Controlling the Message of 9-11

by Christopher Bollyn 


25 May 2006

The mainstream media can no longer avoid the red-hot 9-11 issues, such as evidence of pre-planted explosives in the World Trade Center.  But rather than presenting all of the facts, the message is being carefully controlled to suppress the evidence of Israeli involvement in the attacks and media complicity in the cover-up.

William Rodriguez, the last person to escape from the North Tower just seconds before it collapsed, is a organizer working on behalf of the victims and their families. His efforts to find the truth about the terror attacks were instrumental in pressuring the reluctant Bush administration to establish the 9-11 Commission.  Rodriguez, a janitor who helped rescue many people from the burning tower, stayed in the building from the time it was hit until immediately before it was demolished. His observations of what happened in the tower make him an important witness about the events at the World Trade Center. However, when Rodriguez testified before the 9-11 Commission not one word of his testimony was included in its final report.

Having known Rodriguez for a year and having spent many hours with him, I have learned a great deal about the events of 9-11 from his personal observations, many of which he does not speak about publicly. On a recent trip to Venezuela, Rodriguez told me that he has been advised not to talk about critical evidence that he has personal knowledge of.

"I can't talk about the Israeli involvement because it would offend the Jewish families," Rodriguez said, referring to the relatives of Jewish victims. Yet, Rodriguez has important information about the involvement of Israeli intelligence agents in the attacks.  For example, he has personal knowledge that Israeli Mossad agents, posing as employees of a moving company in New Jersey, met regularly with some of the Arab terror suspects at a video store a block from his home in Jersey City during the year prior to the attacks.

In the afternoon of 9-11, when five Israeli "movers" were arrested in New Jersey after having been observed videotaping and celebrating the attacks on the twin towers, the police sergeant was told not to mention the fact that the men were Israelis, Rodriguez said. Arab clothing had been found in their vehicle, he said.  After investigating the five Israelis, the FBI concluded that they had been "conducting a Mossad surveillance mission and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, N.J., served as a front," wrote Marc Perelman of the Forward, a leading New York-based Jewish newspaper, in March 2002, citing an un-named "former high-ranking American intelligence official."

The five Israeli agents: Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Omer Marmari, and Yaron Shmuel were arrested eight hours after the attacks by the Bergen County police while driving in an Urban Moving Systems van. The police acted on an FBI alert after the men had been seen celebrating and videotaping the events from the roof of their warehouse and van.
Suspicions were compounded when box cutters, multiple passports, and $4,000 in cash were found in the van, which tested positive for explosives. The Israelis had taken pictures of themselves smiling with the smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center in the background. In the weeks and months following 9-11, numerous cells of other Mossad "moving" agents were arrested across the nation.

In December 2001, Fox News reported that U.S. authorities had detained 60 such "movers" and had arrested or expelled some 120 other Israeli agents, identified as "art students," which were part of an extensive Israeli spy ring attempting to penetrate federal buildings and military facilities.  In March 2002, the French newspaper Le Monde reported that the Israeli art students had probably been monitoring "Al Qaeda operatives."

Le Monde added that the Israeli spies appear to have been "trailing Al Qaeda members in the United States without informing Washington." More than one-third of the Israelis under investigation lived in Florida, which was the home base for at least 10 of the 19 "hijackers" in the September 11 attacks, Le Monde noted.  These facts, the article noted, support "the thesis according to which Israel did not share with the U.S. all the elements it had about the planning of the September 11 attacks."

The French and the Fox News reports were dismissed by Israel and its supporters and received limited coverage in the American media, Perelman noted. American Free Press is the only U.S. newspaper which has reported extensively on these stories.

The Israelis were held for two-and-a-half months and deported at the end of November 2001, for "visa violations," although the FBI's counterintelligence investigation had concluded that at least two of them were, in fact, Mossad operatives, according to the former American official, who told the Forward that he had been regularly briefed on the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials.  "The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it," he said. "The conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs but that they could leave because they did not know anything about 9-11."

What all of the teams of Israeli "movers" had in common was that their vans had tested positive for explosives when the tests had been conducted by the local police authorities. When the Israelis' vehicles were turned over to the FBI, however, the FBI changed the reports to say that there was no evidence that the vehicles had carried explosives.

Rodriguez, who was on the first basement level of the North Tower at 8:45 a.m. on 9-11, has often spoken publicly about feeling and hearing a "huge explosion" coming from the lower basement levels moments before the first plane struck the WTC. He recently told me that he can no longer talk about "explosions," but only about what he heard. The first victim that Rodriguez helped, however, was a man who had been severely burned and injured by what he clearly told Rodriguez were "explosions" in the basement.

In return for his co-operation in suppressing evidence of Israeli involvement in 9-11 and the explosions, Rodriguez has apparently been given vague promises of financial stability and even political office in the event that Hillary Clinton wins the presidency in 2008. "I will be set for life if Hillary wins," he said, which suggests that the powers behind Clinton are directly involved in the cover-up.

