The Israeli "art student" mystery -- Part 1
Arther Miller
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/dea1.html
The Israeli "art student" mystery
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2002/05/07/students/index_np.html?x
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.)
Henry
anti-American posters like "Anti-War" the pro Osama bin Laden is God
people, USA the devil!
Arther Miller wrote:
> equally strongly that Pollard and the Israelis betrayed them.)
--
And the star spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave!
Francis Scott Key
D Monte
> This is a fake report. There is no Iraeli art student story except by
> anti-American posters like "Anti-War" the pro Osama bin Laden is God
> people, USA the devil!
Stop spilling lies in order to further your interests. People like you
are Anti-American, with your narrow views with the goal of securing
your Zionist objectives. Americans have a right to know about Israeli
spies, especially since we have been led to believe that the religious
state of Israel is our ally and deserving of us Americans fighting
their wars, besides handing to them billions of our hard earned money.
We deserve to know the truth especially since hearing of suspicious
Israelis filming the World Trade Center horror in fits of laughter.
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=75266&contrassID=
Heinri Garlanch
ialmon...@yahoo.com says...
> We deserve to know the truth especially since hearing of suspicious
> Israelis filming the World Trade Center horror in fits of laughter.
Come on !
You have got to admit that it was pretty funny !
The mightiest military nation in world history humiliated by nineteen
men wielding box cutters !
Shame about the dead cats though....
torresD
"Heinri Garlanch" <politics_is_war...@hotmail.com
> ialmon...@yahoo.com says...
>
> > We deserve to know the truth especially since hearing of suspicious
> > Israelis filming the World Trade Center horror in fits of laughter.
>
> Come on !
>
> You have got to admit that it was pretty funny !
>
> The mightiest military nation in world history humiliated by nineteen
> men wielding box cutters !
Yeah, that is weird.
Are we really getting the complete story.
Those guys had boxcutters, plastic knives,
it doesn't make sense.