Israeli Art Students as Spys as Art Students as Nothing (Really!)
Sta...@truth.com
as Art Students, sneaking into restricted access DEA and Federal
Buildings and Installations, targetting DEA Agents in the offices and
homes, affecting to be selling cheap art from China? Why the almost
total news-ban from any serious coverage in the US except for a
four-part Fox news feature claiming these bogus 'Students' were
actually spies tailing AlQuida terrorists? And then, a 'sudden'
Washington Post story claiming the whole thiung was a hoax, despite
independent DEA and FBI confirmation of genuine field reports tracking
this group of bogus Art Students around the country, noting some VERY
suspicious and baffling behavior;
The inferences drawn are provocative, that the US is extremely wary of
discovering and revealing anything that suggests these 'students' were
actually spies, OR that Israel had advance knowledge of 9/11, which
would seriously disrupt US-Israel relations; The FBI and DEA are VERY
nervous about this mystery; I DON'T think though that whatever it
really is all about bodes anything GOOD;
I can't forget the USS Liberty and the Jonathon Pollard affair; Who
the HELL is Israel to treat an 'ally' in such a way? Loyal, brave Navy
sailors AND Agents died because of these actions; Israel compromised
our National Security to an extent greater than ANY other act of
espionage that's been conducted against the US, according to Caspar
Weinberger;
AIPAC exerts entirely MUCH too much influence in US policy and on the
mainstream media; As another article posted here recently states, our
legislators have become Quislings; Or as another (unnamed) senator
said just recently, Congress members are all part of the Likkud;
Enough is enough;
Starman;
__________________
fwd//
http://real-info.1accesshost.com/artstudents.html
Salon.com
The Israeli "art student" mystery
For almost two years, hundreds of young Israelis falsely claiming to
be art students haunted federal offices -- in particular, the DEA. No
one knows why -- and no one seems to want to find out.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Christopher Ketcham
May 7, 2002 | In January 2001, the security branch of the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Agency began to receive a number of peculiar reports from
DEA field offices across the country. According to the reports, young
Israelis claiming to be art students and offering artwork for sale had
been attempting to penetrate DEA offices for over a year. The Israelis
had also attempted to penetrate the offices of other law enforcement
and Department of Defense agencies. Strangest of all, the "students"
had visited the homes of numerous DEA officers and other senior
federal officials.
As a pattern slowly emerged, the DEA appeared to have been targeted in
what it called an "organized intelligence gathering activity." But to
what end, and for whom, no one knew.
Reports of the mysterious Israelis with an inexplicable interest in
peddling art to G-men came in from more than 40 U.S. cities and
continued throughout the first six months of 2001. Agents of the DEA,
ATF, Air Force, Secret Service, FBI, and U.S. Marshals Service
documented some 130 separate incidents of "art student" encounters.
Some of the Israelis were observed diagramming the inside of federal
buildings. Some were found carrying photographs they had taken of
federal agents. One was discovered with a computer printout in his
luggage that referred to "DEA groups."
In some cases, the Israelis visited locations not known to the public
-- areas without street addresses, for example, or DEA offices not
identified as such -- leading authorities to suspect that information
had been gathered from prior surveillance or perhaps electronically,
from credit cards and other sources. One Israeli was discovered
holding banking receipts for substantial sums of money, close to
$180,000 in withdrawals and deposits over a two-month period. A number
of the Israelis resided for a period of time in Hollywood, Fla. -- the
small city where Mohammed Atta and three terrorist comrades lived for
a time before Sept. 11.
In March 2001, the Office of the National Counterintelligence
Executive (NCIX), a branch of the CIA, issued a heads-up to federal
employees about "suspicious visitors to federal facilities." The
warning noted that "employees have observed both males and females
attempting to bypass facility security and enter federal buildings."
Federal agents, the warning stated, had "arrested two of these
individuals for trespassing and discovered that the suspects possessed
counterfeit work visas and green cards."
In the wake of the NCIX bulletin, federal officials raised several
other red flags, including an Air Force alert, a Federal Protective
Services alert, an Office of National Drug Control Policy security
alert and a request that the Immigration and Naturalization Service
(INS) investigate a specific case. Officials began dealing more
aggressively with the "art students." According to one account, some
140 Israeli nationals were detained or arrested between March 2001 and
Sept. 11, 2001. Many of them were deported. According to the INS, the
deportations resulted from violations of student visas that forbade
the Israelis from working in the United States. (In fact, Salon has
established that none of the Israelis were enrolled in the art school
most of them claimed to be attending; the other college they claimed
to be enrolled in does not exist.) After the Sept. 11 attacks, many
more young Israelis -- 60, according to one AP dispatch and other
reports -- were detained and deported.
The "art students" followed a predictable modus operandi. They
generally worked in teams, typically consisting of a driver, who was
the team leader, and three or four subordinates. The driver would drop
the "salespeople" off at a given location and return to pick them up
some hours later. The "salespeople" entered offices or approached
agents in their offices or homes. Sometimes they pitched their artwork
-- landscapes, abstract works, homemade pins and other items they
carried about in portfolios. At other times, they simply attempted to
engage agents in conversation. If asked about their studies, they
generally said they were from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design
in Jerusalem or the University of Jerusalem (which does not exist).
They were described as "aggressive" in their sales pitch and "evasive"
when questioned by wary agents. The females among them were invariably
described as "very attractive" -- "blondes in tight shorts or jeans,
real lookers," as one DEA agent put it to Salon. "They were flirty,
flipping the hair, looking at you, smiling. 'Hey, how are you? Let me
show you this.' Everything a woman would do if she wanted to get
something out of you." Some agents noted that the "students" made
repeated attempts to avoid facility security personnel by trying to
enter federal buildings through back doors and side entrances. On
several occasions, suspicious agents who had been visited at home
observed the Israelis after the "students" departed and noted that
they did not approach any of the neighbors.
The document detailing most of this information was an internal DEA
memo: a 60-page report drawn up in June 2001 by the DEA's Office of
Security Programs. The document was meant only for the eyes of senior
officials at the Justice Department (of which the DEA is adjunct), but
it was leaked to the press as early as December 2001 and by mid-March
had been made widely available to the public.
On the face of it, this was a blockbuster tale, albeit a bizarre and
cryptic one, full of indeterminate leads and fascinating implications
and ambiguous answers: "Like a good Clancy novel," as one observer put
it. Was it espionage? Drug dealing? An intelligence game? The world’s
wackiest door-to-door hustle? Yet the mainstream media has almost
entirely ignored the allegations or accepted official "explanations"
that explain nothing. Even before the DEA memo was leaked, however,
some reporters had begun sniffing around the remarkable story.
