Here is the author’s introduction to The Star and the Sword: Israeli and Saudi Involvement in the 9/11 Attack, by an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C. I happened on my copy of the 2014 paperback while looking for another book and recommend it as relevant to the current war in Palestine. It is reprinted without the author’s permission. His newest book, published in September, A Parade of New Sovereignties: A Post-Hegemonic World, appears to be dedicated to, among other things, ending what he terms the Russian empire. (GAZA and UKRAINE entries for this date are HERE and HERE .) — MCM
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Introduction by Wayne Madsen
The presence in the United States of a number of young Israelis, most of whom had specialized military and intelligence backgrounds, in the months prior to Sept. 11, 2001, is a subject that received inadequate attention from the major U.S. media and government investigators. Many editors, bureau chiefs, and publishers either ignored the stories or spun them as nothing more than Israelis being caught working without proper U.S. visas
Reporters who attempted to cover the Israeli/Saudi connection to 9/11 faced another problem. One senior reporter for the Associated Press recounted how his investigation into the Israeli “art student” story resulted in an Israel lobby pressure group, CAMERA, or the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, calling his editor to complain about an AP story on the Israelis being arrested by U.S. authorities. If the pressure did not involve CAMERA, it took on the cloak of charging investigative reporters with being “anti-Semitic.”
The activities of the Israelis fell into two main areas: the casing of the offices and homes of federal law enforcement officials, U.S. military bases, and other sensitive sites by Israeli bogus “art students” during 2000 and 2001 and the unusual activities of Israeli furniture “movers” around sensitive areas during and after 9/11. These incidents occurred in tandem with the suspicious activities of other former Israeli military and intelligence officials in neighboring countries, including Canada and Mexico, after 9/11.
In addition, a number of Israeli intelligence agents were apprehended abroad for passport violations and other illegal activities.
It has now been established that the art vending firms and furniture moving companies employing the Israelis were Israeli intelligence fronts.
The fact that the suspicious Israeli activity was directly linked to the movements of Al Qaeda cells in the United States could not be brushed aside as merely coincidental. For example, a number of the Israelis arrested for suspicious activities involving selling bogus Israeli art and driving moving vans were concentrated in the same neighobrhoods where a number of the 9/11 Saudi hijackers lived and trained at flight schools. They used the same commercial mail boxes, storefronts, video rental stores, and bars. In other words, the Israelis seemed to be keeping a close eye on the hijackers either as a support mechanism or a counter-terrorism shadowing operation.
A number of Israeli spokespersons and their corporate media apologists contended that the arrest of suspicious Israelis in the United States was no big thing.
What was ignored was the long history of Israeli espionage in America.
Although they were the subject of a multi-agency investigation for their links to Israeli intelligence, Israeli “art students” and mall kiosk vendors who were extremely active in the United States in the months before and after 9/11 have always maintained they are merely Israelis who want to travel and “see the world” after completing their military service. Practically all Israelis working as door-to-door art salespeople and mall vendors are working in the United States illegally, violating their tourist visas.
After the detention of Israeli art students by U.S. authroities hit the media in early 2002, Mark Regev, the then-spokesman for the Israeli embassy in Washington and who later became Isareli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s spokesman, denied that any Israelis arrested in the United States were espionage agents. Regev categorically stated, “Israel does not spy on the United States,” as if convicted American spy for Israel Jonathan Pollard never existed. Israeli sympathizers and propagandists within the U.S. corporate media all canted the same meme about the Israeli art students being spies: “It is an urban myth,” they all dutifully repeated ad infinitum.
However, in employment advertisements run in Israeli newspapers in 1979, it was quite clear that the hiring of Israeli art students after their military service to subsequently be sent to the United States was a Mossad operation tied directly to the Israeli government. Those interested in Mossad spy work in the United States were directed to send their personal details to a post office box in Tel Aviv or the Israeli Consulate General in New York. The consulate is the largest Mossad station in the United States, with those in Washington, D.C., and Houston in second and third place.
