Good to have Justin Raimondo at Anti-war.com set out the hugely suppressed but growing indicators that Israeli intelligence knew of the 9\/11 attacks but failed to alert the Americans (while the Saudis were probably more directly involved in the attacks). The definitive evidence is likely to be found in the censored\u00a028 pages of the joint report of the intelligence committees of the two\u00a0houses of Congress, as Raimondo highlights.<\/p>\n
As to the Israeli interests at work in allowing 9\/11 to take place, Raimondo\u00a0misses revealing comments made by the two most senior Israeli intelligence officials at the time, statements I noted in my book “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations” (p. 103):<\/p>\n
Israel\u2019s National Security Adviser, General Uzi Dayan, and the head of the Mossad, Ephraim Halevy … reportedly told that year\u2019s Herzliya conference [in 2001] that the 9\/11 attacks were a \u2018Hanukkah miracle\u2019, offering Israel the chance to sideline and punish its enemies. Halevy spoke of the imminent arrival of \u2018a world war different from all its predecessors\u2019 and the emergence after 9\/11 of a common perception combining \u2018all the elements of Islamic terror into one clear and identifiable format\u2019, creating \u2018a genuine dilemma for every ruler and every state in our region. Each one must reach a moment of truth and decide how he will position himself in the campaign.\u2019<\/p>\n
Dayan, meanwhile, identified the targets, after Afghanistan, for the next stage of the regional campaign: \u2018The Iran, Iraq and Syria triangle, all veteran supporters of terror which are developing weapons of mass destruction.\u2019 He argued: \u2018They must be confronted as soon as possible, and that is also understood in the US. Hezbollah and Syria have good reason to worry about the developments in this campaign, and that\u2019s also true for the organizations and other states.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Sounds like a rather accurate prediction of how things turned out, no?<\/p>\n
The Haaretz article on 18 Dec 2001 that quoted the pair, written by Aluf Benn, now the paper’s editor-in-chief, was originally titled “For Israel, September 11 was a Hanukkah miracle”. The version on Haaretz that can now be found\u00a0has excised\u00a0all references to “Hanukkah” and “miracles”, and is under the much blander – and misleading – headline “Israel strives to import America’s war on terror<\/a>“.<\/p>\n
More likely, as I explain in my book, Israel tried to export to Washington, care of the neocons, its own “war on terror” \u2013 and its long-term designs for breaking up the Middle East into feuding sects and tribes.<\/p>\n