On Oct. 1 of last year, Texas newswoman Anna Werner, of KHOU-TV in
Houston, told viewers about a "curious pattern of behavior" by people
with "Middle Eastern looks" claiming to be Israeli art students.
"Government guards have found those so-called students," reported
Werner, "trying to get into [secure federal facilities in Houston] in
ways they're not supposed to -- through back doors and parking
garages." Federal agents, she said, were extremely "concerned." The
"students" had showed up at the DEA's Houston headquarters, at the
Leland Federal Building in Houston, and even the federal prosecutor's
office; they had also appeared to be monitoring the buildings. Guards
at the Earle Cabell Federal Building in Dallas found one "student"
wandering the halls with a floor plan of the site. Sources told Werner
that similar incidents had occurred at sites in New York, Florida, and
six other states, "and even more worrisome, at 36 sensitive Department
of Defense sites."
"One defense site you can explain," a former Defense Department
analyst told Werner. "Thirty-six? That's a pattern." Ominously, the
analyst concluded that such activity suggested a terrorist
organization "scouting out potential targets and ... looking for
targets that would be vulnerable."
Post-9/11, this should have been the opening thrust in an orgy of
coverage, and the scoop of a lifetime for Werner: Here she’d gotten a
glimpse into a possible espionage ring of massive proportions,
possibly of terrorists scouting new targets for jihad -- and those
terrorists were possibly posing as Israelis. KHOU’s conclusions were
wrong -- these weren’t Arab terrorists -- but at the time no one knew
better. And yet the story died on the vine. No one followed up.
Just about the same time that KHOU was stabbing in the dark, reporter
Carl Cameron of the Fox News Channel was beginning an investigation
into the mystery of the art students that would ultimately light the
way into altogether different terrain. In a four-part series on Fox’s
"Special Report With Brit Hume" that aired in mid-December, Cameron
reported that federal agents were investigating the "art student"
phenomenon as a possible arm of Israeli espionage operations tracking
al-Qaida operatives in the United States. Yes, you read that right: a
spy ring that may have been trailing al-Qaida members in the weeks and
months before Sept. 11 -- a spy ring that according to Cameron’s
sources may have known about the preparations for the Sept. 11 attacks
but failed to share this knowledge with U.S. intelligence. One
investigator told Cameron that "evidence linking these Israelis to
9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been
gathered. It's classified information."
According to Cameron, some 60 Israeli nationals had been detained in
the anti-terrorism/immigrant sweeps in the weeks after Sept. 11, and
at least 140 Israelis identified as "art students" had been detained
or arrested in the prior months. Most of the 60 detained after Sept.
11 had been deported, Cameron said. "Some of the detainees," reported
Cameron, "failed polygraph questions when asked about alleged
surveillance activities against and in the United States." Some of
them were on active military duty. (Military service is compulsory for
all young Israelis.) Cameron was careful to note that there was "no
indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks" and
that while his reporting had dug up "explosive information," none of
it was necessarily conclusive. Cameron was simply airing the
wide-ranging speculations in an ongoing investigation.
Incendiary as it was, that story died on the vine, too, and the
scuttlebutt in major newsrooms was that Cameron’s sources -- all
anonymous -- were promulgating a fantasy. Reporters at the New York
Times and the Washington Post hit up their go-to people inside Justice
and FBI and CIA, but no one could seem to confirm the story, and
indeed numerous officials laughed it off. Fox got it wrong, the
newspapers of record concluded. And nothing more was heard on the
topic in mainstream quarters.
But inside the DEA, the Fox piece reverberated. An internal DEA
communiqué obtained by Salon indicates that the DEA made careful note
of Cameron’s reports; the communiqué even mentions Fox News by name.
Dated Dec. 18, four days after the final installment in the Fox
series, the document warns of security breaches in DEA
telecommunications by unauthorized "foreign nationals" -- and cites an
Israeli-owned firm with which the DEA contracted for wiretap equipment
-- breaches that could have accounted for the access that the "art
students" apparently had to the home addresses of agents.
It wasn’t until nearly three months after the Fox reports that the
"art student" enigma resurfaced in newsrooms, this time in Europe. On
Feb. 28, the respected Paris-based espionage newsletter Intelligence
Online reported in detail on what turned out to have been one of
Cameron's key source documents: the 60-page DEA memo. The memo itself,
which Salon obtained in mid-March, went no further than to speculate
in the most general terms that the "nature of the individuals’
conduct" suggested some sort of "organized intelligence gathering
activity." The memo also pointed out that there was some evidence
connecting the art students to a drug ring. "DEA Orlando has developed
the first drug nexus to this group," the memo read. "Telephone numbers
obtained from an Israeli Art Student encountered at the Orlando D.O.
[District Office] have been linked to several ongoing DEA MDMA
(Ecstasy) investigations in Florida, California, Texas and New York."
However, Intelligence Online and then France's newspaper of record, Le
Monde, came to a much more definite -- and explosive -- conclusion.
This was the jackpot, they concluded, a proven spy ring run by the
Mossad or the Israeli government. Thus you had Intelligence Online
leading its Feb. 28 piece with the statement that "a huge Israeli spy
ring operating in the United States was rolled up," and you had Le
Monde trumpeting on March 5 that a "vast Israeli spy network" had been
dismantled in the "largest case of Israeli spying" since 1985, when
mole Jonathan Pollard was busted selling Pentagon secrets to the
Mossad. Reuters that same day went with the headline "U.S. Busts Big
Israeli Spy Ring," sourcing Le Monde’s story.
The two French journals came to conclusions that the memo itself
clearly did not. And yet they had unearthed some intriguing material.
Six of the "students" were apparently carrying cell phones purchased
by a former Israeli vice consul to the United States. According to Le
Monde, two of the "students" had traveled from Hamburg to Miami to
visit an FBI agent in his home, then boarded a flight to Chicago and
visited the home of a Justice Dept. agent, then hopped a direct flight
to Toronto -- all in one day. According to Intelligence Online, more
than one-third of the students, who were spread out in 42 cities,
lived in Florida, several in Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. --
one-time home to at least 10 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers. In at least
one case, the students lived just a stone's throw from homes and
apartments where the Sept. 11 terrorists resided: In Hollywood,
several students lived at 4220 Sheridan St., just down the block from
the 3389 Sheridan St. apartment where terrorist mastermind Mohammed
Atta holed up with three other Sept. 11 plotters. Many of the
students, the DEA report noted, had backgrounds in Israeli military
intelligence and/or electronics surveillance; one was the son of a
two-star Israeli general, and another had served as a bodyguard to the
head of the Israeli army.