On the other hand, countless federal employees, who could provide essential testimony about the attacks, have been gagged by secret letters demanding their silence about what they know, did, saw or heard on 9-11.

Into the heavily-censored media environment, numerous independent researchers have brought forth a great deal of evidence disproving the official version and showing that Israeli intelligence agents and their U.S.-based supporters are prime suspects in the crimes of 9-11. In order to draw attention away from this growing truth movement, the controlled media has begun promoting a select group of authors and their books, videos, and websites.  What this select group has in common is that their works minimize or completely ignore the evidence of Israeli involvement and point to a variety of other suspects being behind 9-11, such as senior officials in the Bush administration, the Neo-Cons, the Vatican, unnamed Luciferians, or the ever popular "Germanic Death Cult."

Webster G. Tarpley, author of 9-11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, is one of the authors being promoted by the controlled media. As his title suggests, Tarpley's thesis revolves around the Bush administration being behind 9-11 and completely ignores the evidence of Israeli involvement. Likewise, without presenting a single piece of evidence, Tarpley wrote an article claiming that the recent anti-Muslim cartoon scandal instigated by a Danish newspaper had been a "NATO intelligence provocation." The "entire affair has been cynically orchestrated by NATO intelligence agencies to set the stage for a new world war," Tarpley wrote.

Rather than embrace the facts and evidence, Hollywood has produced several propaganda television shows and one movie, United 93, to support the seriously flawed official version. Meanwhile, a product of the so-called alternative media, a video about 9-11 called Loose Change, is now being promoted by the mainstream media. As with the others in the media's select group, the producers of Loose Change keep Israeli involvement out of the picture and place the blame for 9-11 squarely on senior officials in the Bush administration.

"We don't want to point fingers at Israel for a number of different reasons," the producers of Loose Change said in a recent interview on Air America.  Questioned later by Eric Hufschmid, author of Painful Questions, about their views on who was responsible for 9-11, the producers said that the Israeli role was simply one of trying to warn the U.S. about a potential terror attack. While they are well aware of the evidence of Israeli involvement, the producers of Loose Change say it is more important to prosecute members of the Bush administration and worry about other issues later.

A third edition of Loose Change is being prepared for release in movie theaters nationwide this fall, according to the video's producers. Deborah S. Simon received special thanks in the video's credits for providing footage and other help in producing the film. Simon told me that she even handed out copies of the video in front of the White House. Who is Deborah Simon, and why is she helping produce and promote Loose Change?

Deborah Simon (nee Cox) is married into the billionaire Simon family of Indianapolis. The family owns the Simon Property Group, Inc., which boasts as being the largest U.S. real estate company. The Simon family owns, develops, and manages more than 280 shopping malls in the United States and 50 similar properties in Europe and Japan.  The Simon family, strong supporters of Zionist causes, the Clintons, and the Democratic Party, also own the Indiana Pacers basketball team. The campus of the Jewish Federation of Greater Indianapolis is named after Max and Mae Simon, the parents of Melvin, Fred, and Herb.

Melvin Simon, the Brooklyn-born founder of the company, also owned a Hollywood production company and produced more than 20 films. Simon is remembered for such films as Porky's, Love at First Bite, and Zorro, the Gay Blade. As of January 2005, Porky's was the highest-grossing movie from Canada. More notably, Simon has had business partnerships with both Larry Silverstein and the Australian-Israeli billionaire Frank Lowy, the leaseholders of the destroyed World Trade Center. In the late 1980s, Silverstein and Simon developed a mall in Manhattan together, and after 9-11, Simon teamed up with Lowy's Westfield America in an attempt to take over the prestigious retail properties belonging to Taubman Centers, Inc. of Detroit.

Silverstein and Simon both sit on the advisory board of the Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute of Baruch College in downtown Manhattan.
In addition to supporting the Clintons, the Simon family has provided generous financial support to a number of Indiana senators, governors, and congressmen. Lee H. Hamilton, for example, the retired congressman who came out of retirement to serve as vice chairman of the 9-11 Commission, received a great deal of money from the Simons during his political career.  During his 34-year career in Congress, Hamilton served as chairman of several key committees, such as the Committee on International Relations, the Joint Economic Committee, the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran. Although he has retired from Congress, Hamilton remains a member of the Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. As director of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, Hamilton still receives generous financial support from the Simon family.

Birch Bayh, the former senator from Indiana, has been on the board of directors of the Simon Property Group since 1993 when his son, Evan, was governor of the state. The younger Bayh is now a U.S. Senator. Diane Meyer Simon was director and administrator of the elder Bayh's senate office with whom she worked from 1968 to 1981.  When Bayh was defeated in 1980, Diane Meyer married the billionaire Herbert Simon in 1981.