anti-neoconservative" activist Ryan Dawson this week. Dawson has produced documentaries and published materials alleging a much tighter neoconservative conspiracy surrounding 9-11 with the goal of serving to increase the power and influence of Israel throughout the Middle East and beyond.

However, before addressing that, a bit about the media censorship and official media that creates the environment that encourages ideas like Dawson's. Rather than open a transparent inquiry into not only the causes and motivations of the attack but the physical failures of the structures as well as raised questions concerning the behaviour of the aircraft, President Bush appointed a blue ribbon panel headed by former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean and composed of a bipartisan gaggle of attorneys and elected officials. Panel member Senator Max Cleland (D-Ga.) raged at the lack of access to pertinent documents:

"If this decision stands, I as a member of the commission cannot look any American in the eye, especially family members of victims, and say the commission had full access. This investigation is now compromised . . . This is `The Gong Show'; this isn't protection of national security."

Rather than bring clarity and trust the 9-11 Commission Report would spawn a cottage industry of alternative assessments of the events, some plausible and others fantastical. Due to the culture of complacency within the Beltway as well as the corridors of mainstream media, a person seeking to raise questions concerning any event surrounding 9-11 is labelled as a crackpot and disregarded, without actually addressing the pertinent points. Beliefs and theories, even outlandish ones, are not rebutted through epithets like "truther" and "conspiracy theorist", and people that use this avoidance tactic are being dishonest, even if they are applying it to someone like Ryan Dawson. The challenge to debate Dawson was not in order to smother discussion of 9-11 related anomalies, nor a result of his other statements and opinions, but rather in order to address the numerous baseless extrapolations that he makes in order to convict them in the public eye presumably because he believes that the FBI did not do its proper diligence in pursuing the role of the accused suspects in a much wider conspiracy that led to the Iraq War.

With that out of the way, let us address the topic at hand which is not 9-11 itself but rather an incident that occurred on the same day.  The basic facts are as such:

• At 3:56 PM on NJ Route 3 a van was detained by East Rutherford Police Department belonging to Urban Moving Systems. The van's plate number JRJ-13Y had been provided by a tip to police earlier in the day by a woman that had observed the van's occupants celebrating on the roof of the van at 100 Manhattan Ave. Union City, New Jersey (the Doric Apartments).  Inside were five men: Omer Marmari, Yaron Shmuel, Paul and Sivan Kurzberg, and Oded Ellner.
• The men were accused of having video-recorded the September 11 attacks and were found with a Canon EOS Rebel 2000 still photo camera and three rolls of film. The men attracted further scrutiny, because they were all Israeli citizens living in the US on tourist visas and working under the table for UMS as movers, as well as the military intelligence functions that two of them performed during their military service. 
• During their interrogations the suspects made several statements pertaining to the timeline of their day such as the time of their arrival at work. 
• Images of the men taken on the rooftop of UMS offices at 3 18th St. Weehawken, NJ validated accusations that they had had gleeful facial expressions on the backdrop of Manhattan skyline during the morning of the attacks. However, the images and other behaviour of theirs do not illustrate that they had begun photographing/videotaping prior to the attacks. For a further updated treatment of this, see my prior article from July.
• A second UMS van was arrested on I-80 in Pennsylvania near the junction with Route 88 in the vicinity of Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania at noon on September 12 due to the general Be on the Lookout alert put out by law enforcement.

During the course of our conversation lasting 134 minutes Dawson made several factual misstatements on the topic, despite the fact that according to him he has spent the better part of the past two decades working to get to the truth. Where the six part FBI Report is cited I link it with both the part and page reference.

1. Time of Arrival

Proponents of the "Dancing Israeli" theory allege that at least three of the arrested men had foreknowledge of the attacks. A central point in their case is the claim that the suspects were sighted at the Doric Towers Apartments "as early as 8 AM". This is misleading. There were two witnesses that claim to have sighted a van prior to the collision of American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center 8:46 AM. One of them (FBI Report Part 1, Page 32) said that the van was in the parking lot "as early as 8:00 AM on the morning of the explosions at WTC". However this witness gives no further description for the van. 