The DEA report on which the French journals based their investigations
contained a wealth of remarkable tales. To take just a few samples:
On March 1, 2001, a DEA special agent in the Tampa division offices
"responded to a knock at one of the fifth floor offices. At the door
was a young female who immediately identified herself as an Israeli
art student who had beautiful art to sell. She was carrying a crudely
made portfolio of unframed pictures." Aware of the "art student"
alert, the agent invited the girl to an interview room, where he was
joined by a colleague to listen to the girl's presentation. "She had
approximately 15 paintings of different styles, some copies of famous
works, and others similar in style to famous artists. When asked her
name, she identified herself as Bella Pollcson, and pointed out one of
the paintings was signed by that name." Then things got interesting:
In the middle of her presentation, she changed her story and claimed
that the paintings were not for sale, but "that she was there to
promote an art show in Sarasota, Fla., and asked for the agents'
business cards so that information regarding the show could be mailed
to them." Well, where's the show? asked the agents. When's it going
up? Pollcson couldn't say: didn't know when or where -- or even who
was running it. Later it was determined that she had lied about her
name as well.
On Oct. 20, 2000, in the Houston offices of the DEA, a "male Israeli
art student was observed by the Security Officers [entering] an
elevator from a secure area. [The officers] were able to apprehend the
art student before he could enter a secure area on the second floor."
Three months later, in January 2001, a "male Israeli" was apprehended
attempting to enter the same building from a back door in a "secured
parking lot area." He claimed "he wanted to gain access to the
building to sell artwork."
On April 30, 2001, an Air Force alert was issued from Tinker Air Force
Base in Oklahoma City concerning "possible intelligence collection
being conducted by Israeli Art Students." Tinker AFB houses AWACS
surveillance craft and Stealth bombers. The report does not elaborate
on what kind of intelligence was being sought.
On May 19, 2001, two Israeli nationals "requested permission to visit
a museum" at Volk Field Air National Guard Base in Camp Douglas, Wis.
"Approximately ten minutes after being allowed on the base, the two
were seen on an active runway, taking photographs." The men, charged
with misdemeanor trespass, were identified as 26-year-old Gal Kantor
and 22-year-old Tsvi Watermann, and were released after paying a $210
fine. According to the Air Force security officer on duty, "Both were
asked if they were involved in the selling of art while in the U.S.
Kantor became very upset over this, and questioned why they were being
asked about that ... Kantor's whole demeanor changed, and he then
became uncooperative."
So it went week after week, month after month, for more than a year
and a half. In addition to the locations mentioned above, there were
"art student" encounters in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, El
Paso, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, New Orleans, Phoenix, San Diego,
Little Rock, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Arlington, Texas, Albuquerque,
and dozens of other small cities and towns.
"Their stories," the DEA report states, "were remarkable only in their
consistency. At first, they will state that they are art students,
either from the University of Jerusalem or the Bezalel Academy of Arts
in Jerusalem. Other times they will purport to be promoting a new art
studio in the area. When pressed for details as to the location of the
art studio or why they are selling the paintings, they become
evasive."
Indeed, they had reason to be nervous, because they were lying. Salon
contacted Bezalel Academy's Varda Harel, head of the Academic
Students' Administration, with a list of every "student" named in the
DEA report, including their dates of birth, passport numbers, and in
some cases military registration numbers. Not a single name was
identified in the Bezalel database, either as a current student or as
a graduate of the past 10 years (nor had any of the "students" tried
to apply to Bezalel in the last ten years). As for the University of
Jerusalem, there is no such entity. There is the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, but Heidi Gleit, the school's foreign press liaison, told
me that Israelis commonly refer to the school as Hebrew University,
not the University of Jerusalem. (Hebrew University, she said, does
not release student records to the public.)
Still, the U.S. press was uninterested. Just one day after the Le
Monde report, the Washington Post ran a story on March 6 that seemed
to put the whole thing to rest. Headlined "Reports of Israeli Spy Ring
Dismissed," the piece, by John Mintz and Dan Eggen, opened with
official denials from a "wide array of U.S. officials" and quoted
Justice Department spokeswoman Susan Dryden as saying, "This seems to
be an urban myth that has been circulating for months. The department
has no information at this time to substantiate these widespread
reports about Israeli art students involved in espionage."
The Post quoted anonymous officials who said they thought the
allegations had been "circulated by a single employee of the Drug
Enforcement Administration who is angry that his theories have not
gained currency ... [T]wo law enforcement officials said the
disgruntled DEA agent, who disagreed with the conclusion of FBI and
CIA intelligence experts that no spying was taking place, appears to
be leaking a memo that he himself wrote."
An INS spokesman acknowledged to the Post that several dozen Israelis
had been deported, but said it was the result of "routine visa
violations." At the same time, DEA spokesman Thomas Hinojosa told the
Post that "multiple reports of suspicious activity on the part of
young Israelis had come into the agency's Washington headquarters from
agents in the field. The reports were summarized in a draft memo last
year, but Hinojosa said he did not have a copy and could not vouch for
the accuracy of media reports describing its contents."
The Post's apparent debunking was far from convincing, even to the
casual reader. Of course there was no proof that the art students were
part of a spy ring: Intelligence Online and Le Monde had jumped the
gun. However, the real possibility that they were part of a spy ring
could not be dismissed -- any more than could any other theory one
might advance to explain their unusual behavior. With that in mind,
Justice spokeswoman Dryden's assertion that reports of an Israeli spy
ring were an "urban myth" was an oddly overplayed denial. A response
that fit the facts would have been something like "There have been
numerous reports of suspicious behavior by Israelis claiming to be art
students. We are looking into the allegations." Instead, Dryden
appeared to be trying to forestall any discussion of just what the
facts of the case were. Given the political sensitivities and the
potentially embarrassing nature of the case, that was not surprising,
If the whole thing was an "urban myth," like the sewer reptiles of
Manhattan, and if it all led back to one deskbound nut job in the DEA,
then what were those "reports of suspicious activity" that had come in
from agents in the field? Hinojosa's statement about the DEA memo was
suspiciously evasive: If the "media reports describing its content"
(that is, the articles in Le Monde and Intelligence Online) were in
fact based on the DEA memo whose existence Hinojosa acknowledged, then
the "lone nut" explanation offered by anonymous U.S. officials was at
best irrelevant and at worst a rather obvious piece of disinformation,
an attempt to shove the story under the rug. (In fact, the French
articles were based on the actual DEA memo -- a fact any news
organization could have quickly verified, since the leaked DEA
document had been floating around on various Web venues, such as
Cryptome.org, as early as March 21).
To someone not familiar with the 60-page DEA memo, or to reporters who
didn't bother to obtain it, the fact that a disgruntled employee
leaked a memo he wrote himself might seem like decisive proof that the
whole "art student" tale was a canard. In reality, the nature of the
memo makes its authorship irrelevant. The memo is a compilation of
field reports by dozens of named agents and officials from DEA offices
across America. It contains the names, passport numbers, addresses,
and in some cases the military ID numbers of the Israelis who were
questioned by federal authorities. Pointing a finger at the author is
like blaming a bank robbery on the desk sergeant who took down the
names of the robbers.
Of course, the agent (or agents) who wrote the memo could also have
fabricated or embellished the field reports. That does not seem to
have been the case. Salon contacted more than a half-dozen agents
identified in the memo. One agent said she had been visited six times
at her home by "art students." None of the agents wished to be named,
and very few were willing to speak at length, but all confirmed the
veracity of the information.
Despite such obvious holes in the official story, neither the Post nor
any other mainstream media organization ran follow-up articles. The
New York Times has not yet deemed it worth covering -- in fact, the
paper of record has not written about the art student mystery even
once, not even to pooh-pooh it. One or two minor media players did
some braying -- Israel had been caught spying, etc. – and the bonko
conspiracy fringe had a field day, but the rest of the media, taking a
cue from the big boys, decided it was a nonstarter: the Post's
"debunking" and the Times' silence had effectively killed the story.
So complete was the silence that by mid-March, Jane's Information
Group, the respected British intelligence and military analysis
service, noted: "It is rather strange that the U.S. media seems to be
ignoring what may well be the most explosive story since the 11
September attacks -- the alleged break-up of a major Israeli espionage
operation in the USA."
The only major American media outlet aside from Fox to seriously
present the "art student" allegations was Insight on the News, the
investigative magazine published weekly by the conservative Washington
Times. In a March 11 article, Insight quoted a senior Justice
Department official as saying, "We think there is something quite
sinister here but are unable at this time to put our finger on it" --
essentially echoing what the DEA report concluded.
Managing editor Paul M. Rodriguez, who wrote the Insight story and had
quietly tracked the art student phenomenon for weeks before
Intelligence Online scooped him, took an agnostic stance toward the
mystery. "There is zero information at this time to suggest that these
students were being run by the Mossad," he told me. "Nothing we've
come across would suggest this. We have seen nothing that says this is
a spy ring run by the Israeli government directly or with a wink and a
nod or some other form of sub rosa control. Based on what we've been
told, seen and obtained I just don't see the so-called spy ring as a
certain fact. Does that make it not so? I don't know."
Rodriguez added, "I think the investigators' take is this: What were
these 'students' doing going around accessing buildings without
authorization, tracking undercover cops to their homes -- if not for
some sort of intel mission? It's sort of a mind-fuck scenario, if one
were to believe this was a conspiracy by a foreign intel source and/or
a bunch of nutty 'kids' fucking around just to see how far they could
push the envelope -- which they seem to have pushed pretty damn far,
given the page after page after page of intrusions and snooping
alleged."
The Israeli embassy denies the charges of a spy ring. "We are saying
what we've been saying for months," spokesman Mark Reguev told Salon,
referring to the Fox series in December. "No American official or
intelligence agency has complained to us about this. The story is
nonsense. Israel does not spy on the United States."
Whether or not the "art students" are Israeli spies, Reguev's blanket
disavowal is untrue: Israel does spy on the United States. This should
come as no surprise: Allies frequently spy on each other, and Israeli
intelligence is renowned as among the best and most aggressive in the
world. Israel has been at war off and on since its birth as a nation
in 1948 and is hungry for information it deems essential to its
survival. And America's relationship to Israel and support for it is
essential to the survival of the Jewish state. Add these things up,
and espionage against the United States becomes understandable, if not
justifiable.
The U.S. government officially denies this, of course, but it knows
that such spying goes on. In 1996, the U.S. General Accounting Office
issued a report indicating that "Country A," later identified as
Israel, "conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the
United States of any U.S. ally." A year earlier, the Defense
Investigative Service circulated a memo warning U.S. military
contractors that "Israel aggressively collects [U.S.] military and
industrial technology" and "possesses the resources and technical
capability to successfully achieve its collection objectives." The
memo explained that "the Israelis are motivated by strong survival
instincts which dictate every facet of their political and economic
policies."
In the history of Israeli espionage in and against the United States,
the case of Jonathan Pollard was certainly the most heinous. Pollard,
a civilian U.S. naval intelligence analyst, provided Israeli
intelligence with an estimated 800,000 pages of classified U.S.
intelligence information. The Israelis in turn passed the information
to the Soviets, compromising American agents in the field -- several
of whom were allegedly captured and killed as a result. Israel at
first denied, and then admitted, Pollard's connections to the Mossad
after he was arrested in 1985 and imprisoned for life. The case
severely strained American-Israeli relations, and continues to rankle
many American Jews, who believe that since Pollard was spying for
Israel, his sentence was unduly harsh. (Other American Jews feel
equally strongly that Pollard and the Israelis betrayed them.)
Any attempt to understand the official U.S. response to the Israeli
art student mystery -- and to some degree, the media response -- must
take into account both the smoke screen that states blow over
incidents that could jeopardize their strategic alliances, and
America's unique and complex relationship with Israel. The Jewish
state is a close if problematic ally with whom the United States
enjoys a "special relationship" unlike that maintained with any other
nation in the world. But U.S. and Israeli interests do not always
coincide, and spying has always been deemed to cross a line, to
represent a fundamental violation of trust. According to intelligence
sources, the United States might perhaps secretly tolerate some
Israeli spying on U.S. soil if the government decided that it was in
our interest (although it could never be acknowledged), but certain
types of spying will simply not be accepted by the United States,
whether the spying is carried out by Israel or anyone else.
If England or France spied on the United States, American officials
would likely conceal it. In the case of Israel, there are far stronger
reasons to hide any unseemly cracks in the special relationship. The
powerful pro-Israel political constituencies in Congress; pro-Israel
lobbies; the Bush administration's strong support for Israel, and its
strategic and political interest in maintaining close ties with the
Jewish state as a partner in the "war against terror"; the devastating
consequences for U.S.-Israeli relations if it was suspected that
Israeli agents might have known about the Sept. 11 attack -- all these
factors explain why the U.S. government might publicly downplay the
art student story and conceal any investigation that produces
unpalatable results.
The pro-Israel lobby is a vast and powerful force in American
politics; the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, is
the No. 1 foreign-policy lobby and the fourth most powerful lobby in
Washington, according to Fortune Magazine. Michael Lind, a senior
fellow of the New America Foundation and a former executive editor of
the National Interest, calls the Israel lobby "an ethnic donor
machine" that "distorts U.S. foreign policy" in the Middle East. Among
foreign service officers, law enforcement and the military, there is
an impression, says Lind, that you can't mess with Israel without
suffering direct and indirect smears, such as being labeled an
Arabist. Lind, who himself has been virulently attacked as an
anti-Semite for his forthrightness on the subject, acknowledges that
the Israel lobby is no different from any other -- just more
effective. "This is what all lobbies do," Lind observes. "If you
criticize the AARP, you hate old people and you want them to starve to
death. The Israel lobby is just one part of the lobby problem."