A second witness (Part 1, Page 29) claimed to have seen at 8:15 AM a "male individual appearing to have a brown but not dark complexion, round face, dark hair, approximate age 30's" driving the van. This witness did not see any visible passengers and claimed that the van had lettering on it that said "electric supplies". This does not match the description of the UMS van, and suggests that there had been a different vehicle in the lot that morning prior to the arrival. Dawson's protestations during the debate that this van was also owned by Dominick Suter's companies has no evidence. Other witnesses had sighted the individuals in the vicinity of the Doric or within it the day before as Dawson claims, but this was consistent with a further witness statement from a witness (presumably a Doric employee) that affirmed that UMS had had a scheduled move-out of a resident couple on the 10th (Part 1, Page 71). 

Therefore no one had seen any of the men themselves between 8 AM and the collision of the plane into the towers. Sighting a van, and possibly the wrong van belonging to an electrical supplies company is not proof  The main witness labelled "T-1" in the file (Part 5, Page 43) and called Maria by Dawson and media reports stated that she was called at approximately 9:00 AM she was called by a neighbour "T-2" to tell her that the World Trade Center was on fire. Therefore there are no known witnesses that can claim to have seen the suspects themselves prior to 9:00 AM. Another witness (Part 5, Page 25) mentions seeing the men between 9 and 9:10 AM while painting one of the suites at the Doric.

Typical drive time for a journey to the Doric Apartments on a Tuesday morning.
(Google Maps)

2. The Map disagreement

In addition, the van had passed through the EZ Pass station on the Brooklyn end of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel at 7:48 AM (Part 5, Page 51). While I contended that the journey from there it could not have arrived within 12 minutes to the Doric Apartments, our moderator Halsey attempted to time the same journey in Google Maps and received the result of 17 minutes. This was likely because Google Maps initiates a journey based on the hour that the user engages it. Our stream had started at 11 PM likely making traffic much lighter. After recalculating the journey with the input of the time and day of the week, Google Maps estimates such a journey at between 26 and 55 minutes, meaning that a fast arrival time would have been 8:24 AM, nine minutes after the witness that saw the electrical supplies van. 

3. Driving Mr. Al-Omari

A different point of contention that I had with Dawson was that he had alleged that one of the arrested Israelis (Yaron Shmuel) may have been involved through a different moving company (Classic International Movers) with the movement of one of the 9-11 hijackers from Florida to New Jersey, the Saudi imam Abdulaziz al-Omari, and may have been tracking him. He also claimed that he had been living "next door" to hijackers during this exchange. Dawson made this claim on the Know More News YouTube channel with Adam Green on May 13. 

According to various reports Shmuel had established a residence on Drexel Ave. in Miami Beach. In the video Dawson alleges that the move had been to bring al-Omari from Florida to New Jersey. When challenged on this by me he claimed that it was irrelevant whether it was in one direction or the other. But it does matter if his contention is that Shmuel was following the hijackers from one residence to another. The record shows from Moussaoui v. USA (Page 50/75) that Al-Omari arrived in the USA on June 29, 2001, and lived at various addresses in Queens and New Jersey thereafter including at Mohammed Atta's Paterson, NJ apartment. Then on August 9 he departed for southern Florida from Newark and established residency at an apartment in Vero Beach, 151 miles away. When challenged on this Dawson had said that he had meant "other hijackers", but refused to name which ones. It was one of many instances when he refused to discuss specifics of claims that he had made. In order to test his hypothesis, I will specify the known residences (and overnight lodging locations) of the other hijackers based on evidence from the Moussaoui case unless otherwise specified:

• Mohammed Atta (American 11) - New Jersey: Paterson, Wayne, Elmwood Park. Florida: Hollywood, Delray Beach, Boynton Beach. Las Vegas, NV; S. Portland, ME Neither of those towns are "next door" to Miami Beach and they are in Palm Beach and Broward, the two counties north of Miami-Dade County. 
• Abdulaziz al-Omari (AA11) - Woodside, NY. New Jersey: Elmwood Park, Wayne, S. Hackensack. Newton, MA.
• Wail al-Shehri, Waleed al-Shehri, Satam al-Suqami (AA11) all lived in a budget motel in Boynton Beach after arriving in the US on June 21 and spent eight days at another one in Deerfield Beach in August, 2001. Also: Lake Worth, FL.
• Marwan al-Shehhi (United 175) - Florida: Delray Beach, Lake Worth, Deerfield Beach, Hollywood. New York, NY; Las Vegas, NV; Boston, MA
• Mohand al-Shehri (UA175) - Florida: Hollywood, Tampa
• Fayez Banihammad (UA175) - Boston, MA.
• Hamza Al-Ghamdi (UA175) - Florida: Delray Beach, Deerfield Beach. Massachusetts: Cambridge, Boston. New Jersey: S. Hackensack.
• Ahmed al-Ghamdi (UA175) - Paterson, NJ; Falls Church, VA. (from FBI letter to Federal Reserve, Sept. 17, 2001)
• Hani Hanjour (American 77) - Mesa, AZ; Paterson, NJ; Fairfield, CT; Laurel, MD;
• Majed Moqed (AA77) - Laurel, MD.
• Khalid al-Midhar (AA77) - Wayne, NJ; New York, NY; S. Hackensack, NJ
• Nawaf al-Hazmi (AA77) - Laurel, MD; Herndon, VA
• Ziad Jarrah (United 93) - Florida: Venice, Jacksonville, Hollywood, Lauderdale-by-the-Sea. Decatur, GA; Philadelphia, PA; Laurel, MD; Newark, NJ
• Ahmed al-Nami (UA93) - Florida: Delray Beach, Dania.
• Ahmed al-Haznawi (UA93) - Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, FL
• Salem al-Hazmi (AA77) - Paterson, NJ; Laurel, MD; Herndon, VA
• Saeed al-Ghamdi (UA93) - Delray Beach, FL.

As one can see from searching this list of locations, none of the hijackers is documented as having lived in Miami Beach, let alone "next to" Yaron Shmuel. Dawson also claimed to Adam Green that Shmuel moved to New York and was living within three miles of Mohammed Atta, but Atta had never lived in New York. He had an apartment in Paterson, NJ whereas Shmuel lived in Brooklyn. Supposing there had been one, it's also unknown when Shmuel was living there. As a side issue to this Dawson claimed in his 2015 documentary film The Empire Unmasked that it was not Shmuel but rather a certain Hanan Serfaty that had lived "next door" to Mohammed Atta along with his "roommate" Uzi Bohadana. Serfaty was another illegal alien worker who was the foreman for a group of art dealers selling cheap paintings in south Florida. The "art students" (a second Israel-September 11 theory propagated by Christopher Bollyn and others) were investigated in March 2001 by the Drug Enforcement Administration on allegations that they were attempting to penetrate offices of federal agencies after some of them showed up at the workplaces and residences of DEA agents and attempted to hawk their wares. They were all either arrested or deported by April of that year, and it is unclear what they accomplished apart from failing to sell crappy art reproductions. Atta and al-Shehhi moved into their Hollywood, Florida flat in May of that year and left in June. The addresses of Serfaty and the two hijackers were rather close (seven blocks away), but they were not next door to one another and they lived in the area at different times.

Bohadana was not Serfaty's roommate as claimed in his film, but lived in an apartment in the same building starting in March 2001. The only reason he is well-known has nothing to do with UMS or the "art students", but rather because he was arrested on either September 14 or 16 in Mississippi in a rental truck and detained in Madison County Jail, Jackson, MS. He would have his jaw broken by other inmates, allegedly because guards told them he'd been involved in the attacks. He was, like the art students and Yaron Shmuel, a tourist visa holder working illegally in the United States. No one is calling any of these people paragons of virtue, but to accuse them of terror related crimes based on where they lived reeks of a desperate need to settle a grudge rather than get to the truth.

Please check in for Part 2, to be published after the TBA second part of the debate.