Considering the volatility of the issue, it is not surprising that
almost no one in officialdom wants to go on the record for a story
like the art students. "In government circles," as Insight's Rodriguez
put it, "anything that has to do with Israel is always a hot topic, a
third rail -- deadly. No one wants to touch it." Fox News' Cameron
quoted intelligence officers saying that to publicly air suspicions of
Israeli wrongdoing was tantamount to "career suicide." And the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in one of its bloodiest and most
polarizing phases, has only exacerbated sensitivities.
Some of the same pressures that keep government officials from
criticizing Israel may also explain why the media has failed to pursue
the art student enigma. Media outlets that run stories even mildly
critical of Israel often find themselves targeted by organized
campaigns, including form-letter e-mails, the cancellation of
subscriptions, and denunciations of the organization and its reporters
and editors as anti-Semites. Cameron, for example, was excoriated by
various pro-Israel lobbying groups for his exposé. Representatives of
the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and the Committee for Accuracy in Middle
East Reporting in America (CAMERA) argued that the Fox report cited
only unnamed sources, provided no direct evidence, and moreover had
been publicly denied by spokesmen for the FBI and others (the last, of
course, is not really an argument).
In a December interview with Salon, CAMERA's associate director, Alex
Safian, said that several "Jewish/Israeli groups" were having
"conversations" with representatives of Fox News regarding Cameron's
piece. Safian said he questioned Cameron's motives in running the
story. "I think Fox has always been fair to Israel in its reporting,"
said Safian. "I think it's just Cameron who has something, personally,
about Israel. He was brought up in the Middle East. Maybe that has
something to do with it. Maybe he's very sympathetic to the Arab side.
One could ask." The implicit suggestion was that Cameron is a bigot;
in conversation, Safian would later make the same allegation about the
entire editorial helm at Le Monde, which he called an anti-Semitic
newspaper.
Told of Safian's comments, Cameron said, "I'm speechless. I spent
several years in Iran growing up because my father was an
archaeologist there. That makes me anti-Israel?" The chief Washington
correspondent for Fox News, Cameron had never before been attacked for
biased coverage of Israel or Israeli-related affairs -- or for biased
coverage of Arabs, for that matter. Cameron defends his December
reporting, saying he had never received any heat whatsoever from his
superiors, nor had he ever been contacted by any dissenting voices in
government.
Oddly, four days after the Cameron investigation ran, all traces of
his report -- transcripts, Web links, headlines -- disappeared from
the Foxnews.com archives. (Normally, Fox leaves a story up for two to
three weeks before consigning it to the pay archive.) When Le Monde
contacted Fox in March for a copy of the original tapes, Fox News
spokesmen said the request posed a problem but would not elaborate.
(Fox News now says Le Monde never called.) Asked why the Cameron piece
disappeared, spokesman Robert Zimmerman said it was "up there on our
Web site for about two or three weeks and then it was taken down
because we had to replace it with more breaking news. As you know, in
a Web site you've got x amount of bandwidth -- you know, x amount of
stuff you can put stuff up on [sic]. So it was replaced. Normal course
of business, my friend." (In fact, a text-based story on a Web site
takes up a negligible amount of bandwidth.)
When informed that Cameron's story was gone from the archives, not
simply from the headline pages (when you entered the old URL, a Fox
screen appeared with the message "This story no longer exists"),
Zimmerman replied, "I don't know where it is."
The extreme sensitivity of the Israeli art student story in government
circles was made clear to this reporter when, in the midst of my
inquiries at DEA and elsewhere, I was told by a source that some
unknown party had checked my records and background. He proved it by
mentioning a job I had briefly held many years ago that virtually no
one outside my family knew about. Shortly after this, I received a
call from an individual who identified himself only by the code name
Stability. Stability said he was referred to me from "someone in
Washington." That someone turned out to be a veteran D.C.
correspondent who has close sources in the CIA and the FBI and who
verified that Stability was a high-level intelligence agent who had
been following the art student matter from the inside.
Stability was guarded in his initial conversation with me. He said
that people in the intelligence committee were suspicious about my
bona fides and raised the possibility that someone was "using" me.
"Your name is known and has been known for quite a while," Stability
said. "The problem is that you're going into a hornet's nest with
this. It's a very difficult time in this particular area. This is a
scenario where a lot of people are living a bunker mentality." He
added, "There are a lot of people under a lot of pressure right now
because there's a great effort to discredit the story, discredit the
connections, prevent people from going any further [in investigating
the matter]. There are some very, very smart people who have taken a
lot of heat on this -- have gone to what I would consider
extraordinary risks to reach out. Quite frankly, there are a lot of
patriots out there who'd like to remain alive. Typically, patriots are
dead."
In a subsequent conversation, Stability said that the DEA's Office of
Professional Responsibility is currently undertaking an aggressive
investigation targeting agents suspected of leaking the June 2001
memo. The OPR inquiry was initiated as a result of Intelligence
Online's exposé of the DEA document in late February. According to
Stability, at least 14 agents -- including some in agencies other than
DEA -- are now under intense scrutiny and interrogation. Half a dozen
agents have been polygraphed several times over, computers have been
seized, desks have been searched.
A DEA spokesman would neither confirm nor deny the allegation.
"Anything that has to do with internal security, which would include
OPR, is not anything we're able to discuss," the spokesman said.
As for the DEA document itself, Stability said that all information
gathering for it ceased around June 2001. He also noted that "there
are multiple variations of that document" floating around DEA and
elsewhere.
"It was a living, breathing document," Stability said, "that grew on a
week-by-week basis, that was being added to as people forwarded
information. To say this was a coordinated effort would be a stretch;
it was ad hoc. But that document [the DEA memo] didn't just happen.
That document was the result of literally dozens of people providing
input, working together. These events were going on, people were
looking at them, but could not understand them.
"It wasn't until the end of 2000 and the beginning of 2001 that field
agents ran across a series of visits that occurred within a very close
period of time," Stability said. Agents from across the country began
talking to each other, comparing notes. "There was an embryonic
understanding that there was something here, something was happening.
People kept running across it. And agents being who they are, gut
feelings being what they are, they would catch a thread. They'd start
to pull a thread, and next thing, they'd end up with the arm of the
jacket and the back was coming off, and then you'd end up with reports
like you saw. The information, in its scattered form, is one thing.
The information compiled, documented, timelined, indexed, is a
horrific event for some of these people. Because it is indisputable."
"Agents started to realize that people were coming to their homes," he
continued. "If you are part of an organization like this, you tend to
be careful about your security. When something disturbs that sense of
security, it's unnerving. One thing that was understood fairly early
on was that the students would go to some areas that didn't have
street signs, and in fact they would already have directions to these
areas. That indicated that someone had been there prior to them or had
electronically figured where the agents were located -- using credit
card records, things of that nature. This sat in the back of people's
minds as to the resources necessary to do that."
"I will tell you that there is still great debate over what [the art
students’] specific purposes were and are," Stability went on. "When
you take an individual who picks up a group of individuals from an
airport, individuals who supposedly have no idea what they're doing
in-country, who fly on over from a foreign land, whose airline tickets
could in some instances total a value greater than $15,000 -- and who
get picked up at the airport and drive specifically to one
individual's home, which they know the exact directions to: Yeah, you
could say there's a problem here. You don't need to be a rocket
scientist to understand that. The overarching item is that a lot of
work went into going to people's houses to sell them junk from China
in plastic frames."
But to what end? What was the value? What was to be gained? "Unknown,
unknown," Stability said. "You could be anywhere from D.C. to daylight
on that one. Even on our side, you have to take all the stuff and draw
it all out and clean out all the chaff. I will tell you that from
those who are working ground zero [of this case], it is a difficult
puzzle to put together, and it is not complete by any means." Even the
spooks are baffled; they have no answers.
So let’s draw out the chaff ourselves and see if we can at least
speculate. In intel circles, there are a number of working theories,
according to Stability. "Profiling of federal agents is one," said
Stability. "Keeping tabs on other people, other foreign nationals, is
another. A third is that they were working for organized crime --
that's an easy one, and it almost sounds more like a cover than a
reality. The predominant thought is that it was a profiling endeavour,
and from a profiling aspect, also one of intimidation."
You mean this whole vast scheme was a mind fuck, to use Paul
Rodriguez’s elegant phrasing? A psy-ops endeavor to spook the spooks?
Perhaps. As Stability put it, "Almost nothing is wrong in this
particular instance, Mr. Ketcham. In this particular situation, right
is wrong, left is right, up is down, day is night."
Yet for the most part the targeted agents weren’t spooks in the
strictest sense: They were DEA -- cops who bust drug dealers. And that
leads us into Theory No. 1, also known as the Art Student/Drug Dealer
Conspiracy. This theory has a piece of evidence to support it: the
link, mentioned in the leaked DEA memo, between an Ecstasy
investigation and the telephone numbers provided by an Israeli
detained in Orlando. There are "problems" with Israeli nationals
involved in the Ecstasy business, according to Israeli Embassy
spokesman Reguev. "Israeli authorities and the DEA are working
together on that issue," he said. In a statement before Congress in
2000, officials with the U.S. Customs Service, which intercepted some
7 million Ecstasy tablets last year, noted that "Israeli
organized-crime elements appear to be in control" of the
multibillion-dollar U.S. Ecstasy trade, "from production through the
international smuggling phase. Couriers associated with Israeli
organized crime have been arrested around the world, including ...
locations in the U.S. such as Florida, New Jersey, New York and
California."
Miami was cited as one of the main entry points of Ecstasy into the
United States and was specified as one of the central "headquarters
for the criminal organizations that smuggle Ecstasy"; Houston was also
cited for large Ecstasy seizures -- an interesting nexus, given the
large number of "art students" who congregated both in the Miami and
Ft. Lauderdale area and in Houston. "Israeli nationals in the Ecstasy
trade have been very sophisticated in their operations," says a U.S.
Customs officer who has investigated the groups. "Some of these
individuals have been skilled at counterintelligence and in concealing
their communications and movements from law enforcement."
It would thus seem that Israeli organized crime has at least the
capacity to pull off a widespread surveillance and intelligence
operation. The drug connection would also explain the sizable reserves
of cash one Tampa student was handling.
One DEA agent named in the "art student" report told Salon that the
best possible explanation for the affair –- and he admitted to being
utterly baffled by it -- was that drug dealers were involved.
"Why us if not because of the DEA's mission?" the agent asked. "I
mean, what would Israeli intel want with us? Here's another avenue of
inquiry to take: Israeli organized crime is the now the biggest dealer
of Ecstasy in the United States. These students? It was Israeli
organized crime judging our strength, getting a survey of our
operations. What if I wanted to burglarize your building and go
through your files? I'd do a reconnoiter. Get a sense of the floor
plan and security, where the guards are stationed, how many doors,
what kind of locks, alarm systems, backup alarm systems."
The trouble with this theory is the obvious one: In the annals of
crime chutzpah, for drug dealers to brazenly approach drug agents in
their homes and offices may represent the all-time world record. And
what conceivable useful intelligence could they gather that would be
worth the risk? Were the tee-heeing tight-sweatered Israeli babes
pulling some kind of Mata Hari stunt, seducing paunchy middle-aged DEA
boys and beguiling them into loose-lipped info sharing?
Theory No. 2 is that they were all engaged in espionage. This scenario
has the virtue of simplicity -- if it smells like a spy, walks like a
spy, and talks like a spy, it probably is a spy -- but doesn't make
much sense, either. Why would the Mossad -- or any spy outfit with a
lick of good sense -- use kids without papers as spies? And, just as
our incredulous DEA agent noted, what intelligence useful to Israel
could be gathered from DEA offices, anyway?
I suggested to Stability that the operation, if it was that, was
purposely conspicuous -- almost oafish. "Yes, it was," he replied. "It
was a noisy operation. Did you ever see '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." He 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?"
That’s where you enter truly dark territory: Theory No. 3, the Art
Student as Agent as Art Student Smoke Screen. It has major problems,
but let’s roll with it for a moment. This theory contends that the art
student ring was a smoke screen intended to create confusion and allow
actual spies -- who were also posing as art students -- to be lumped
together with the rest and escape detection. In other words, the
operation is an elaborate double fake-out, a hiding-in-plain-sight
scam. Whoever dreamed it up thought ahead to the endgame and knew that
the DEA-stakeout aspect was so bizarre that it would throw off
American intelligence. According to this theory -- Stability's
"Victor/Victoria" scenario -- Israeli agents wanted, let's say, to
monitor al-Qaida members in Florida and other states. But they feared
detection. So to provide cover, and also to create a dizzyingly
Byzantine story that would confuse the situation, Israeli intel
flooded areas of real operations with these bumbling "art students" --
who were told to deliberately stake out DEA agents.
Perhaps. Why not? Up is down, left is right. I nudged Stability on the
obvious implication of the "Victor/Victoria" scenario: If this was a
ruse, a decoy to conceal another operation, what was that other
operation? "Unknown," Stability said.
Then of course there’s Theory No. 4: that they really were art
students. Either they were recruited in Israel as part of an
art-selling racket or they simply hit upon the idea themselves. This
theory is basically the de facto position held by the U.S. and Israeli
governments, which insist that the only wrong committed by the
"students" was to sell art without the proper papers. There are almost
too many problems with this to list, but it's worth mentioning a few:
Why in the world would people try to sell cheap art market to DEA
officials? Why would they almost all use the same bogus Bezalel
Academy of Arts cover story? Why would anyone running such a racket to
make money use foreign nationals without green cards, knowing that
they would quickly be snagged for visa violations? And why did so many
of these itinerant peddlers, wandering the United States on their
strange mission of hawking cheap Chinese knockoff paintings, have
"black information" about federal facilities?
There are other theories. One is that these were spies in training,
newly minted Mossad graduates on test runs to see how they would
operate in field conditions. I asked Stability how hotly the matter
was now being pursued in intel and law enforcement. "Depends on who
you speak to," he told me. "Some people say that it's a dead issue, a
fantasy. Most of the investigations are happening at an ad hoc level.
There are people out there that you couldn't sway off some of the
cases, because that's how dedicated they are."
Apparently, at least some agents in FBI remain quite concerned about
the art student problem. According to several intelligence sources,
including Stability, on Dec. 3, 2001, six separate FBI field offices
simultaneously forwarded communiqués to FBI headquarters inquiring
into the status of the investigation. The FBI agents wanted to have a
"clarification" as to what was going on.
The subject may not be officially dead yet. The art student matter may
be taken up by the congressional committees investigating intelligence
failures leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, according to another
source.
What about the crucial Washington Post article, in which anonymous
federal agents alleged the DEA memo was the work of a disgruntled
employee?
"The Washington Post article was a plant -- that's obvious. The story
was killed," Stability told me. Who planted the story? Stability
claimed the FBI was behind it. "Every organization is running scared,"
Stability added, "because they're afraid of the next shoe to drop.
There are many smoking guns out there, many. So consequently every one
is at a level of heightened anxiety, and when they're anxious they
make mistakes."
Yes, but what are they afraid of? What will the smoking guns prove?
Questions, questions, labyrinthine questions, and the more you ask in
this matter, the fewer get answered. When I called the CIA to inquire
about the agency's March 2001 alert -- an alert that evinced deep
disquiet over the affair -- an official who was aware of the inquiry
told me, "I'll make a recommendation to you: Don't write a story. This
whole thing has been blown way out of proportion. As far as we're
concerned, we reported it, yes, but subsequently it's nothing of
interest to us. And we've just closed the book on it. And I really
recommend you do the same. Let it go. There's nothing here."
Not everyone else in law enforcement is so sure. "There's a lot of
concern among the agents," said the DEA source. "We're investigators.
We're not satisfied when we don't have answers. This is a mystery that
has an answer and it has to be resolved."
Christopher Ketcham is a freelance writer in New York City.
Copyright 2002 Salon.com
Reprinted for fair use only.
fwd//Starman
What's the connection?
Were they:
Spies in training? Profiling? Providing cover in plain sight for
covert operatives? Providing distraction? Conducting Organized-crime
drug intel?
ralph
>
> So, who WERE these people, hundreds of young people from Israel posing
> as Art Students, sneaking into restricted access DEA and Federal
> Buildings and Installations, targetting DEA Agents in the offices and
> homes, affecting to be selling cheap art from China? Why the almost
> total news-ban from any serious coverage in the US except for a
> four-part Fox news feature claiming these bogus 'Students' were
> actually spies tailing AlQuida terrorists? And then, a 'sudden'
> Washington Post story claiming the whole thiung was a hoax, despite
> independent DEA and FBI confirmation of genuine field reports tracking
> this group of bogus Art Students around the country, noting some VERY
> suspicious and baffling behavior;
>
And also, who are all these Israelis selling cellphones in electronics
stores on 42 street? What better cover for spies than selling
cellphones, with bugging devices in them, no doubt.
--
May the Dark One hold you in the fetid hollow of his crotch.
Sta...@truth.com
wrote:
>Sta...@truthfree.net wrote:
(....)
>
>And also, who are all these Israelis selling cellphones in electronics
>stores on 42 street? What better cover for spies than selling
>cellphones, with bugging devices in them, no doubt.
>--
>May the Dark One hold you in the fetid hollow of his crotch.
It's much worse than that; The US has funded the Israeli
telecommunications intelligence infrastructure which 90 percent of
domestic telephone companies use to provide and track billing
statements, as well as the Gummint contracting for phone-tapping
equipment; This is known as the Israeli Phone tapping spy scandal,
since such tracking capability allows phone tapping access BUILT IN to
the phone sysytem itself; I dunno what the cellphone connection is,
unless it helps subsidize the technology and/or spying or, as you
suggest, the phones themselves are compromised;
One sure wonders why the US media continues to cover-up and omit any
reference which implicates Israeli activities in NOT being in the US
National Security interest;
___________________
From: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/spyring.html
(with more links to information and sites)
"Israel does not spy on the United States of America."
-- Mark Regev, a spokesman at the Israeli embassy in Washington
Prior to 9/11, the FBI had discovered the presence of a massive spy
ring inside the United States run by the government of Israel. This
seems a harsh gratitude from a nation which obtains 10% of its annual
budget from the American taxpayer, $3+ billion a year. Over the years,
American taxpayers have been required to send Israel more than four
times what the US spent to go to the moon.
What Israel has done in return was to set up government subsidized
telecommunications companies which operate here in the United States.
One of these companies is Amdocs, which provides billing and directory
assistance for 90% of the phone companies in the USA. Amdocs' main
computer center for billing is actually in Israel and allows those
with access to do what intelligence agencies call "traffic analysis";
a picture of someone's activities based on a pattern of who they are
calling and when. Another Israeli telecom company is Comverse Infosys,
which subcontracts the installation of the automatic tapping equipment
now built into every phone system in America. Comverse maintains its
own connections to all this phone tapping equipment, insisting that it
is for maintenance purposes only. However, Converse has been named as
the most likely source for leaked information regarding telephone
calls by law enforcement that derailed several investigations into not
only espionage, but drug running as well. Yet another Israeli telecom
company is Odigo, which provides the core message passing system for
all the "Instant Message" services. Two hours before the attacks on
the World Trade Towers, Odigo employees received a warning. Odigo has
an office 2 blocks from the former location of the World Trade Towers.
Let us be clear here. There is nothing benign about Israel spying on
the United States. When Jonathan Pollard stole our nuclear secrets
(which your taxes paid to develop) and sent them to Israel, Israel did
not hesitate to trade those secrets to the USSR in exchange for
increased emigration quotas.
The implication of these facts is that the billions of our tax dollars
sent to Israel (while women and children sleep in America's alleys and
eat out of trash bins) have bought and paid for a monstrous phone
tracking and phone tapping system that can eavesdrop on almost any
phone call in America. Even the White House phones were open to such
tapping by listening in on the other end outside the White House
itself.
This actually happened. The Ken Starr report on Whitewater describes
how Bill Clinton informed Monica Lewinsky that their phone sex
conversations had been recorded. At the same time, Clinton ordered the
FBI to cease the hunt for an Israeli mole known to be operating inside
the White House itself!
So here we have a foreign nation able to listen in on most phones at
will, using taps that cannot be found because they are built into the
phone system itself, and willing to use the information gleaned from
those calls to blackmail Americans into any desired course of action.
This may well be what Ariel Sharon meant when he stated that the
Jewish people control America.
That the information gleaned from these phone taps is being used to
coerce the behavior of key individuals in the US Government and media
is illustrated by the manner in which the government and the media
have handled this scandal of the largest spy ring ever uncovered
inside the United States, and of phone taps on all of our phones. They
are downplaying it. Actually, burying it is a better word.
Fox News, alone of all the media, actually ran the story as a four
part broadcast, and put the story up on its web site. Then, without
explanation, Fox News erased the story from their web site and have
never mentioned it again. CNN followed by "Orwellizing" their report
of the two hour advance warning of the WTC attacks sent to Odigo
employees. But far more telling is the admission made by a US Official
in part one of the Fox News report that hard evidence existed linking
the events of 9/11 not to Arab Muslims, but to some of the more than
200 Israeli spies arrested both before and after 9/11, but that this
evidence had been CLASSIFIED.
Since then, any and all mention of the Israeli spy ring and phone
tapping scandal has resulted in a barrage of shrill screams of "hate"
and "anti-Semite", two well worn and frankly over used devices to try
to silence discussion on any topic unfavorable to the nation which
owns the spy ring in question.
The story of the uncovering of the largest spy ring ever discovered
inside the United States should be the story of the century, if indeed
the US media is looking out for the best interests of the American
people. That this spy ring helped drug smugglers evade investigators
should be a major scandal, if indeed the US media is looking out for
the best interests of the American people. That the spy ring includes
companies able to track and tap into any phone in America, including
the White House, should be a cause celebre', if indeed the US media is
looking out for the best interests of the American people.
But they are not. The media is trying to bury this story. They are
spiking it, erasing it from their web sites in a chilling real-life
Orwellian rewriting of history.
The actions of the US media are those of people trying to protect this
spy ring and those that the spy ring worked for.
The actions of the US media are those of traitors to the American
people.
______________________
Media selective censorship and complicity in cover-up and fraud is
raging like never before; Fronting for the war on Terror and the war
on drugs, covering-up such critical stories as the Israeli Art
Students/Spy-Ring mystery, avoiding any stories that might cast Israel
in a less-than-admirable light, as the recent incident re:
moving-truck driven by 2 Israelis in the country illegally in which
the truck's gearshift and steering-wheel and the driver tested
positive TWICE for explosives residue, that has been discounted as a
'false' test result and of no significance to any domestic terrorist
concern, the apparant suicides of Foster and Baxter, US conducting
assassinations in Afghanistan routinely, against all its own
regulations of civilized conduct, in order to 'manage' the country's
domestic politics, and on and on:
The US drug/terror connection and the ongoing fraud and corruption in
which the US military, intelligence and political leadership engages
in vast criminal practices is essentially unreported, as obviously
widespread knowledge about such practices would undermine public
support of the essential gov. services and lead to civil unrest; The
US's interest in developing non-lethal law enforcement technologies,
as well as the expanded powers authorized by the Patriot Act would
seem to be designed to assist management of the public if and/or when
such information does get widely spread and substantiated;
I no longer have much confidence in the integrity of the US, or indeed
even any other, Government; The integrity and honour of the system is
so corrupt and has been so compromised that I don't expect it can
reform itself, or be reformed anytime soon; As I understand it, the US
is in SUCH a financial crisis that the leadership, ie. the Bush
Adminsration, but also essentially all legislators, are wholly
committed to prosecuting war as a means to defer and manipulate the
current in-process economic catastrophe; In a convoluted way,
masterminding 9/11 in order to justify the War in Afghanistan in order
to wrest control of the world's oil resources is apparently considered
'rational' and justifiable in order to preserve the country's
long-term interests as well as constituting a vital National Security
issue; It seems that megalominia, media-control and PR cover-ups,
obstruction-of-Justice, broad self-delegated extra-legal discretionary
authority, the use of bribery and blackmail and assassination as
legitimate polical and governing strategies, business/government
collusion and corporate favoritism, and avarice/greed have become
institutionalized as parts of the un-official but crucial 'way things
are done' moral code of the country, and throughout much of the world;
'WE' aren't in much a position to do much about it, but be aware of
it, and resist it in our personal lives, and live according to our
uncompromised moral codes to the best of our ability;
I for one am for Peace and Justice, so I have a LOT of things to be
'against'; I'm disgusted by the way things are, but inspired to
realize the really important, the MOST important things, are of the
Spirit, which for me means being moral, loving and decent, following
the WAY of love and life taught by the wise souls Buddha, Jesus, and
Mohammed, among many others;
It may be that these are the last days, in which the struggle between
Good and Evil leads to Armeggedon; iF SO, it seems likely that what
the Gummint says is Good isn't, really; The more any group or
Government says they are 'on God's side' or 'blessed by God', I think
the more they're WAAAAY off base, and essentially clueless, OR trying
to put a morally-'correct' spin on what they're doing for purposes of
selfish interest and/or idealism;
That's MY take onnit;
Starman
"This administration is doing everything we can to end the stalemate
in an efficient way. We're making the right decisions to bring the
solution to an end." Washington, D.C., April 10, '01 -- King Dubya
"Redefining the role of the U.S. from enablers to keep the peace to
enablers to keep the peace from peacekeepers is going to be an
assignment." interview with the N.Y. Times, Jan. 14, '01 -- President
(sic) Bush
"I think if you know what you believe, it makes it a lot easier to
answer questions. I can't answer your question." In response to a
question about whether he wished he could take back any of his answers
in the first debate. Reynoldsburg, Ohio, Oct. 4, 2000 -- Georgie Bush
the 2nd
"Our priorities is our faith." Greensboro, N.C., Oct. 10, 2000 --
Boyem George B.